For more than twenty years, educators have been remarkably consistent about the kind of future young people are likely to enter. We have spoken about greater complexity, accelerating change, abundant information, technological disruption and work that will increasingly require adaptability, critical thinking, agency and responsible decision-making. The language has evolved, but the underlying direction has remained remarkably stable: the future will demand people who can interpret unfamiliar situations, weigh competing information and act responsibly when no predetermined response is sufficient.
That creates an important question for education. If the future places a higher premium on human judgement, what happens when the systems preparing young people for that future increasingly narrow the professional judgement of the people responsible for leading them? This reaches beyond autonomy or leadership preference. It goes directly to the relationship between educational purpose and the conditions under which education is led.
The future requires more human judgement, not less.
That proposition connects the future-facing ambitions of education with the central argument of The Sustainability Myth. If complexity increases the value of judgement, then the narrowing of professional discretion should concern us because it can make leadership harder to sustain while also weakening one of the capabilities education increasingly depends upon.
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Here’s the short video version of this idea if you’d like a quicker way into the argument before reading further.
The future we have been describing
The case for capabilities beyond the acquisition of knowledge is well established. Binkley and colleagues described twenty-first-century capability through ways of thinking, ways of working, tools for working and ways of living in the world, including creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and problem-solving (Binkley et al., 2012). Fullan and his colleagues similarly emphasise character, citizenship, collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking as capacities required for deep learning and meaningful participation in a changing world (Fullan et al., 2018).
The OECD Learning Compass 2030 takes this further by placing agency, responsibility, knowledge, skills, attitudes and values inside a broader conception of what learners will need in order to navigate complexity, reconcile tensions and participate actively in shaping the world around them (OECD, 2019). The World Economic Forum approaches the issue from a labour-market perspective, yet arrives at a similar pattern by identifying analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, curiosity and lifelong learning alongside rapidly developing technological capability (World Economic Forum, 2025).
Taken together, these frameworks point to something more important than any particular list of skills. As environments become more complex, capability depends increasingly on interpretation: deciding which information matters, adapting prior knowledge to context, weighing competing responsibilities and acting when the pathway cannot be fully prescribed. The educational argument should extend beyond employability or forecasting which technologies will dominate. The more durable insight is that uncertainty increases the importance of people who can make disciplined judgements in situations where no single predetermined response will be sufficient.
Biesta’s work is especially valuable here because it returns the conversation to educational purpose. He argues that education cannot be evaluated only through measures of effectiveness because it always contains questions about what outcomes are desirable, what kinds of human beings we hope to cultivate and what forms of participation in society education should make possible (Biesta, 2009). That perspective prevents future capability from becoming another technical checklist. The deeper issue is what kind of human judgement education will increasingly require and whether the systems around schools are organised in ways that value it.
Complexity changes the leadership task
The same logic applies directly to school leadership. Schools operate inside increasingly complex environments in which learner diversity, workforce pressures, curriculum reform, technological change, community expectations, accountability requirements, inclusion, wellbeing and system priorities interact continuously. A staffing decision may affect culture, learning, workload, budget and community confidence at the same time, while a curriculum decision can sit at the intersection of evidence, local context, mandated expectations, professional capability and finite implementation capacity.
In these circumstances, leadership cannot be reduced to executing a sequence of predetermined responses. Frameworks, evidence, policy and standards all strengthen decision-making, while leaders still have to interpret what applies, what matters most and what consequences are acceptable in a particular context. That interpretive work is one of the defining features of professional practice because the variables in complex educational decisions cannot be fully resolved in advance.
Complexity increases the value of judgement because complexity reduces the reliability of predetermined responses.
This sits at the centre of The Sustainability Myth. Leadership becomes harder to sustain when accountability for increasingly complex outcomes continues to grow while the space available to interpret, adapt, sequence and decide becomes narrower. Accountability, coherence, standards and evidence-informed practice all remain legitimate, and the important question is whether consistency is being pursued in ways that preserve enough professional space for leaders to respond intelligently to context.
Complexity does not disappear when a system becomes more prescriptive. The variables remain, the competing responsibilities remain and the consequences remain. What changes is the leader’s capacity to respond to them. When professional discretion narrows while complexity rises, judgement becomes harder to exercise openly even as the need for it increases.
The contradiction inside education
Education routinely describes adaptability, agency, critical thinking and judgement as important human capabilities. We want young people to become capable of navigating uncertainty, responding to complexity and taking increasing responsibility for the choices they make. Yet the professionals leading those same institutions can encounter increasingly prescribed conditions around implementation, compliance and acceptable forms of response.
Those two directions sit uneasily together. A system can legitimately seek consistency while still valuing professional judgement, but the tension grows when uniformity of process begins to take precedence over contextual interpretation. Schools serve different communities, operate under different conditions and confront different combinations of challenge and opportunity. Effective leadership therefore requires some capacity to translate legitimate system intent into contextually responsible action.
We are preparing young people for a future that will require more judgement while risking the creation of systems that permit less of it.
Good professional judgement must be evidence-informed, ethically defensible and answerable for its consequences. Local discretion does not become wise simply because it is local, and standards do not become unnecessary simply because context matters. The challenge is to create systems capable of holding both: clear expectations about purpose and outcomes, alongside enough professional discretion for leaders to determine how those expectations should be realised in different circumstances.
The contradiction becomes especially significant when viewed through the lens of leadership sustainability. The Judgement–Compliance Gap describes a structural tension between responsibility and discretion: leaders remain answerable for outcomes while having progressively less room to determine how those outcomes should be pursued. When that pattern intensifies, a system can inadvertently weaken the professional capability it still relies upon when circumstances do not fit neatly inside the prescription.
