11 February 2021
Using Judgement
Ms Bingham’s appointment.
By John Watson
If you were asked to identify a high spot in the government’s performance recently, an obvious candidate would be the appointment of Kate Bingham to head up the vaccine procurement effort. Although she was already a member of the Vaccine Task force, her experience of life sciences was from the venture capital rather than the administrative end of the industry and her selection must owe much to the fact that, as the wife of a prominent Tory MP, she would have been well known to Johnson or to his inner circle. “Give it to Kate”, they must have said, thinking perhaps of how Churchill decided to give the organisation of munitions to Beaverbrook, “she will sort it out.” And sort it out she did, using her extensive contacts to get Britain to the table with the various pharmaceutical players. Working, and no doubt persuading others to work, without reward, she seems to have delivered in spades. It is all rather impressive.
Important roles are, of course, often allocated in this rather informal way. When a prime minister is choosing his cabinet he does not ask applicants to submit CVs or go through a system of interviews. No doubt he listens to recommendations and suggestions but in the end, having gathered all available information, he makes a judgement on the basis of what he thinks of the possible candidates and their abilities, and how he thinks they will fit together.
It is a very different system to that used by many large organisations in their recruitment of staff. There, due process often involves the submission of CVs from which background details have been removed and interviews at which the history of the candidate is not investigated. Through this approach the organisation counters any accusation of bias, whether racial, class-based or on any other basis, by depriving itself of the information on which that bias can operate. After all, recruiters cannot bias their selection against a particular category if they do not know whether those applying belong to that category or not.
Although one can understand why this is a “safe” approach in relation to accusations of bias, a baby is inevitably thrown out with the bathwater. The price of the approach is a restriction of data and the decision ultimately reached is made on the basis of less information than could have been available. Now that wouldn’t matter a jot if the information being ignored was irrelevant, but in reality that can seldom be the case. Getting a picture of a human being is a holistic business and the more you know about them the better the image you create. That a child was educated at a particular institution does not of itself tell you anything about his or her abilities. If, on the other hand, they thrived there or were in the gang which set fire to the headmaster’s car, that would tell you a great deal. Yet that information is not available unless you know something about their background.
The reality must be that when organisations, whether in business or in civil administration, deprive themselves of information about candidates, they make a trade. They protect themselves against the possibility of bias on the one hand but they make less well-informed decisions on the other. When is that trade worth making and when is it not?
In politics and business the matter seems to depend on the significance of the post being filled. In selecting a new chief executive, a company will bring together all the information it can and his or her background will certainly be relevant. At a more domestic level you see the same approach. If you’re looking for someone with whom to share a flat you really do want to know all about them because the decision is an important one to you personally. It is only when you begin to care less about the quality of the appointment that the importance of avoiding bias becomes more important than full information.
That raises difficult points in relation to large organisations. Should they in each case ask themselves whether a post is sufficiently important to justify full information or whether it is one where information restricted to avoid bias is sufficient? The answer to the question is likely to depend on where you look from. The case for getting the best possible head of vaccine procurement is obvious, but suppose we were talking about those who award universal credit on the basis of disability. The government or its contractor might take the view that, because there are many people involved in this work, these are less important roles. The person who is claiming the credit may think that the best possible staff should be assigned to the matter.
The decision between the important and unimportant roles is a false one and has only risen because of a cowardly approach to the question of bias. If recruitment is biased, the right approach is not to start playing around with the information but to get better quality people to do the recruiting. Big institutions who use the background-blind CVs system make one of two ugly admissions. The first is that if they did not do so their recruiters would show unacceptable bias in their appointments. The second is that that is not the case but that they do not have the guts to stand behind the integrity of their own staff. It is hard to say which is the less attractive.
Ms Bingham’s appointment is an example of how an informal system of appointment based on recommendations or personal knowledge can succeed. Not every appointment can be made like that, but the fact that the process succeeded so well should give pause to those who prefer to withhold information and, for it must follow, reduce reliance on human judgement.
