Edition 57 | 20 October 2026

Welcome to The Perspective, a weekly note on work, leadership, and clarity. The aim isn't to add another voice to the noise. It's to slow down for a moment, look at something carefully, and see what's actually underneath. Some editions land practical, some more reflective. All chosen to help you see the pattern behind the noise.

A note this week on something I have learned over fifteen appointment processes about the difference between structure and objectivity.

Judgement, Earned

Over the years I have run more than fifteen appointment processes for professional firms. External audit, internal audit, actuarial, asset consultants, reinsurance brokers, systems and implementation partners. The subject matter differs. The structure is largely the same.

A request for information, then a shortlist. A request for proposal, then a shortlist again. Presentations (otherwise known as "the beauty parade"), where you go through everything from start to finish. A scoring matrix, agreed up front, applied along the way. A recommendation out the other end.

The one I think about most ended in a deadlock.

By the end of the presentations, two submissions were exceptional. There was nothing material left that separated them. Technical capability, team quality, references, pricing, cultural fit, everything scored closely enough that any further splitting hairs would have been invented.

So we chose on judgement.

At the time, that felt like the process had failed to do its job. It had taken us all the way to the end and still required a human decision at the final step. If the matrix could not decide, what had we been doing for the last three months?

The work was excellent, and it was the right call.

What I have realised since is that this is what a proper appointment process is actually for. It is not there to make the decision for you. It is there to earn you the right to make it.

A rushed appointment produces a decision between options that have not been properly understood. Someone’s cousin, a firm the chair has worked with before, a recommendation from a trusted colleague. These may land on the right answer, but the committee has no way of knowing, because it has not seen what else was out there. A proper process does the opposite. It takes a wide field, narrows it honestly, and ends with two or three options that are genuinely interchangeable on everything the organisation has said matters.

Which is where the committee’s judgement comes back in. By the time two options are genuinely interchangeable on paper, something else is doing the work. A read on how a firm will behave when a difficult issue comes up mid-engagement. A sense of which partner the committee actually wants to be in a room with when the audit report is being signed. A feel for which firm will push back when it should, and which will nod along.

None of that lives in the matrix. All of it belongs to the committee. The process just makes sure the committee is choosing between two great answers rather than guessing among unknowns.

The mistake is expecting the matrix to decide, because it cannot. It can only make sure that the decision you end up making is an honest one.

The deeper point is that a scoring matrix is a tool for forcing comparability, not for removing judgement. The questions that got scored were questions the committee chose in advance. The weights it put on them were the committee’s weights. The thresholds for shortlisting were the committee’s thresholds. By the time the matrix produces a result, it is reflecting back what the committee had already decided mattered. If two firms come out level after all of that, the committee’s own judgement is the only thing left that can honestly separate them, because every other mechanism has already been applied.

This is uncomfortable for people who want the process to feel objective all the way through. It is not objective. It is structured, which is a different thing. Structure forces honesty into the comparisons. Objectivity is a claim nobody running an appointment process should ever make.

The best committees I have sat with understand this. They treat the matrix as the thing that cleared the field, not the thing that chose the winner. They sit with the final judgement openly, name why they are making it, and move on. The worst committees treat the matrix as a shield, and spend hours re-weighting cells after the fact to produce a number that matches the decision they wanted to make anyway. That is not process. That is theatre.

A proper process does not remove judgement. It earns you the right to use it.

👉 I shared the shorter version of this on LinkedIn last week:

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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The Longer Read

Where the Money Stops Working

I published a piece this week on where our tax money goes, and why some of it works and most does not. SASSA pays 19 million grants a month, with 99.98% landing in the right account, at 2.6 cents of every rand. Ten years ago it was a national scandal. What fixed it was taking out the step where somebody had to buy something.

Everything else works the other way. A school receives a budget and has to buy desks and textbooks. A clinic receives a budget and has to buy gloves and medicine. A municipality receives a budget and has to buy pipes. The purchase is where it goes wrong. The Auditor-General found that 87% of irregular expenditure in local government last year came from procurement. Which is only the part that can be measured.

Read the piece

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On My Desk

Not much on my desk this week, because the desk has moved. Today and Thursday I am at the Sandton Convention Centre, for the HR Indaba and the Finance Indaba, with a stand and concept that has been six months in the making.

A stand is a strange workspace. For two full days, several hundred visitors walk past it. Some pause, some engage, some stop long enough to have the conversation the stand was built for. By the end of each day it comes down, the hall goes quiet, and the only trace left is what we have captured, what we have learnt, and the small handful of conversations that will matter after the week ends.

Back at the actual desk on Friday.

Closing Perspective The committees that trust the process are usually the ones that end up having to use their judgement anyway. The committees that distrust it short-circuit it, and never find out whether the final two options were really the right two. Which is why structure is worth the discomfort it produces. Not because it removes the judgement. Because it earns the right to use it on the right question. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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