The value of an advisor is not in making the decision

There is a particularly sensitive moment in leadership transitions: the new CEO has assumed the role, formal authority has been transferred and the previous leader is no longer in command. Yet, in some cases, they do not immediately exit the field.

In October 2026, two major organisations implemented an interesting transition. At Danaher, with Julie Sawyer Montgomery stepping in as CEO, Rainer Blair stepped down from the CEO role and the board, remaining Senior Advisor for a set period. At Ericsson, Börje Ekholm stepped down as CEO and remained Executive Advisor to the new CEO during the transition.

We might read these simply as two cases of a well-managed succession. There is, however, a more interesting element: both organisations separated the transfer of authority from the value of the judgment accumulated by the person who had led up to that point.

Authority can be transferred without considering exhausted, at that very same moment, everything a person has learned while exercising it.

Authority and judgment are not the same thing

Those who lead an organisation for a long time accumulate something that does not coincide with the amount of information possessed. They know precedents, they have seen decisions produce unexpected consequences, they recognise people, balances and resistances. They have learned that certain seemingly marginal elements can alter the field and that what formally matters most is not always what exerts the most influence.

Part of this knowledge can be documented and transferred. Another exists in the ability to read what is happening and connect it to what has already happened.

Naturally, when the CEO changes, decision rights must be clear. The new leader must be able to fully exercise their role and a transition cannot turn into an informal permanence of the previous CEO in command.

But exactly here the interesting distinction emerges: protecting the new leader's authority does not necessarily require expelling every form of previous judgment from the system.

Authority passes. Judgment can remain available.

This separation also helps to better understand the role of the advisor.

Being close to the decision does not mean owning it

There is a conception of advisory that tends to equate value with power: the more important the advisor, the more they should enter the decision, steer it directly or take on a part of its execution.

Not necessarily.

An advisor can be very close to a decision without taking on the responsibility of making it. They can question the criteria used, observe what the decision-maker is considering irrelevant, recognise an interference or challenge a Field Reading that is consolidating too rapidly. They can bring elements that the decision-maker does not possess, but also help them to look differently at those they already possess.

This second point is particularly important.

The value of an external reading does not necessarily consist in arriving with a better reading. It can consist in creating the conditions for the decision-maker to deepen their own.

The decision, therefore, remains where it should be. But the reading from which that decision will be born can become broader, more questioned and less dependent on what, at that moment, simply appears obvious.

Before the decision, there is a reading

We tend to represent the decision as the moment in which we choose between alternatives. In reality, much of the process has already happened beforehand.

Before choosing, we have established, often without fully realising it, what we consider relevant. We have assigned a weight to information, interpreted the behaviour of others, excluded certain possibilities, defined a problem in a certain way and constructed a relationship between what is happening and what we think should happen.

In other words, before the decision, there is a reading.

And it is exactly this reading that deserves to be questioned.

Not only: “Do we have enough information?”, but also: are we assigning them the correct weight? What have we already excluded? Which hypothesis are we treating as a fact? Which pressure is making an alternative more urgent than it really is? How much does our position in the system influence what we are able to see?

An experienced decision-maker is not immune to these dynamics. On the contrary, experience, accountability and knowledge of the field are enormous resources, but they can also make certain interpretations particularly solid and therefore less open to being called into question.

Deepening the reading does not mean continuously doubting everything. It means knowing when it is worth questioning what is becoming decisive.

The field enters the decision before the decision

An executive choice does not happen in a neutral space. It happens inside a system of relationships, accountability, dependencies, expectations, precedents and pressures.

A formally marginal actor can have a decisive influence. A relationship to protect can unknowingly alter the weight assigned to a risk. The need to rapidly send a signal to the market, to the board or to the organisation can prematurely narrow down the number of alternatives considered. A solution already discussed many times can begin to appear inevitable simply because it has conquered the centre of the conversation.

These elements do not stand outside the decision.

They are already inside the way the decision is read.

This is why Field Reading does not coincide with the accumulation of information about the context. It means also observing the forces that are determining which information becomes important, which questions are asked and which cease to be.

An external advisor can have a privileged position right here. Not because they are external to the field—no one who truly enters a situation is completely external—but because they do not occupy the same position as the decision-maker and can therefore question configurations that are harder to distinguish from the inside.

The advantage of not having to execute

Those who must implement a decision necessarily occupy a position in the field. They have people to coordinate, results to produce, resources to defend, relationships to maintain and operational consequences to sustain. There is nothing problematic about this: it is what it means to have ownership.

But ownership and independence are not the same thing.

An external advisor can occupy a different position precisely because they will not subsequently have to direct the execution. They do not have to build consensus around the solution they have proposed, nor defend a plan because it will become their plan. They do not have to transform a recommendation into a project that they will then be called upon to govern.

This distance allows them to bring the decision-maker to a question that comes before the solution:

have we read well enough what is happening before committing to this decision?

It is a different work from execution. And it is also different from the simple preparation of the decision.

Preparing does not necessarily mean seeing

Today, a growing amount of the work that precedes a decision can be accelerated. Information can be gathered more quickly, documents summarised, scenarios constructed and alternatives compared. AI can maintain memory, produce briefings, interrogate large quantities of material and accompany the decision-maker with a continuity that until recently would have required much more human work.

It is enormous progress. But a decision can be perfectly prepared and continue to have a problem, because the critical point might not be found in the missing information. It might be found in the way the decision-maker is reading what is in front of them.

Adding more information, in that case, does not necessarily solve the problem. It can even reinforce an already consolidated reading, because new evidence is interpreted within the same framework.

Here, external judgment performs a different function from the mere availability of another opinion. It does not necessarily add an answer: it introduces the possibility of questioning the construction of the question, the criteria with which alternatives are being weighed and the Field Reading from which the choice is emerging.

Before commitment

The most interesting moment in advisory, then, is not necessarily when someone arrives asking: “What must I do?”.

It can be the preceding one, when the decision has not yet been made but certain readings are already becoming dominant; when alternatives still exist, but one of them has silently begun to appear inevitable; when the field is already steering the choice before the decision-maker has declared to have chosen.

It is a subtle point, because formally the decision is still open. In reality, a part of the decision-making process might have already happened through what has been excluded, what has not been questioned or what has too rapidly become obvious.

The advisor's task is not to replace that reading with their own. It is to help the decision-maker go deep enough to recognise what is already steering their judgment and decide whether they want to confirm it or call it back into question.

A distinction destined to become more important

As increasingly sophisticated tools make preparation, memory, analysis, brainstorming and continuous support abundant, it will likely become less useful to define the advisor as someone “to reason with”.

That function is becoming accessible in very different forms and at increasingly lower costs. The interesting question will therefore be another: what judgment capacity am I acquiring, on which decisions, at what moment and with what degree of independence?

And, above all, what happens to my way of reading the situation thanks to that intervention?

Leadership transitions make the separation between authority and judgment particularly visible, but the principle is broader. An organisation may need judgment without transferring authority. A CEO can seek an external reading without ceding decision rights. A decision-maker may want to test their own way of reading a situation without delegating the choice.

In all these cases, the advisor's value does not lie in making the decision in someone else's place, nor in necessarily arriving with the missing answer.

It lies in taking the decision-maker deep enough into the Field Reading to be able to question what is steering the choice before that choice becomes a commitment.

The decision remains theirs.

But the point from which they are looking at it does not necessarily remain identical.