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When Good Judgement Has to Scale
Phase 2 will increase the number of decisions providers need to get right, making consistent professional judgement an organisational capability.
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Skills, within the McKinsey 7S Framework, considers whether people have the competence required to perform their roles effectively.
For Awaab's Law Phase 2, one of the more demanding capabilities will be effective triage. Some of the additional hazards require staff to interpret the information available in context, including the potential severity of the hazard and the circumstances of the household. Excess heat is a good example: the same conditions may present very different levels of risk depending on factors such as age, health and vulnerability.
The government has published separate hazard guidance specifically to support landlords with triaging the additional Phase 2 hazards. Providers need to determine whether a reported problem could constitute a significant or emergency hazard and respond accordingly. That requires professional judgement, repeated consistently across potentially large volumes of cases.
Two similar reports should not produce radically different outcomes simply because different people received them. Yet attempting to prescribe a fixed response for every possible scenario would remove the judgement needed to account for individual circumstances. The challenge is therefore to give people enough structure to support consistency, without constraining the professional judgement the process still requires.
Technology can provide valuable support here. Structured data can help ensure the same relevant information is considered each time, while digital decision frameworks can guide staff through established processes. AI can go further by drawing together larger volumes of case information, surfacing relevant property or resident history and identifying information that may warrant closer consideration.
The opportunity is to make good judgement easier to apply consistently across the organisation. People still make the decisions, but they do so with better information and stronger operational support. As Phase 2 broadens the range of hazards staff will need to assess, technology can help organisations apply human expertise more consistently and at greater scale.
Skills is the seventh and final element in the McKinsey 7S Framework for organisational change, which we use throughout our Roadmap to Readiness to examine Phase 2 preparedness. The guide explores the capabilities providers will need across their workforce, including the role of professional judgement and the growing importance of applying it consistently as Phase 2 expands the range of hazards coming into scope.
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