Field Note · No. 004 · Free
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.
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Run these against the evidence you already have. If you cannot answer one, that is the answer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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this person run thirty people brilliantly is describing conditions that no longer exist, in a role that has since been replaced by a different role wearing the same title.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.
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.
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.
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.
You have a real evidence base, and the count is now the wrong thing to look at. Breadth is settled. What it does not tell you is whether your sources described a decision or only a person.
Your next step. Before the vote, one director writes a single page from the file you already have: the decision this candidate owned that most resembles the one this seat will require, the reasoning they held at the time, what happened, and what they now say they would do differently. No adjectives. If that page cannot be written from eleven accounts and five roots, the gap is not independence, it is substance, and the next call is to whoever watched that decision happen.
Then write the root count down, dated, where the board can see it. In six months everyone will remember the conclusion and nobody will remember how well supported it was.
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.
Your next step. Before the decision, one director makes one call to a counterparty the candidate did not choose. Someone on the other side of a table from him: a customer who left, a partner in a deal that came apart, the other side of a negotiation he won. Not the search firm, not staff. A director, with a name and a date.
Write down the sentence your current sources produced before you dial, then ask something whose answer would differ if that sentence were false. If the call would sound the same either way, you have added a voice and not a root.
If no one can name a counterparty, that is the finding. Record it.
You have one account, told to you repeatedly. Whatever you decide, you are not deciding on evidence yet.
Your next step. Take the list back before you make another call. Ask the search committee, in writing, for names sourced without the candidate’s involvement, and have a director place two of those calls before this goes on an agenda. One to a counterparty, someone who sat on the other side of a table from him. One to a person he reported to, who set his objectives and judged the result.
Not more references. Different ones. A ninth account from inside the same root will read like confirmation and change nothing.
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 independent diligence adds. If the decision is coming, the time to build the record is before it.
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.