Provocare Coaching

Proximity can create bias, but distance can create ignorance. Good governance does not choose one automatically. It identifies, tests and balances both.

I have noticed something curious about expertise.

When an organisation needs somebody to build a program, manage a complicated partnership, solve operational problems and remember why a decision was made three years ago when nobody wrote it down, the person closest to the work is invaluable. They may also be the only person who knows where all the passwords are hidden.

Then they produce a report with a mildly inconvenient conclusion. Suddenly, years of practical experience have transformed into bias. One minute they are the organisation’s institutional memory and safe pair of hands. The next, they are too close to understand the very thing they were trusted to build, deliver and assess. That is a belter of a magic trick.

Independence matters, but so does knowing what is going on

Let me say this early, before somebody reaches for the governance handbook and starts waving it at me.

The practical question is not whether proximity or independence is inherently more trustworthy. It is whether the process makes interests visible, tests claims against evidence and explains how informed disagreement will be resolved.

People close to a project inevitably bring relationships, loyalties, assumptions, frustrations, emotional investment and blind spots. If you have poured years into building something, you probably want it to succeed. If you have worked nights, weekends and holidays solving its problems, you are unlikely to examine its future with the emotional detachment of someone reviewing a mildly disappointing toaster warranty.

That proximity should be declared, understood and reflected in how the conclusions are tested. If the author benefits from the work’s continuation, that should be transparent. If they have carried responsibility for delivery, that should be transparent too. But transparency about proximity is only half the job, because people far removed from the work have blind spots as well.

Distance may provide objectivity, but it can also produce a fascinating shortage of context. The independent reviewer may not understand why a seemingly awkward arrangement exists, which relationship took five years to establish, what was inherited from a previous team, which compromise prevented a larger crisis or why changing one apparently minor process will trigger a seventeen-paragraph email from an international partner at two in the morning.

Independence may protect against one form of bias. It does not protect against ignorance.

The strongest analysis usually combines both perspectives: the person who understands the machinery because they have spent years covered in its oil, and the person standing far enough away to notice that the whole thing is making a strange noise.

Expertise has a surprisingly flexible job description.

The person delivering the work is expected to identify risks, recommend improvements, collect evidence, manage relationships, handle emergencies, control finances, and remain accountable for the outcome. They must understand the detail without losing sight of strategy, care deeply without becoming emotional and exercise professional judgement—until that judgement becomes inconvenient.

Their judgement was credible enough to deliver the project, but it wasn’t sufficient to assess it.

If somebody’s proximity creates a potential conflict, identify it at the start. Build independent input into the process. Agree how you will test the evidence. Clarify who will make the final decision, which other factors they will consider and how any disagreement between the report and the eventual decision will be explained.

That is discovering independence at the precise moment it becomes useful.

Findings and conclusions are not the same thing.

A report may find that a project delivered what it promised. The finances were sound. The systems improved. Participants valued the work. Risks were identified and managed. Partnerships strengthened. The organisation became more capable, visible or connected through its involvement.

A board must consider more than a single evaluation. It may weigh organisational capacity, opportunity cost, staff sustainability, strategic fit, member priorities, future risk or changed circumstances differently from the report’s author. It may accept every factual finding and still choose another direction—but it should explain why.

Reasonable people can accept the same evidence and reach different conclusions. The honest response is beautifully simple: “We accept the findings, but we have reached a different conclusion because we have weighted these broader considerations differently.” That is clear, defensible and respectful of both the evidence and the board’s authority.

The evaluator was too close. The evidence was incomplete. The benefits were difficult to measure. The consultation was no longer necessary. The people most directly involved were probably not representative. The risks required a separate assessment. The circumstances changed. The timetable became tight. Christmas was approaching. Mercury had once again wandered into retrograde and nobody had thought to include astrology in the evaluation framework.

Before long, a report trusted enough to document the project becomes strangely unreliable because it failed to arrive at the preferred destination. Dinnae kid yourself. If the facts remain sound, say so. If the board reaches a different judgement, explain the divergence. Do not turn a legitimate disagreement about conclusions into a retrospective attack on the competence of the person who gathered the evidence.

Independent does not automatically mean correct

An independent reviewer can misunderstand the problem. They can miss important context, accept the loudest version of events, ask the wrong questions or apply a framework that looks impressive but has very little connection to the reality of the work.

An independent reviewer can produce absolute mince. They can also produce brilliant analysis precisely because they are free from the relationships and assumptions surrounding the issue. The point is not that independent review is unreliable. Independence is one characteristic of credible analysis, not a mystical force that turns every observation into objective truth.

