The Leadership Judgement Assessor (LJA)

The Leadership Judgement Assessor (LJA)

The Leadership Judgement Assessor (LJA) is a Vygotskian (dynamic) assessment of leadership judgement. Rather than treating judgement as fixed, it explores what a person can do with guidance during the assessment, as well as what they can do unaided — echoing Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.

Why the unpublished Guide is still worth reading

Although the LJA User Guide is unpublished and is best treated as academic rather than operational, it contains something that is hard to find elsewhere: a clear account of the ten leadership judgement questions and the competency framework that underpins them (set out in Appendix 10).

The ten judgement questions sit at the centre of the system

The Guide explains how the leadership principles are expressed as ten Yes/No judgement questions, asked sequentially to form a decision tree. Through trialling and validation, this becomes the organising logic that drives the wider set of tools, including the LJA and the LJI series.

Crucially, the Guide also makes clear that LJI scenarios are built on the same principles used to create the judgement questions — meaning Appendix 10 effectively provides the blueprint behind the scenario-writing and the eight sub-style outcomes.

Appendix 10: what it adds that you won’t easily find elsewhere

Appendix 10 expands each of the ten questions and links each one to an underlying competency. These competencies are presented as the foundation for making sound Yes/No judgements — and, in turn, as practical levers for leadership development.