By Stephen Dowdie
This article is part of a companion series to “Crisis Management: Seven Steps to Prepare Your Organizations,” which appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of West Virginia Executive magazine.
Imagine for a moment that you are given the task of completing a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. You are provided a box of puzzle pieces, but as you begin to sort through them you realize something is not right. You find four corner pieces and then a fifth and a sixth. You think, “What kind of jigaw puzzle has six corners?” Then you begin to study the designs on each piece. While they all appear to be of similar fall foliage scenes, some of the pieces simply do not fit among the others.
What you actually received is a box containing 3,000 pieces from three different 1,000-piece puzzles. You look around and find a picture for two of the puzzles, yet your only objective is to assemble the third puzzle, which is not pictured. Where do you begin?
The process of assembling the puzzle requires pragmatic judgment. There are many ways to achieve the final vision, and different people will complete the puzzle successfully through different, innovative paths. But gathering the right team members at the right time for the right puzzle can make a considerable difference in achieving success. This process is called pragmatic judgment.
Pragmagtic judgment aligns preparation with building knowledge, monitoring and adjusting as needed. Constructing expertise and social capital occurs well before the need for judgment or a crisis. It is the lifelong learning that creates the ability to develop intuition and achieve insights at critical moments in a leader’s life. Pragmatic judgment is knowing when to hold back and when to seize opportunities at the right time.
Preparing for Pragramtic Judgment
Preparation for making judgments evolves throughout a person’s lifetime. The process of judgment begins small—deciding things like what clothes to wear and what to eat. From these experiences, we gain an understanding of social norms, personal preferences and how we fit within circles of influence.
Thomas Aquinas suggested that human beings can calculate the value of information and knowledge by applying reason to piece together a montage of experiences to form a judgment. In a sense, every decision of our lives is the summation of past choices. Many of these judgments occur without conscious thought because we employ judgment every day. Only through conscious thought can we construct an understanding that considers our effectiveness and ability to adapt to new situations.
Preparation involves gathering information asynchronously, moving forward or looping back in the process to make sense of a situation. Placing value on knowledge and aligning it within the context of a more comprehensive view allows us to project possible outcomes. This is pragmatic judgment. Judgment informs decisions through an internal process of valuation in which knowledge is assigned discrete values while that which is not assigned value is discarded or set aside for further examination.
Tools for Pragmatic Judgment
Building knowledge and social networks take considerable time and effort. Sound executives sense, cultivate and collect talent along their journey by developing relationships that are leveraged judiciously at crucial moments like a crisis. Executive leaders develop in-depth knowledge and understanding of their organizations. Deep knowledge provides a sense of how and where an organization can stretch, grow and respond to a crisis or problem. In preparation, they provide opportunities for team members to demonstrate capabilities beyond the day-to-day decisions. Not only are executive leaders building knowledge and social capital for themselves, but they are also investing in their teams and building trust and loyalty.
How to Use Pragmatic Judgment
Monitoring requires viewing a situation from a broader perspective, allowing the executive to discern opinion from rational fact. Through an understanding of cultures, practices and language, the executive can perceive both the immediate problem and how it fits within the mosaic of the entire world view. We must face the realities of the condition or crisis. Pragmatic judgment requires the executive leader to refrain from thinking, speaking or acting in ways that are contrary to fact. Within the constructs of pragmatism, imagination is employed to rearrange knowledge and information to gain insights or spark intuition. John Dewey describes this as the imagination that is freed, through intelligent means, to experience in mind new and more complex ends by looking forward. Creating multiple constructs in mind allows us to envision the potential outcomes for both the participants and the stakeholders.
In her book The Power of Framing, Gail Fairhurst suggests we cannot control events, but leaders can control the context in which the events are viewed. Presenting a solution to be implemented, the leader must provide meaning and sense-making for each group, considering the stakeholder and those involved. The decision must be framed to address what most concerns participants and stakeholders. Therefore, the leader employs various discourses of language and action that speak directly to those concerns, holding to the facts that help implementation fit within the constructed world view of each group.
Pragmatic judgment recognizes that situations change, new information is revealed and plans will require adjustment. Executives must guide, advise and mentor participants through the process of change. Further information may lead to reframing the problem and solution. The leader continually scans for missteps that place the plan in jeopardy. Be prepared to admit mistakes in judgment and be willing to loop back to find alternate solutions throughout the execution phase of the project.
The End Results of Pragmatic Judgment
It is only when all the pieces of the puzzle come together that we see a coherent picture that creates understanding for everyone. Pragmatic judgment is not linear; instead, it is messy. There is continuous overlap and loopback as we place each of the pieces of the puzzle into their proper place to gain understanding. Understanding, for the executive, is achieved through the imagining of various arrangements of the puzzle pieces until he or she has a clear picture of how the possible decisions may impact the whole.
Each part of the puzzle has its intrinsic value. As with the puzzle example, problems in life come with extra pieces that may or may not contribute to the solution. It is the role of the leader to discern which parts of the puzzle are relevant. Leaders employ judgment by assigning value to each element of the problem and determine relevance and contribution. The leader sets aside those pieces that in their experience have little or no value to the current issue. The remaining pieces of the puzzle are then arranged over and over, through imagination, to determine the impact on stakeholders and participants to create the final image.
About the Author
Stephen Dowdie is director of executive service for the Florida National Guard and a retired lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Army National Guard. He received his master’s degree in management from Catholic University and is currently a doctoral student at University of Charleston in the executive leadership program. The father of two grown children, he resides in St. Augustine, FL, with his wife of 33 years and their two dogs.
