Permission to Judge

Elsewhere I have written about the cost of all this caution: how over-classification is rational, expensive, and a quiet departure from the very principle the regime is built on. That piece is about the system. This one is about the people inside it, because the same incentives that distort a risk rating also teach capable people to stop trusting their own judgement. The competence is, overwhelmingly, already in the building. What is too often missing is the confidence that a sound, defensible judgement is safe to make, even when it is not the most cautious option on the table, and even when the colleague at the next desk would have called it differently.

You can watch the confidence gap in real time. Over the years, in more than one organisation, I have had relationship managers arrive at my desk holding an adverse media report at arm’s length, “we’ve found this on a client, tell us what to do,” rather than “here is what I think it means.” The risk is handed over instead of owned. I used to reply, a little mischievously, “Well, you’ve brought me adverse media on a customer, so I suppose we’ll have to exit them.” Almost without fail the person would, on the spot, become a fluent risk analyst: it is a politically charged jurisdiction, the allegations are unproven, it has the look of score-settling by an incoming administration, there is no conviction, we should keep them. To which my honest answer was: you should have led with that, and I would have agreed with you. The judgement was there the whole time. It only needed permission to surface.

It is tempting to read that as a competence problem. It is not. It is the same fear, and the same incentive structure, described in the cost of caution, only here it is felt from the inside as a lack of permission. Raising a flag is safe; standing behind a nuanced judgement is exposed. Once a risk has been named out loud it is very hard to walk it back without looking as though you are under-reacting, so the safest move is never to commit a view at all, but to pass the file upward and let someone more experienced carry it. The irony is that the person passing it up frequently has the better information and the sharper instinct. They have simply learned that having a view is riskier than not having one.

A defensible judgement that differs from a colleague’s is not a problem to be engineered away. It is the thing we are actually paying for.

There is a fear underneath this that deserves to be said plainly: that if judgement is allowed to vary, the work becomes inconsistent and therefore unsafe. But give the same file to several genuinely competent people and you may well get several different assessments, and that is not a failure of the system. It is what judgement looks like. What matters is not that everyone reaches an identical answer, but that each person can show the reasoning behind theirs and stand behind it. A defensible judgement that differs from a colleague’s is not a problem to be engineered away. It is the thing we are actually paying for.

Which is why empowerment on its own is never an invitation to wave files through. The confidence to make a call has to sit alongside the discipline of writing down why, clearly enough that someone else can follow it later. That documented reasoning is what makes a confident judgement safe rather than reckless, and it deserves a piece of its own. For now the point is narrower. The capability is already there. The task of anyone leading the work is not to supply the judgement, but to make it safe to use, and to write it down.