Judgment Is a Work in Progress

I have spent much of my career in rooms where people were expected to have a point of view.

That is usually why we were there. Someone needed to understand the problem, recommend a direction or make a decision. Confidence mattered. The ability to explain what we believed and why helped others move forward.

But confidence can create its own trap.

Once we have argued for a position, changing our mind can feel like admitting that our earlier judgment was poor. The more senior the person, the more public the commitment and the more difficult reconsideration can become.

I have felt this myself. I have entered conversations prepared to listen, only to discover that I was really waiting for the other person to stop talking so I could explain why I was right.

For years, I described the difference as arguing versus debating. Arguing meant defending one point of view. Debate required being able to defend the position opposite our own. I called the first a pixel perspective and the second a panoramic one.

The language may have been too neat, but the distinction still matters to me.

Can I explain the position of someone I disagree with in a way they would recognize as fair? Can I see what they see, even if I reach a different conclusion? What would I need to learn before I could say that my judgment had been tested rather than merely repeated?

Daniel Kahneman and his collaborators described this as being actively open-minded. It is not simply a willingness to hear another opinion. It is the deliberate search for information that might contradict what we already believe, followed by the more difficult work of weighing that information honestly.

That word, actively, changes the obligation.

Most of us would say we are open to new evidence. Far fewer of us design our work so that unwelcome evidence can reach us and still carry weight.

Organizations often invite people to speak candidly after a direction has already been announced, resources have been committed and leaders have attached their credibility to the outcome. People may technically be permitted to disagree, but they understand the difference between being allowed to speak and being safe to influence what happens next.

What looks like stubbornness at the top can also be produced by the system around the leader. Presentations are prepared to demonstrate progress. Problems are translated into implementation issues. Contradictory experiences are treated as isolated exceptions. By the time reality reaches the decision maker, it may have been cleaned up enough to leave the original judgment undisturbed.

I have tried different ways of resisting that tendency in my own work.

At times, I arranged regular conversations with people whose views differed from mine. The purpose was not to bring them around. It was to understand what they were seeing that I was not. I attended gatherings outside my profession and read far beyond design, technology and business. Some of the ideas that changed my work came from psychology, music, history, medicine and conversations with people whose titles suggested little about what they actually knew.

None of this made me consistently open-minded. I could still become attached to an idea, impatient with an argument or convinced that I understood more than I did.

Perhaps that is why I no longer think of open-mindedness as a personal quality we either possess or lack. It is a practice, and one that becomes more difficult when the stakes are high.

Strategy still requires choice. Leadership still requires commitment. Teams cannot work effectively if every decision is permanently provisional or if the direction changes whenever someone raises a concern.

But commitment should not require us to protect a choice from reality.

A judgment can be responsible and still incomplete. It can be the best conclusion available to us at a particular moment while remaining open to evidence that the conditions have changed, an assumption was wrong or someone closer to the work can see what leadership cannot.

The question is not whether we should trust our judgment. We have to. The question is what we put in place so that trust does not become immunity from correction.

What would cause us to look again? Whose perspective might challenge the story we are telling ourselves? Have we made it possible for that person to be heard before the cost of being wrong becomes too great?

Changing our minds is not always evidence that our earlier judgment failed. Sometimes it is evidence that judgment is still working.

Continue the inquiry