If you’ve ever filled out a self-assessment questionnaire — ours or anyone else’s — something curious probably happened: you answered honestly, and yet when someone from outside reviewed the same ground, they found things you hadn’t seen. That’s not a failure on your part. It’s a documented pattern, with a name, that repeats across almost any organization.
Sociologist Diane Vaughan gave it a name: “normalization of deviance.” She coined it studying why NASA kept launching shuttles despite repeated warning signs — right up to the Challenger disaster, in 1986. The mechanism is simple: if a risky practice doesn’t cause an immediate disaster, it stops feeling like a warning. It just becomes “how things work around here.”
In a legal department, the everyday version has another name: a regular Tuesday. After months of closing matters through urgency alone, firefighting stops being the anomaly. It becomes the routine. And routine, from the inside, is almost impossible to see as a problem.
The second obstacle is simpler: there’s nothing to compare against. That’s exactly why surveys like the ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey exist — over 1,000 Chief Legal Officers interviewed this year, across 43 countries — along with the ACC and Major, Lindsey & Africa Law Department Management Benchmarking Survey.
Without an instrument like that, a legal department has only one reference: its own history. And against your own history, almost everything looks reasonable.
The third obstacle is the hardest to overcome from the inside. When Dunning and Kruger studied self-perception of performance, they found something remarkably solid: the “better-than-average” bias. Most people rate themselves above average — mathematically impossible for the majority.
It isn’t that people lie when they self-assess. It’s that judging, with any distance, a decision you made yourself — or questioning outside counsel you chose years ago — is structurally difficult. You’re judge and party. No bad faith required.
A self-assessment questionnaire, like the one available at mboadalegal.com/auditoria-360, is still a good first step: it forces you to put in writing questions that rarely get asked out loud. But for these three reasons, it has a structural limit. That’s why the ASSESS phase of MBoada Legal 360 doesn’t replace that self-assessment — it complements it with an outside perspective, free of what’s already been normalized, with a real comparison against other departments, and without being judge of its own decisions.
If you’ve already done the self-assessment and want to compare notes, or would rather skip straight to a conversation, the initial call comes with no obligation.