Key takeaways:
- Systems develop capability through what they repeatedly require people to exercise.
- Professional judgement is not a static reserve; it becomes stronger through use, challenge and reflection.
- As complexity grows, organisations become more dependent on leaders who can interpret context rather than simply execute predetermined responses.
- Accountability is strongest when leaders have sufficient room to exercise judgement and remain answerable for it.
- A useful leadership question is: What does working inside this system make our leaders better at?
The Judgement We Stop Practising
Transcript
I can often learn a great deal about a leadership culture by listening to the first questions people ask when something unexpected happens.
A difficult situation emerges. The usual process does not quite fit. There is enough ambiguity that somebody has to interpret what is happening rather than simply move to the next step.
And almost immediately, the questions begin.
What does the policy say? What have other schools done? Is there a template for this? What does the system expect?
All reasonable questions. Good leadership should draw on policy, evidence, precedent and the experience of others.
But eventually another question has to enter the room.
What does this situation require from us?
That question is different because the answer may not exist somewhere else. The people closest to the situation have to bring together what they know, what they value, what the evidence suggests and what this particular context demands.
They have to exercise judgement.
I’m Lee Crockett — welcome to the Culture of Excellence podcast.
There is an idea I want to sit with today that I think we sometimes overlook.
Professional judgement is often treated as something a leader possesses.
An experienced principal has good judgement. A capable system leader has good judgement. Years of practice, professional knowledge and accumulated experience have given them an ability to read difficult situations well.
That is certainly part of it.
But judgement is also something we practise.
And that means the environment around a leader matters enormously.
A system does more than establish priorities, policies and processes. It also teaches people what to practise.
When leaders are regularly expected to interpret context, weigh competing responsibilities, explain their reasoning and remain answerable for what follows, they become more capable of doing those things.
Their judgement becomes more disciplined because it is being used.
The opposite deserves much more attention.
Because when a professional capability is used less often, it does not necessarily remain perfectly preserved somewhere in reserve.
We get better at what we practise.
And we can become less practised at what we rarely have to do.
That is the tension I want to explore.
For years, education has described a future that will require more adaptability, critical thinking, agency and responsible decision-making. The OECD Learning Compass reflects this through its emphasis on agency, responsibility and navigating complexity. Fullan and his colleagues make a similar case through their work on deep learning and human capability.
The specific frameworks matter less here than the assumption underneath them.
The future will contain situations where the pathway is incomplete.
People will have to interpret.
That same reality already exists in educational leadership.
A school leader may be dealing with workforce pressure, learner diversity, community expectations, curriculum reform, inclusion, wellbeing, financial constraints and system priorities at the same time.
None of those things exists in isolation.
A staffing decision can affect culture, learning, workload, budget and trust.
A curriculum decision can involve evidence, local capacity, mandated expectations and timing.
A system priority can be entirely legitimate and still require a judgement about sequence, adaptation and what will have to move aside to make room for it.
Good frameworks help leaders navigate those decisions.
Clear standards help.
Evidence helps.
But eventually somebody still has to interpret what all of that means here.
That is where complexity changes the value of professional judgement.
As more variables interact, predetermined responses become less reliable.
The rule may still matter.
The framework may still matter.
But the leader has to understand how they apply to circumstances the framework could never fully anticipate.
This is why I think we need to be careful about treating professional judgement as something that can simply sit dormant until a difficult situation demands it.
You cannot keep professional judgement in reserve and expect it to be fully available when complexity suddenly demands it.
Imagine a leader working for several years in an environment where almost every important decision arrives with a detailed process, a prescribed sequence and a narrow range of acceptable responses.
They may become exceptionally good at implementation.
They may become highly reliable.
They may understand the system extremely well.
Then something arrives that does not fit.
A workforce issue that has no clean precedent.
A community response nobody anticipated.
A policy that makes complete sense at system level but creates an unexpected consequence locally.
Now the organisation needs that leader to interpret, adapt and decide.
And we should ask ourselves: how much opportunity have they actually had to practise doing that?
That is the part of the sustainability conversation I find particularly interesting.
We often talk about leadership sustainability through workload, wellbeing and resilience. Those pressures are real.
There is also a capability dimension.
When leaders remain responsible for complex outcomes while the professional space to interpret those outcomes becomes narrower, we create what I have called the Judgement–Compliance Gap.
The leader still carries accountability.
The leader still carries consequence.
But more of the interpretive work has already been moved somewhere else.
Over time, the cost may go beyond frustration or fatigue.
The system itself can become less adaptive.