Judgement is a system capability
Professional judgement is often treated as an individual attribute, something an experienced leader either possesses or does not. A more useful interpretation is that judgement is also a system capability. It grows when professionals are expected to interpret, decide, explain their reasoning and remain answerable for the consequences, because those acts create the repeated practice through which judgement becomes more disciplined.
Every system develops capability through what it repeatedly allows, rewards and requires. Leaders become better at interpreting context by having to interpret context, better at weighing competing responsibilities by making those judgements and better at adapting evidence by being trusted to do so while remaining accountable for what follows. Capability grows through disciplined practice, trusted challenge, reflection and feedback.
When those acts are progressively displaced by prescription, the profession becomes less practised at the very work complex circumstances still require. A system may gain procedural consistency while gradually weakening its adaptive capacity. This risk is particularly important in education because contextual variation, human difference and competing priorities are embedded in the work rather than sitting at its edges.
The narrowing of professional judgement is a sustainability problem because it can weaken the system capability that complexity increasingly requires.
Seen this way, professional discretion is more than a benefit granted to leaders. It is part of the system’s capacity to respond intelligently when circumstances exceed the reach of standardised responses. Protecting judgement therefore involves more than allowing leaders greater freedom; it requires creating conditions in which judgement can be exercised, challenged, explained and improved.
What capabilities are we developing beyond compliance?
One question can help leadership teams and systems examine this tension without turning the conversation into an argument against accountability: What capabilities are we developing beyond compliance?
Compliance has a legitimate place. Schools carry legal, ethical and professional obligations, and standards can protect equity, coherence and public trust. Beyond that baseline, leaders also need opportunities to interpret evidence in context, make disciplined trade-offs, explain why adaptation is warranted and remain answerable for the consequences. These are the acts through which professional judgement develops.
The leadership question is therefore whether systems are deliberately strengthening professional discretion alongside accountability. A system that wants thoughtful, adaptable and responsible leaders has to create conditions in which thoughtful, adaptable and responsible leadership can actually occur. That requires clarity about which expectations are fixed, where contextual interpretation is necessary and how leaders will be supported to make defensible decisions when legitimate priorities compete.
This does not mean every decision belongs locally. It means being explicit about where judgement is required and preserving enough professional space for it to be exercised well. When systems can distinguish between fidelity to purpose and simple fidelity to process, they increase the likelihood that consistency and contextual intelligence can coexist.
Protecting what the future will require
The future of education will continue to require standards, evidence and accountability. It will also require systems sophisticated enough to combine those things with professional judgement. Artificial intelligence, automation and rapidly expanding access to information are changing the environment around schools, but the deeper challenge is that leaders are making decisions amid increasing interdependence, competing legitimate priorities and uncertainty about consequences.
More information does not necessarily create clearer decisions, and greater technological capability does not remove questions of purpose, values or consequence. Human beings will still need to decide what deserves attention, which evidence should be trusted, how competing interests should be reconciled and what responsibility should organise a choice when certainty is unavailable. These are precisely the circumstances in which professional judgement becomes most valuable.
The case for professional judgement is therefore future-facing. The capabilities required to lead well in increasingly complex environments cannot be reduced to procedural compliance because the situations that matter most are often the ones that do not fit cleanly inside a predetermined response. Educational systems depend upon leaders capable of interpreting those circumstances without abandoning accountability for the choices they make.
There is a further implication here. If complexity is increasing the value of judgement, then the narrowing of professional judgement is occurring at precisely the moment when education needs that capability most. Leadership sustainability is commonly discussed through workload, wellbeing and resilience, but the Judgement–Compliance Gap reveals another condition: the relationship between what leaders remain responsible for and the professional space they retain to respond.
Educational systems are preparing young people for increasingly complex environments while depending upon leaders who must navigate complexity now. Protecting professional judgement is therefore more than a matter of making leadership tolerable. It is part of protecting the adaptive capability education itself increasingly requires.
Prefer to listen and reflect a little more deeply?
I explore this idea more fully in the podcast episode, where I unpack the research, leadership dynamics and practical implications in greater depth.
The future we should remember
The future will ask educational systems to maintain standards and accountability while becoming more capable of responding intelligently to variation and change. That means recognising where consistency genuinely protects quality, where context requires interpretation and where professional leaders need sufficient discretion to make responsible trade-offs. It also means expecting those leaders to explain their reasoning, remain answerable for consequences and adjust when evidence shows that a judgement needs to change.
The Judgement–Compliance Gap becomes especially important through this lens because the issue extends beyond whether leaders have enough freedom. It concerns whether educational systems are cultivating the professional capability they increasingly need from the people charged with leading them. When accountability expands without corresponding space for judgement, the cost can appear in sustainability, adaptability and the system’s capacity to respond intelligently to complexity.
The question is therefore larger than whether leadership feels sustainable today. It is whether the conditions being created are fit for the complexity education will face tomorrow.
The future requires more human judgement, not less. The question is whether our systems are strengthening that capability or quietly designing it out.
The Sustainability Myth: How Great Leaders Protect What Matters When Everything Is a Priority explores why leadership becomes harder to sustain when leaders remain accountable for outcomes while the space for professional judgement narrows.
The paper develops the Judgement–Compliance Gap and examines the conditions leaders need to interpret context, make responsible trade-offs and protect what matters in increasingly complex environments.
