On judgement, authority, and the exercise of leadership—as distinct from management, and rarely as tidy as the literature pretends.
82 essays
My guest this week is Tim Newbold, founder of OKR Quickstart, who has spent a decade watching goal-setting frameworks meet real organisations, and who argues that when they fail, the fault is almost never in the framework.
Some organisations do not merely fail to develop judgement in the people they appoint. They select against it—and in a culture where everyone first-names the chief executive, the selection is almost invisible.
An agent, in law and in the older political vocabulary, is someone who exercises judgement on another's behalf and answers for having exercised it. The systems we have agreed to call agents can do the first and not the second, and the evidence on what that costs has started to arrive.
Someone is promoted, moved sideways in a restructure, or hired in on the strength of a document. Within a quarter the gap is obvious and a fortnight's certification is bought to close it. The evidence says the first move was made on the wrong signal and the second is the weakest remedy available.
A certificate records that a person completed a defined process on a defined day. It does not record whether judgement was formed — and in most organisations, nobody is asking the second question, because the first one has tidied the file.
Pamela Wyatt says the outsider's job is to adapt, not impose. Then she describes overruling a seating convention, redesigning a room over its users' objections, and building a board pipeline where none existed. The exception is the argument.
My guest this week is Pamela Wyatt, Head of Business Transformation for Asia-Pacific at DT Global, who spent nearly a decade at the Asian Development Bank negotiating governance reform with Pacific governments.
The person who takes on eight things and ruins all eight is following a specification, not indulging a personality. Organisations grow the arms themselves, because busyness is legible and judgement is not.
The remedy has no dashboard, vests over years, and mostly benefits your successor—which is precisely why it is avoided. The final essay in the Prior Obligations series sets out what raising the general level of competence actually requires, and why no tool can be bought in its place.
My guest this week is Professor Alistair Noble, President of Nan Tien Institute, a small independent higher education provider near Wollongong grounded in Buddhist values.
Asked to choose between discipline and judgement, David Harvie had just spent an hour describing his disciplines. He chose judgement anyway. On a system that worked exactly as designed, what it cost the people it promoted, and why he has rebuilt a gentler version of it.
My guest this week is David Harvie, Director of Wholesale Distribution at AUSIEX, a wholesale broker serving financial advisers and institutions, and the founder of DADBODZ, a health venture for time-poor fathers.
Why 'human in the loop' means nothing if the human can no longer tell when the machine is wrong — on judgement, the medieval trivium, and what nine years of flat AI returns are actually measuring.
My guest this week is Jay Fontanini, founder of the AI Executive Accelerator, who spent three decades in property and casualty insurance before turning to building software and teaching executives to think with it rather than perform having thought.
There is a familiar shape to the discussion of artificial intelligence in Australian enterprises. Adoption figures rise. Pilot counts rise. Licence spend rises. Somewhere in the annual report a paragraph