The Art of Judgment

10 Steps to Becoming a More Effective Decision-Maker

John Adair

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Business
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781472980700
• eBook ISBN: 9781472980717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

The success of any organization or individual depends upon making good decisions, arrived at through the use of a sound judgment. Too often, this elusive characteristic has been misperceived as an unchangeable, entrenched element of our character, over which we have little control. In fact, judgment is an art – one that can be honed, developed and mastered. In The Art of Judgment, John Adair draws upon his decades of experience and expertise to provide a practical and fascinating insight into how you can harness the full potential of your judgement. These in-depth methods are summarised in 10 key principles, which include: - Thinking to Some Purpose
- Experience – the Seedbed
- Truth – the Leading Star
- How to Share Decisions
- The Role of Values With the divisiveness of public discourse and the complexities of modern business, it is more difficult than ever to be sure that you're making the right decision. Adair provides a clear pathway to improving your judgment, beginning with an exploration of the machinations behind decision-making, before demonstrating how you can develop a stronger understanding and control of your judgment. This is an essential companion for any business leaders interested in making the best decisions for them and their organization. Good judgment is the secret behind any success, and also has the potential to accelerate one's own career. This book provides insight, expertise and inspiration for anyone looking to cultivate and develop their art of judgment.

PART ONE

UNDERSTANDING JUDGMENT

1

Thinking to some purpose

Thought is not a trick, or an exercise, or a set of dodges,

Thought is a man in his wholeness wholly attending.

D.H. LAWRENCE

We experience thinking as a kind of a holistic activity. It is something our minds seem to do as if of their own accord, whether we like it or not, and it can take many different shapes or forms. Who hasn’t spent some idle moment daydreaming of this or that? At other times, however, our holistic mind is in harness: you are thinking to some purpose.

Incidentally, the word holistic (from the Greek holos, whole) entered the English dictionary in 1926, coming from a book published that year entitled Holism and Evolution. Jan Christian Smuts (1870–1950), the South African statesman and soldier, was its author. During his youthful post-graduate studies in plant biology at Cambridge University, Smuts had conceived a ‘big idea’. It concerned the way in which nature works, especially in the context of living organisms such as plants and humans: ‘This whole-making or holistic tendency,’ he wrote, ‘is fundamental in nature.’ There you have it in one sentence. Furthermore, he argued, the human mind is a living organism and it therefore works holistically when addressing a purpose of one kind or another.

Smuts on thinking to some purpose

The most significant element, however, in the ‘field’ of Mind concerns the future, and makes the future an operative factor in the present mental activity. Mind does this through purpose; purpose is the function of Mind by which it contemplates some future desired end and makes the idea of this end exert its full force in the present.

Thus I form a purpose to go on a hunting expedition for my next holiday, and this purpose forms a complex synthesis and sets going a whole series of plans and actions all intended to give effect to the purpose. Thus in purpose the future as an object in my mind becomes operative in the present and sets going and controls a long train of acts leading up to the execution of the purpose. The conscious purpose, the end as deliberately envisaged and intended, falls, of course, within the conscious inner area of Mind; but numerous subsidiary elements in the plan would operate subconsciously.

It will be noticed that purpose or purposive activity involves much more than merely the influence of the future on the present. Purpose is the most complete proof of the freedom and creative power of the mind in respect of its material and other conditions, of its power to create its own conditions and to bring about its own situations for its own free activities.

My purposive action is action which I have myself planned, which is not impressed on me or dictated to me by external necessity, and for the performance of which I take my own self-chosen measures. Through purpose the mind becomes at last master in its own house, with the power to carry out its own wishes and shape its own course, uninfluenced by the conditions of the environment.

Again, purposive activity is peculiarly holistic. Elements both of the actual past and of anticipated future experience are fused with the present experience into one individual act, which as a conscious object of the mind dominates the entire situation within the purview of the purpose or plan. It involves not only sensations and perceptions, but also concepts of a complex character, feelings and desires in respect of the end desired, and volitions in respect of the act intended; and all these elements are fused and blended into one unique purpose, which is then put into action or execution. Purpose is thus probably the highest, most complex manifestation of the free, creative, holistic activity of Mind.

