Every awards and grants program produces a decision someone will eventually question.
When that happens, the program needs to be defensible. Not perfect. Defensible.
By Ion Despoiu. Originally posted on LinkedIn, .
- A denied applicant asks why.
- A board member asks how finalists were chosen.
- A chapter president asks why their nominee didn’t advance.
Defensibility requires intention. The criteria need to be set before submissions open. Not adjusted midway to fit the submissions that came in.
Every submission is evaluated against the same criteria. Same rubric, same weighting, same scale. Not gut feel for some and careful scoring for others.
Reviewer assignments need to be deliberate. You can show who reviewed what, and that conflicts of interest were identified and handled before scoring, not explained away afterward.
Disagreement is resolved through a process, not a hallway conversation. When reviewers split on a submission, there is a defined way to handle it, and you can describe what that is.
The decision trail still exists after the program closes. Who scored what, when, and why the final call went the way it did. Not reconstructed from memory months later when someone asks.
Notice what’s not on this list: the right winner.
Defensibility isn’t about whether the outcome was correct. Reasonable people disagree on merit. It’s about whether the process that produced the outcome can withstand scrutiny.
A program can pick a debatable winner and still be fully defensible.
A program can pick a deserving winner and have no way to prove the process was fair.
The second one is the program that gets into trouble.
Defensibility isn’t something you add at the end when someone complains. It’s something the process either had all along, or didn’t.