I’ve been asked to be Lead Judge on two panels this year. One is a Positive Impact award. One is a growing business award.
- The brief for the role is modest, and I’d like to quote.
- Keep the discussions and the timings on track.
- Make sure the panel gets to discuss every finalist.
- Make sure a sentence of feedback is recorded for each of them.
- Make sure the decision and the reasons are written down.
That’s it. No extra vote. No casting vote. Every judge has an equal say.
Most people would read that as admin.
Whoever speaks first decides
Put five capable people in a room with six finalists and ninety minutes, and the decision probably gets made in the first four minutes. Somebody will probably confident says “for me it’s got to be number three”, everybody else reorganises their thinking around number three, and the next hour is spent finding reasons for a conclusion the room reached before it started.
I’ve watched it happen in trustee meetings, in tender evaluations, in senior teams deciding who to promote. It isn’t a failure of character. It’s what rooms do.
So the first thing I’ll do is the least impressive thing on the agenda. Before anyone says a word about who should win, everybody writes down their own view. On paper, in a notes app, on the back of the judging pack. Then we go round, and the people who haven’t spoken yet go first.
I’ll go last. Every time.
That one change is most of the job. The rest is watching the clock.
Judge what happened, not how well it was written
The entries in front of us were written by people. Some of those people write for a living. Some of them run the business and wrote it at eleven o’clock at night because nobody else was going to.
The second group are not worse at business. They’re worse at entering awards.
So the question I’ll keep bringing back to the table is a boring one. What changed, and how do we know? Not what was claimed. Not how nicely it was put. What changed, who says so, and what’s the evidence in front of us.
I’ll apply the same rule to my own opinions, which is harder. If I can’t say why I rate an entry in a way another judge can check, I’m not judging. I’m just preferring.
The ones who don’t win
One organisation wins. The rest go home.
The organisers have asked for a sentence of feedback on every finalist, in case anyone asks for it afterwards. In most rooms that turns into “strong entry, close decision”, written at speed while people are getting their coats.
I’d rather we wrote something the finalist could actually use. What was strongest. What we wanted more of. If it came down to two, why it came down to that.
Being a finalist costs a small organisation real time. Somebody wrote that entry instead of doing their actual job. The sentence at the end is the only thing most of them take away, and it takes about a minute longer to make it worth reading.
The bit I’ll have to sit on
My day job is walking into an organisation, finding what isn’t working and helping fix it. That’s the muscle. It’s what I enjoy.
A judge doesn’t do that. A judge reads an entry, decides, and leaves. I’ll finish some of these entries wanting to send the finalist a list of three things I’d change, and it isn’t my room and they didn’t ask.
Nobody asked the judge for a diagnosis. They asked for a decision, and for a reason they can live with.
I also want to be clear about what I won’t be doing. I won’t be writing about any entry, any organisation or any decision, before or after. The entries are confidential and they should be. This piece is about how I’ll behave in the room, not about who’s in it.
If I do it properly, nobody notices
Lead Judge isn’t chief judge. It’s one vote and a stopwatch.
The measure of doing it well isn’t that my view carries. It’s that the quietest person in the room said what they thought, that every finalist got a fair share of the time, and that the winner can be explained in two sentences to somebody who wasn’t there.
