John Adair - The Art of Judgment: 10 Steps to Becoming a More Effective Decision-Maker

Contents

What then is Time? If nobody asks me I know; but if
I wanted to explain it to someone that should ask me,
plainly I do not know.

ST AUGUSTINE

Much the same could be said about judgment. Looking back, I acted against my better judgment in marrying him, a friend who has recently separated from her husband remarked to me yesterday. Like most people, I knew well enough what she meant by judgment. But ask me to explain it let alone teach it and I struggle. Nor am I alone in this respect. Which may account for the fact that previous attempts to write a book on the art of judgment can be numbered on the fingers of one hand.

Yet great importance is commonly attributed to the quality of having good judgment in a person, and especially in a leader. Reason and calm judgment, the qualities especially belonging to a leader, wrote the Roman historian Tacitus.

In one very large opinion poll before an American presidential election, three-quarters of the voters of all parties rated sound judgment the top desirable quality, ranking it as more important than high ethical standards, compassion, frankness, experience, willingness to compromise and party loyalty. But in the run-up to elections anywhere in the world, this key quality is seldom addressed, perhaps not least because of the difficulty in defining it.

The way ahead

Achieving a dictionary-like definition of judgment is far less important than forming a clear idea of the concept. Therefore, Part One of this book is devoted to understanding judgment as a process a universal one through which we take our minds when, looking ahead, we experience real difficulty in deciding which way to go.

It is perhaps possible for academics to sit on the fence forever about many questions, endlessly debating the possible answers, but leadership exists in the world of time and chance: it is about action. That reality is the theme of Part Two. Amid conditions of uncertainty, complexity and turbulence, how can leaders both make the right decisions and take their people with them on the journey?

Each chapter focuses on a subject highly relevant to the art of judgment and does so in a practical way. For the purpose of this book is to give you opportunities ten of them in all to improve your own powers of judgment. It is worth remembering, too, that the best judges are generally those who are aware how much human beings including themselves are predisposed to misjudgment.

How to use this book

In order to stimulate your thinking beyond the compass of these ten chapters, at the end of each one I summarize the discussion in some simple key points. These are not merely summaries, however, for sometimes new thoughts are born in them.

Some checklists are also included. Again, they are not of the rather mundane type that serve to remind you if you have packed everything before going on holiday. They are designed to help you to relate the ideas of this book to your own situation: your particular needs, problems and opportunities. For we learn only when the sparks jump to and fro between ideas and experience, theory and practice:

As it is when connections occur between these two poles the general and the actual that learning occurs, you need both. The various case studies and examples in this book are designed to be stepping stones to that end:

Equally, the process must work in reverse. Your practical knowledge, gleaned from both observation of actual leaders and your own practical experience, must be brought to bear in a constructively critical way on the ideas presented in this book. The more time and thought you invest in reflecting on these key points and in answering these checklists, the more fruitful you will find the exercise. And so it takes both experience and reflection to make meaningful progress in the art of judgment. The journey is a long one lifelong, in fact so I can only guide you for part of the way and bring you to the point where you can face with confidence the judgment calls that lie ahead in the adventure that is your life. Then, as Marcel Proust in effect says, it will be all up to you:

We do not receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us .

Note

Quoted in Renshon, Stanley A. Appraising Good Judgment Before It Matters in Good Judgment in Foreign Policy: Th eory and Application, Renshon, Stanley A. and Larson, Deborah Welch eds. New York: Rowman & Littlefi eld, 2003.

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 hasnt 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 (18701950), 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.