A practitioner can be emotionally invested and still be factually correct. A board member can be removed from day-to-day delivery while holding strong personal views about the project. A consultant can arrive with no prior connection to the work and still bring a suitcase full of assumptions from the last five organisations they reviewed.

Good governance does not pretend perspectives can be removed. It makes them visible, tests them against evidence and balances them against other informed views.

Sometimes the call for independence is entirely justified

If someone is evaluating their own performance, recommending the continuation of their own paid role or assessing an arrangement from which they benefit, additional oversight is sensible—no argument from me.

That is why conflicts should be declared. It is why boards should ask difficult questions. It is why financial data should be independently verified. It is why evaluation methods should be transparent and why important decisions should rarely depend entirely on one person’s assessment.

The problem begins when independence is used not to strengthen the analysis, but to avoid engaging with it.

There is a significant difference between saying, “This report contains valuable evidence, but because the author is connected to the work, we should test its conclusions,” and saying, “The author is connected to the work, so we can discount it now that the conclusion is inconvenient.” The first is governance. The second is choreography: the papers circulate, concerns are noted, and the destination remains remarkably undisturbed by the evidence.

The person closest to the work is allowed to have a view

People involved in work are allowed to form conclusions about it. They are allowed to identify what succeeded, what failed, what nearly went wrong and what could be improved. They are allowed to believe something should continue. They are allowed to disagree with a board’s decision.

They are even allowed to say that the decision makes no bloody sense to them.

Too often, organisations confuse disagreement with disloyalty. A practitioner challenges a decision and is described as emotional. A manager defends a project and is described as conflicted. A community member questions a process and is described as resistant to change. A consultant reaches an awkward conclusion and is suddenly insufficiently independent.

Apparently, professionalism requires people to provide fearless advice, remain deeply invested in the quality of the work and then develop no view whatsoever about what should happen next. That is not professionalism. That is decorative expertise: inviting someone to the table because their knowledge is useful, then asking them to sit quietly once their judgement becomes awkward.

Independence should be designed into the process, not discovered at the end.

If independent analysis matters, design it into the process from the beginning. Agree on the questions, who gathers the evidence, what will be independently verified, how conflicts will be managed, who may review the report and who ultimately decides. Most importantly, agree on what happens when the evidence, recommendation and decision do not align.

Otherwise, the sudden demand for independence can look suspiciously like moving the goalposts after discovering the other team has scored. Perfectly possible, perhaps even technically permitted, but not especially sporting.

Proximity contains knowledge that cannot always be transferred

You can document procedures, finances, outputs, risks and decisions. You can create manuals, dashboards, action logs, transition checklists and flowcharts. Lord knows I have tried.

You cannot always explain why one person will take a difficult call from another, or reduce years of relationship-building to a project output. Nor can you easily measure the credibility that enables someone to repair a disagreement, create an opportunity or ask an international partner for help at short notice.

The person closest to the work often sees these things because they have lived them. They understand which relationships are resilient, which are fragile, which opportunities are real, and which exist only in a beautifully written strategy paper.

If decision-makers disregard everything they can’t independently measure, organisations gradually strip value from relationships because relationships refuse to behave like columns in a spreadsheet.

Then everyone acts surprised when the project concludes successfully, but half the network no longer answers their emails.

The real test is what happens when informed people disagree

The real test comes when a practitioner, executive, evaluator and board examine the same evidence and reach different conclusions.

Could the organisation discuss the divergence openly, please? Can the board explain its reasoning without diminishing the people who advised it? Can the practitioner accept the board’s authority without pretending the decision was brilliant? Can everyone acknowledge that expertise and authority are different things?

The expert does not get the final decision simply because they know the work best. The board does not suddenly become the operational expert merely because it has the authority to decide. Both truths can exist at once.

Boards govern. Executives advise and implement. Practitioners interpret lived and operational realities. Independent reviewers test assumptions. Members bring experience, legitimacy and ownership.

The strongest decisions emerge when all these perspectives are present, challenged, and respected, rather than when one is declared inconvenient and quietly removed from the room.

Neither proximity nor distance gets a free pass.

Better questions are: Are the facts sound? Have interests and assumptions been declared? Which perspectives are missing? What has been independently verified? Where have decision-makers reached a different judgement—and can they explain why?

Being close to the work can create bias. Being distant from the work can create ignorance. Neither proximity nor independence should win automatically. The goal is not to find the one person in the room with no perspective. That person does not exist. The goal is to put the perspectives on the table, test them honestly, and make a decision that can be explained clearly without smoke, mirrors, or a hastily discovered concern about independence.

Because if someone was trusted to build the work, deliver it, manage the risks, gather the evidence and write the report—but became unreliable only when their conclusion proved inconvenient—the problem may not be that they were too close to the work. The problem may be that their judgement got too close to the truth.