Back safely on our own planet, the British astronaut Tim Peake also emphasized the supreme importance of having purposes in our lives; above all, they give us a sense of meaning, he said. He was speaking in Peterborough Cathedral in 2018 to accompany the Tim Peake’s Spacecraft exhibition, which displayed the Soyuz capsule that had brought him back safe and sound from the International Space Station in 2016. From it, Peake said, that famous distant view of the blue planet Earth – our home in space – had inspired in him a sense of wonder and a profound change of perspective on life. Not, he added, faith in the religious sense. However, he went on to say that his mind remained open to the idea that the universe may be the result of intelligent design.

‘What I do think is important,’ Peake continued, ‘is whether we feel we have a purpose. It doesn’t matter whether one believes in God or not; what matters is having a sense of purpose… our sense of purpose should be about how we lead our lives and our relationship with others. That’s what I believe in.’

It is because we are born for purpose that we are born to think.

Purposive thinking

But what actually happens when we do think in a deliberative way? It isn’t easy to find out by introspection, for the simple reason our minds cannot do two things at once. As C.S. Lewis pointed out:

You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself.

Of course the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity; but they are distinct and incompatible… But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look ‘inside ourselves’ and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it…

It is as if we know the two bookends of thinking but struggle to understand what comes in between them. For, as the American philosopher John Dewey writes in How We Think (2007 edition):

The two limits of every unit of thinking are a perplexed, troubled, or confused situation at the beginning, and a cleared up, unified, resolved situation at the close.

In a much-reprinted early book, Clear Thinking (1936), R.W. Jepson – a retired headteacher – provides us with what might be called a generic bridge between these two end points. It is a span resting on six arches:

Stage 1. Interest: the thinker becomes aware of the problem and their interest is aroused.

Stage 2. Attention: the problem is formulated and the relevant data collected and examined.

Stage 3. Suggestion: possible solutions occur.

Stage 4. Reasoning: the consequences of each suggested solution are worked out.

Stage 5. Conclusion: the most satisfactory solution is adopted.

Stage 6. Test: the adopted suggestion is submitted to trial.

1. Interest

In Stage 1, the thinker’s interest is aroused and comes fully alive; and that is an indispensable preliminary to all purposive thinking. Mere curiosity is not enough to stimulate constructive thought. For example, you may hear a strange sound which causes you a momentary curiosity, but your interest remains dormant. You may dismiss the occurrence from your mind as being of no consequence to you. In these circumstances no thinking follows, for it is only when interest ignites that sustained thinking occurs: interest is the fuel of the mind.

2. Attention

In Stage 2, the first step the thinker takes is to analyse the situation – to break it up into its constituent elements in order to separate those that do and those that do not present any difficulty. The various facts and conditions bearing upon the problem are collected, verified, sorted, arranged and examined, and their significance – singly or in groups – assessed in the light of previous judgments. Then the thinker proceeds as it were to crystallize the problem and to put it into words in the form of a question or, in the case of a complicated problem, of a series of questions.

So always ask yourself what is the exact point at issue. Try to put the fundamental question in as simple and definite terms as possible and to strip it of all other questions that are of secondary importance or merely confuse the issue. For it is essential to the success of the whole operation that the questions you are addressing should be framed as clearly, as definitely, and as precisely as possible.

Indeed, in many problems this may be the crucial stage for very often when we have got down to the heart of the problem and propounded the fundamental question which is causing perplexity, the solution will be reached without much difficulty. It is as if finding and defining the right question is 50 per cent of the solution, the key to the door. By contrast, asking yourself vague indeterminate questions will often get you nowhere.

Complex questions should therefore be avoided where possible. Again, in some problematic situations, the question may be framed for us and here it is essential that we should spend a little time pondering over the terms carefully and finding out exactly what is required.

When the preliminary ground has been cleared, very often the cause of a problem will disappear. Facts only acquire significance and importance relative to the question asked. Or, putting it another way, it is the question you frame that turns data into information. It is possible, however, that the significance of a fact does not appear until Stages 3 and 4, when a tentative solution or hypothesis may send the thinker back to Stage 2 for a fact they have overlooked, or even to search for evidence that was not then apparent.

Let me now sum up Stage 2, when your attention is fully focused on the problem. It can be called the analytic phase: the situation out of which the difficulty arises is broken up; the problem is isolated and formulated; the various facts and conditions bearing upon it are collected, verified, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE Understanding Judgment
• PART TWO Leading With Judgment
• Conclusion
• Index
• Copyright