Because the people it depends upon have fewer opportunities to strengthen the very capability it needs when circumstances become unusual.
This is where Gert Biesta’s work on educational purpose is useful.
Biesta reminds us that educational decisions always involve questions of desirability and purpose. Evidence can help us understand what produced a particular result. It cannot fully determine what should matter most in this community, at this moment, when several legitimate responsibilities are competing.
Those are professional judgements.
They require knowledge.
They require evidence.
They require ethical reasoning.
And they become better through practice.
That last part matters.
We sometimes talk about judgement as though it were simply intuition refined by experience.
Good professional judgement is more demanding than that.
A leader should be able to explain why they interpreted the situation as they did.
They should be able to show what evidence informed the decision, what responsibilities were weighed and what consequences they are prepared to monitor.
That is how discretion becomes disciplined.
And it is also how a system develops judgement rather than simply granting freedom.
There is a very important difference between those two ideas.
Freedom alone tells us little about the quality of a decision.
Professional discretion carries an expectation of reasoning and answerability.
You have room to interpret because interpretation is required.
And because you have that room, the quality of your reasoning matters.
That is the relationship I think healthy systems have to get right.
Clear expectations where clarity is necessary.
Strong boundaries where consistency protects quality and equity.
And enough professional space for contextual interpretation where the circumstances genuinely require it.
The difficult part is recognising which is which.
I think this is where organisational culture becomes visible.
Because every environment rehearses something.
Some environments rehearse initiative.
Some rehearse caution.
Some rehearse curiosity.
Some rehearse permission-seeking.
Some rehearse professional challenge.
Some rehearse procedural alignment.
None of those habits develops because somebody put them in a strategic plan.
They develop because people experience them repeatedly.
That is why one question may tell us more about leadership capacity than another professional learning programme ever could:
What does working inside this system make our leaders better at?
Think about that seriously.
After three years inside your organisation, what professional capability has become stronger simply because of the work people have been expected to do?
Are leaders becoming better at interpreting evidence across different contexts?
Are they becoming better at making difficult trade-offs?
Can they explain why adaptation is warranted without treating deviation from process as something that must immediately be defended?
Do they know how to remain accountable for a contextual decision?
Or have they primarily become more skilled at navigating the machinery of the system?
Again, procedural capability matters.
Complex organisations need reliability.
The real question is whether reliability is developing alongside adaptability.
Because when circumstances change, the system will eventually need both.
I think this becomes particularly important when we talk about consistency.
There are forms of consistency we should protect fiercely.
A learner’s dignity should not vary.
Safety should not vary.
High expectations should not depend on geography or personality.
Access to educational opportunity should not be a matter of luck.
But sameness of purpose does not always require sameness of pathway.
Two schools can pursue the same legitimate goal differently because they serve different communities.
Two leaders can respond differently to similar evidence because the surrounding conditions are materially different.
The quality test is whether the judgement can be professionally explained.
Can you show the evidence?
Can you explain the context?
Can you name the trade-off?
Can you remain answerable for what follows?
That is a much more demanding standard than simply allowing variation.
And I think it is a much stronger conception of professional trust.
Trust becomes the space in which accountable judgement can be exercised.
So perhaps the question for leadership teams and system leaders is less about whether people have enough freedom.
Ask instead: What does this environment require people to practise?
And then ask: Is that the capability complexity will require from them?
Those two questions can take you a long way.
Because the future will not become simpler simply because our processes become clearer.
Schools will continue to serve different communities.
New technologies will continue to alter the conditions around us.
Evidence will continue to evolve.
Legitimate priorities will continue to compete.
And circumstances will continue to arrive that no policy writer could have fully anticipated.
Those moments will require judgement.
Professional judgement that is informed by evidence, bounded by legitimate expectations and strengthened through answerability.
That capability cannot be developed only when the crisis arrives.
It has to be practised before it is needed most.
If this idea resonates with something you are experiencing in your own leadership, I explore the deeper argument in the full Leadership Paper, The Sustainability Myth: How Great Leaders Protect What Matters When Everything Is a Priority.
The paper examines what happens when leaders remain accountable for outcomes while the professional space to interpret, adapt and decide becomes narrower. You can download it through the link in the show notes.
And the next time something happens that the usual process cannot quite resolve, listen carefully to the questions people ask.
They will tell you what the system has taught them to reach for.
Then add one more question to the conversation.
What does this situation require from us?
Because the future requires more human judgement, not less.
And the systems most capable of navigating that future may be the ones that never stopped developing it.
