Tips for Development

• Consider all aspects in the complexity of issues involved in making the judgement
• The degree of ambiguity in the objectives to be achieved
• The measurability of the performance to be controlled
• The extent to which the outcomes of activities are known
• The degree to which the activity is repetitive
• Draw on your previous experience and knowledge of issues
• Talk to other people within the organisation to learn from their experiences
• Learn from experiences, making a mental or written note of the key learning points, in order that you may draw on these experiences in the future
• Think "outside the box" to create ingenious alternatives for consideration
• Bias can influence judgement and therefore you should aim to eliminate any bias from your judgement
• A strategy for reducing bias should include the following:
• Be aware of the possibility of bias
• Identify the source and the direction of the bias
• Feedback and training are valuable tools for discussing and eliminating future bias
  

Types of Judgement

Judgement has three aspects – for simplicity, three kinds of judgement – value judgement, reality judgement and action judgement.  The first two are the more fundamental and important.  Action judgement is only called for by the interaction of value judgement and reality judgement.
 

The Action Judgement

Action judgement may be called ingenuity – a mental ability for uncoupling the elements of a familiar idea and recombining them in a new way.  The action judgement is involved in answering any question of the form, "What shall I do about it?" when ‘it’ has been defined by judgements of reality and value.

The maker of action judgements must be ingenious, persistent and bold.

The Reality Judgement

One of the gifts needed by those who make reality judgements is to know where to stop: to sense the point beyond which the best estimate of trends is not worth making.  The maker of reality judgements needs detachment, objectivity balance, a clear head to follow the complex permutations of the possible and practicable; a stout heart, to give as much reality to the unwelcome as to the welcome.

The maker of reality judgements must be honest, clear-sighted and brave.  Above all, he needs a ready sense for those aspects of the situation which are most relevant.

The Value Judgement

If we were not concerned with values which we wanted to realize and preserve, we should have no interest in the situation and no incentive to action.  The basic difficulty in all complex decisions is to reconcile the conflicting values involved.

In approaching their decisions, people usually find the appropriate standards of value which relate to their own past standards or from those current in their industry.  Thus in making value judgements, we are seldom conscious of doing more than apply a rule.

In making a value judgement you should be aware of your own values, taking steps to minimize any bias when making judgements.