Context instead of control: what it really takes

A management-software company in Brazil, 180 people, growing 30% a year. Leadership read about freedom and responsibility and removed two things in the same month: pre-approval for expenses under a certain value, and time-tracking. The announcement said the company trusts adults.

Four months later, finance couldn't project cash flow, two teams had bought tools that did the same thing, and a coordinator had been called in to explain a decision nobody had told him was his to make. The company concluded that autonomy doesn't work in Brazil. That's not what happened: it removed the rule and didn't put context in its place.

01The idea: information is the counterpart of freedom #

Patty McCord ran Netflix's people function from 1998 to 2012, the period during which the company's public culture deck was written — published in 2009 and widely copied since. She laid out the reasoning in How Netflix Reinvented HR, in the 2014 Harvard Business Review, and in the 2018 book Powerful.

The argument isn't that rules are bad. It's that most rules exist to compensate for a lack of information and a lack of hard conversations. If a person knows precisely what the company needs, what things cost, and what the real state of the business is, they'll make most of the decisions the rule was meant to govern just fine on their own — and the few they don't become a direct conversation, not a new policy.

The part usually left out when copying it is the cost of that trade. McCord describes an organization that speaks with unusual frankness about performance, opens up business numbers with uncommon breadth, and treats the departure of someone who's not a fit as a normal event, not a failure. Whoever adopts the first half — fewer rules — without the second — more information and more direct conversation — ends up with the worst of both arrangements.

02The honest limit at an average Brazilian company #

This section exists because the thesis travels poorly when transplanted without adjustment. Erin Meyer, co-author of a later book on Netflix, documented in The Culture Map (2014) how direct frankness reads very differently depending on cultural context — what sounds like respect in a California office sounds like aggression in many countries.

Three concrete limits, without dressing them up.

Employment terms. The original deck operates under an employment regime where letting someone go is fast and the market reabsorbs them quickly. Under Brazil's labor code (CLT), with severance cost, notice periods, and formal record, the same design doesn't hold up — and pretending it does produces a manager who avoids the conversation until it becomes a lawsuit.

Team composition. Much of the average Brazilian company has shop-floor operations, shifts, scale, and junior staff in their first job. Context there doesn't replace procedure: a warehouse operator needs one correct way of doing things, and that isn't infantilizing — it's safety and quality. Autonomy without criteria, in that case, produces variation — the subject of variation is not error.

Information maturity. Opening up numbers requires having reliable numbers. A company whose monthly result closes on the 20th of the following month, in a spreadsheet reconciled by hand, has nothing to open up — and transparency announced without available data turns into distrust.

03The math on context that isn't available #

At the scale of the 180-person company. This is a mid-size Brazilian company (figures in Brazilian reais). Stated assumptions:

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The math: 26 people × 3 decisions × 40 working weeks gives 3,120 postponed decisions a year; at 2.5 days of delay each, about 7,800 decision-days, the equivalent of 195 weeks of accumulated waiting. It's not payroll wasted — it's delivery that arrives later. At a company growing 30% a year, the real cost of that queue is the order the competitor filled first.

04Where this breaks down in practice #

1. The rule is removed before the information is opened up. The person is left with the responsibility and without the data to exercise it.
2. Transparency is announced at a quarterly meeting. The number shows up once every three months and doesn't help decide anything on Tuesday.
3. Nobody defined the decision boundary. What belongs to the coordinator versus the director was never written down, and the boundary is discovered when someone gets it wrong.
4. Frankness turns into imported rudeness. The tone gets copied without the relational contract that sustained it there, and the team learns to stay quiet.
5. Autonomy without priority. Everyone decides, and the decisions point in different directions because there's no declared common goal.
6. There's no feedback on the decision made. Without knowing the effect of what they decided, nobody calibrates their judgment — and the next decision gets escalated again.

05What data-driven management answers #

Available context is a systems problem before it's a culture problem. Numbers updated without waiting for month-end close, priorities written and dated, explicit ownership, decisions logged with the reason: with that, a person decides alone in most cases and the exception reaches the manager already carrying the information.

It's the practical counterpart to what appears in managing oneself, and what distinguishes declared value from practiced value in the three levels of culture. The manager's repertoire for switching between letting go and directing is in the six leadership styles.

At Relevanti, the operations, metrics, and processes modules keep that context available without manual reporting — see the platform, the breakdown by area in solutions, or talk to us at contact.

Before announcing autonomy, answer one question: if someone on your team needed to decide something tomorrow morning, could they see everything you would see?