The Wrong Room

THE COUL & GOLD BRIEFING · ISSUE Nº 34 · October 6, 2026

Whenever someone puts a spreadsheet in front of me I think of the line Mark Twain credited to Disraeli, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Most people read it as a complaint that numbers lie, and it is not. The numbers are usually honest. The lie is in which numbers someone picks and how they line them up, so it is a complaint about the person presenting them, and I say that as someone who has spent a career being very good at presenting them.

I want to make an argument this week that sounds obvious and is not: judgement is the spine of leadership. Vision, strategy, culture and all the other words that get a slide to themselves sit on top of it. By judgement I mean something specific. The process has run, the data is in, the room has agreed, and someone still has to look at all of it and decide what it actually means. That is judgement. Everything else a leader does can be systematised, delegated, automated or bought. Judgement cannot. And most of what we build around leaders, whether we admit it or not, exists to spare them from ever having to use it.

An organisation makes decisions all day, and most of them are not judged, they are ratified, which is a polite word for rubber-stamped. A recommendation arrives with the options already narrowed, the analysis already done and the agreement already lined up, and the person at the top says yes. That yes is the last signature on something that was decided three meetings earlier.

A leader can run a company this way for years and the numbers will look fine, because the process is competent and competent processes produce acceptable results. Meanwhile the judgement muscle goes unused, and nobody notices, because nobody measures something that did not happen. Then one day a decision arrives that the process cannot narrow down. The data points both ways, the room is split, and the right answer is unpopular. The leader reaches for a capacity they have not used in a decade. It is a bad day to find out it has gone.

I’ll give you one from my own record, because it is the one where I learned that judgement is not first about the decision, it is about where the decision belongs.

Some of you will have watched the second season of Clarkson’s Farm, in which Jeremy Clarkson, the old Top Gear presenter, asks to open a restaurant on his Cotswolds farm, the local planning committee says no, and for an hour of television that committee becomes the most hated local authority on Amazon Prime. That was West Oxfordshire District Council, and I was a Cabinet member there at the time, one of the small group of elected councillors who make the council’s executive decisions.

I was not on the planning committee. In British local government a planning committee works like a court. It has to judge each application on its planning merits alone, and the executive side of the council, which included me, has no business in the decision. But a high-profile application does not stay in its lane, and the restaurant came up in a private Cabinet conversation before the committee met. The conversation was drifting towards a view.

I argued that how any of us felt about Clarkson himself was no basis for taking a position on a planning decision. I was not arguing to approve the application, or to refuse it. I was arguing that our room had no authority over the question, and that forming a view in it meant pre-judging the case, whatever we did with that view afterwards. I was told, in substance, that we were only talking. I lost the argument. I think I was right then and I think I am right now, and the person who disagreed with me has since left office, so I will leave it there.

The committee refused. The council’s own planning officers had recommended refusal because of the building’s size and the harm it would do to the view. Clarkson opened anyway, the council served an enforcement notice (which is another story that I cannot share), and in 2023 a government planning inspector, ruling on the appeal, upheld the refusal of the restaurant while allowing the car park. By every measure the system keeps, the system got it right. The process was vindicated by the process.

None of which touches my point. Look at who did what. The committee, which had the authority, rubber-stamped its own officers’ recommendation. The Cabinet, which had no authority at all, did the real arguing. Judgement was being exercised, with some heat, in exactly the place it could do nothing except contaminate, and that is not an unusual failure, it is the normal one. In most organisations the people with the strongest view on a decision are not the people who hold it, and the person who holds it has been handed a recommendation and a deadline.

Judgement has to sit where the authority sits. When it does not, you get a leader who rubber-stamps, or a room that decides without the right to, and usually you get both.

There are three ways an organisation starves its leader’s judgement, and all three look like good practice.