Count the roots, not the voices.

You talked to eleven people about the candidate. Ten came back positive. This is how you find out whether that was eleven confirmations or one.

A voice is who told you. A root is where their view came from. Four voices growing off one root are one source, not four confirmations, and separating the two is most of the job. It takes about twenty minutes and it is the step almost every board skips, because writing down where a view originated feels clerical and slightly rude.

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The seven

Seven questions, and the tell that gives each one away.

Run these against the evidence you already have. If you cannot answer one, that is the answer.

Who chose the sources?

Every name on your list got there somehow. Some you found. Some were offered. The difference decides whether you are auditing or being briefed.

The tellThe list arrived complete, fast, and enthusiastic. A candidate who supplies eight references has supplied one reference eight times.

How many of them have reported to the candidate?

Subordinates are honest and they are also structurally limited. They have watched this person be a boss. They have not watched them be a peer, a subordinate, or a counterparty.

The tellThe accounts describe the same strengths in the same order. That is not corroboration. That is a single vantage point, well populated.

For each source, how do they know what they told you?

Not what they said. How they came to believe it. Direct observation, secondhand report, or the candidate's own account of themselves, repeated back.

The tellYou cannot answer for more than half your list without guessing. If you do not know how someone knows, you cannot count them as a source. You can only count them as a voice.

Does anyone appear in more than one role?

The chair who recommends the internal candidate and also mentored him. The investor whose conviction anchors the board and who also wrote the original check. The head of HR presenting a slate produced by her own development program.

The tellAsk what else would have to be wrong if this person's read is wrong. If the answer is their own judgment, their own hire, or their own investment, you are not receiving an assessment. You are receiving a position.

When did each source last observe the candidate, and at what scale?

Evidence expires. A source who watched this person run thirty people brilliantly is describing conditions that no longer exist, in a role that has since been replaced by a different role wearing the same title.

The tellThe most vivid, most specific, most persuasive stories are the oldest ones. True, detailed, and about someone who no longer exists.

What do you have on capability, as distinct from character?

Brilliant, magnetic, hardworking, decent. All observable from any distance, which is why everyone reports them and why they agree. Capability is specific and situational and mostly visible only to people who watched a closely analogous thing.

The tellYour notes are full of adjectives and thin on decisions. If you cannot name a decision this person owned, the reasoning they held at the time, the outcome, and what they would do differently, you have impressions rather than evidence.

What would have had to happen for you to hear a different answer?

The master question, and the only one that matters if you skip the other six.

The tellYou cannot construct the world in which the answer comes back no. If every account you gathered would sound identical whether or not the thing is true, the agreement is not evidence about the candidate. It is a description of the room.

The map

Now count them.

Add each account you have gathered. Nothing you enter is transmitted or stored. When you are done, the map tells you how many separate sources you actually have.

What it means

What the number means.

Five or more roots.

You have a real evidence base. Write down the count somewhere the board can see it, because in six months everyone will remember the conclusion and nobody will remember how well supported it was.

Two to four roots.

Ordinary, and workable if you know it. A board that knows it has three roots and proceeds is in a completely different position from one that believes it has eleven. The risk is not the number. The risk is not knowing the number.

One root.

You have one account, told to you repeatedly. Whatever you decide, you are not deciding on evidence yet. The next call is to someone the candidate did not choose.

This is one step out of a longer method, and it is the one that changes the most for the least effort. The rest — building the standard before anyone is scored, insisting on demonstrated decisions rather than stated philosophy, writing the case against as carefully as the case for — is what an independent evaluation adds. If the decision is coming, the time to build the record is before it.

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Residuals

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A working note, not an assessment. It counts where your evidence came from. It does not tell you whether the person is right for the seat — that is what the rest of the method is for.