The Information Trap

Hello everyone! I’m Kwame, and this is Pattern of Play, the newsletter where we step away from the score line to decode how systems — leadership, institutions, and culture — actually work, using football as the instrument rather than the subject.

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A goalkeeper is the only person on the field who sees the entire game in front of them. The strikers see the space in front of goal. The midfielders see where the passing lanes are. The defenders see the pressure coming, but only the keeper sees all of it.

In football, decision-making often comes down to who has the best information about what’s happening. The keeper can see the fullback is exposed before anyone else does. The midfielders can feel the pressing intensity changing before the forwards realize it. The defenders can sense the offensive rhythm breaking down.

The teams that make the best decisions are the teams where information flows to whoever is in position to use it. If the keeper sees danger and can’t communicate it to the defense, the defense doesn’t respond. If the midfielders feel the pressure building and the forwards don’t know it’s coming, the forwards keep making passes they think are safe.

But what happens when the person with information isn’t the person making the decision?

The Cost of Information Misalignment

A strategy meeting happens in the executive suite. They decide to pursue a new market segment. The decision gets handed down to the sales team. The sales team immediately sees the problem — the target customer doesn’t have the budget we’re asking for, or they buy very differently than our current customers. But the decision has already been made. Now the sales team has to either execute a bad decision or spend months trying to get it revisited.

Information is filtered before it reaches the decision-maker. The person who has the real data — the customer success manager, the support team lead, the junior engineer who built the feature — is three levels below the person making the decision. By the time the information gets to the decision-maker, it’s been simplified, summarized, and had all the nuance removed. The decision-maker thinks they understand the situation, but they’re actually responding to a filtered version of reality.

Decisions are reversed the moment the people affected by them have a chance to respond. The decision was fine in principle, but the people who have to execute it see immediately that it won’t work because they understand something the decision-makers didn’t. Now there’s scrambling, time is wasted, and trust is eroded.

There’s a standard phrase: “That’s not how it works in practice.” This is the clearest sign. Someone is pointing out that the decision assumes a version of reality that doesn’t match how things actually operate. The decision was made on good principles, but on bad information.

Actual decisions happen in side conversations. The official process is that we discuss the problem in a meeting, we document the decision, and we implement it. But in reality, important stakeholders figure out what the real decision is in a hallway conversation before the meeting even happens. The meeting is theater; the decision has already been made somewhere else.

Why This Happens

Formal hierarchies make sense for accountability. Someone has to be responsible for the decision, but accountability and good information don’t always line up. The person with the most authority is often the person with the least current, detailed information about what’s actually happening.

This creates a structural trap. The organization needs decisions to be made by someone. The people who have the best information can’t officially make decisions. So the organization sacrifices either information quality or decision speed. Usually it sacrifices information quality.

The person in charge makes decisions based on the information they have. That information is incomplete, but they’re in a position to decide so the decision gets made anyway. The people who have the missing information find out after the fact. Then there’s a scramble to either execute a decision that won’t work or to get it reversed.

It’s not malicious; it’s structural. The formal hierarchy wasn’t designed with the current reality in mind.

A Real Example

I’ve seen this many times, but here’s a clean one.

A product team decides they need to simplify the onboarding process. They do research, interview some customers, look at usage data. They come back with a simplified flow. It’s elegant, faster and it looks good.

They present it to the broader org. Support loves it because it means fewer confused customers. Engineering loves it because the code is cleaner. Product is happy.

The launch happens, and immediately, within 48 hours, support is getting messages from the customers who need the most detailed configuration. The simplified flow doesn’t work for them. It skips essential steps.

What happened? The people designing the flow didn’t have information about the 15% of customers who use the advanced features. They designed for the 85%. The simplified flow works great for those customers. It breaks everything for the others.

Should they have known this? Maybe. But the people who would have known—the support reps who talk to those advanced customers every day—weren’t involved in designing the flow. They weren’t even asked.

The decision was made. Then it was unmade. Then a compromise was reached. Six weeks of work, back-and-forth, frustration. All because information didn’t reach the people making the decision.

The Pattern

The Information Trap creates a predictable pattern:

1. A decision is made by someone with authority but incomplete information

2. The people with the missing information find out after the fact

3. They see immediately that something is wrong

4. There’s friction, pushback, or requests to revisit

5. Time and trust are wasted

This happens over and over. Each time it reinforces that decisions shouldn’t be trusted. Each time it slows down the organization. The fix isn’t to blame the decision-maker for not having perfect information. It’s to change the structure so information reaches whoever is making the decision.

What You’re Experiencing Right Now

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably experienced the Information Trap in your own organization or setting. You might be the person making a decision with incomplete information (and frustrated when it gets revisited). Or you might be the person with information that didn’t reach the decision-maker (and frustrated because you could have prevented the problem).

The full diagnosis—the worksheet, the frameworks, and the implementation guide—is available to paid subscribers. This includes:

1. The Information Trap Diagnosis Worksheet — Three questions that tell you whether information is actually flowing to your decision-makers. And if it’s not, where the breakdown is happening.

2. The Filter Analysis Framework — How to trace where information gets simplified, summarized, or filtered before it reaches the top. This tells you exactly which person or process is removing the nuance you need.

3. The Decision-Maker + Operator Framework — How to restructure meetings and decisions so the person with authority and the person with information are in the same room, working together.

4. The “Trial by Fire” Alternative — What to do if you can’t change who’s in the room. How to make decisions faster when you don’t have perfect information, so you can iterate based on real feedback instead of endless prep meetings.

To get the full diagnostic, worksheet, and implementation guide, upgrade to a paid subscription.

You’ll get immediate access to this piece in full, plus all the materials, and the 30-day action plan when it’s published on August 31.