On Monday, I shared Stanford professor Steve Callander’s research on correlated learning: the idea that decisions – from your tiny experiments to your big initiatives – can tell you something not just about that choices you’ve made, but about the options you haven’t explored yet.

Let’s dig into that topic more deeply.

Most leadership decisions don’t happen in isolation. They happen with input from people who how knowledge you need to make an informed decision. Those individuals also typically have a stake in what you decide.

Your division head recommending a restructure. Your direct report briefing you on what their team needs. Your consultant advising a strategic pivot. Each of them has information you don’t have. Each of them also has interests that aren’t perfectly aligned with yours.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t trust those you collaborate with. Rather, this names a human reality: we all have self-interests. Callander’s research surfaces something most leaders miss. The recommendation itself is data. Data shaped by the recommender’s interests. And so is what they don’t recommend. Both tell you something.

Which means the question isn’t just Do I trust this person? The question is:

What does this recommendation reveal, including what’s been left unsaid?

That’s a harder kind of listening. It requires holding two things at once: genuine openness to expert input and clear-eyed awareness of how that input is filtered before it reaches you.

It’s the gap between what people say and what they mean. Between what’s stated and what’s implied. Most of the costly decisions I’ve seen leaders make didn’t fail because they had bad information. They failed because they didn’t know what more to ask of the information they had received.

Thinking about your own experience: What am I missing?