Easy Wisdom
How Leadership Lost Its Sense of Judgment
1. When Everything Sounds Profound
A short video of Slavoj Žižek resurfaced recently, and it stayed with me longer than expected. In a brief sequence he delivers four incompatible statements:
1. Reject immediate pleasures in favor of eternity;
2. Reject eternity in favor of the present;
3. Reconcile the two by finding eternity in fleeting moments;
4. Accept that one is suspended between the two without resolution.
Each statement contradicted the others, yet all could be styled as “wise” with almost no effort at all. Once you notice the pattern, you start seeing the same trick everywhere, especially in leadership
2. How Leaders Borrowed the Logic of Easy Wisdom
Leadership discourse has quietly adopted this logic. The vocabulary has expanded, yet the concepts have thinned. Encouraging authenticity, empowerment, presence, or courage has become a matter of style rather than interpretation. The appeal is obvious. These terms are broad enough to fit any situation, reassuring enough to provoke agreement, and gentle enough to avoid conflict. And who would disagree with the value of courage? Its vagueness protects it from scrutiny. The result is an environment where leaders are praised for “embracing ambiguity”, not because they can think through competing demands, but because the language itself never forces them to choose.
Judgment, by contrast, requires context. It requires attention to what is at stake and acceptance of the consequences that follow. In the classical sense it meant the capacity to weigh priorities, tolerate friction, and decide which principle applies at a specific moment. Contemporary leadership theory inherited that lineage, but the popularized version turned it into a set of virtues one can rotate according to preference. Discernment is replaced by posture. Complexity is replaced by mobility. The responsibility to interpret is replaced by the freedom to select whatever stance feels most socially acceptable.
3. Call the Consultant
This shift is not accidental. It responds to a cultural environment where individuals experience a surplus of slogans and a shortage of stable criteria. Leaders are often inclined toward a flight from responsibility, a preference for avoiding the burden of commitment in favour of a continual circulation of possibilities. Instead of engaging the structural constraints of a situation – the conflicting interests, the political pressures, the trade-offs that cannot be avoided – leaders are offered fragments of language that mimic understanding. They offer the sensation of clarity without its obligations. And because they circulate widely, they become self-legitimating: if enough people use the same terms, they appear authoritative by default.
This is attractive for a simple reason. It reduces discomfort. The more ambiguous the principle, the easier it is to adopt. One can always rotate from authenticity to empathy, from empathy to empowerment, from empowerment to resilience. Each virtue cancels the one before it without ever creating friction. The idea of judgment disappears. What remains is a carousel of categories that excuse us from determining what matters in a specific moment. It creates the perfect conditions for a familiar pattern: call the consultant, adopt the framework, and allow the external authority to certify the decision that was preferred from the start. It is technically the right thing to do, because the consultant said so.
4. Restoring Judgement as Practice
None of this prepares leaders for situations where interpretation is unavoidable. A moment from my previous career illustrates the distinction.
I once presented the post project appraisal of a major capital investment to a board o whose members included a former German chancellor, other former senior politicians, the CEO of one of the major oil companies, and several individuals commonly described as oligarchs, among them my own CEO. The appraisal was direct: the project had not gone well. When I finished outlining the failure points, the room went quiet. The CEO looked at me and asked, “So you’re saying we need to be tougher and smarter?” For a moment, I assumed the discussion was about to take a familiar turn and I could picture myself on a one way flight back out of there. Instead, after a long pause, which felt eternal, he nodded and with a faint smile said, “You’re absolutely correct. We didn’t get this one right.” There was no search for excuses, no displacement of responsibility, no attempt to soften the outcome. Just a recognition of what had happened and a willingness to face it. The difference between posturing and leadership was visible in that silence.
Reintroducing judgment into leadership does not require romanticizing certainty. It requires restoring the link between interpretation and action. It requires recognising that understanding is not a sequence of encouraging terms but the capacity to read a situation, determine which principle applies, and accept the consequences of applying it. It requires resisting the comfort of interchangeable insight and recovering the discipline of deciding.
The alternative is a culture where statements circulate freely but responsibility does not. When everything sounds wise, nothing guides us. Leadership becomes an aesthetic rather than a practice.
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Federico Malatesta
Transformational & Executive Coach | Author