Volume 1, Number 1
June 2015
C.
Stephen Byrum, PhD
I’m
starting a new blog to create larger interest and increased awareness around
the topic of good judgment—or maybe
the topic should be just good, solid “common sense.” There’s an old saying
about common sense being very uncommon, and my life experiences in education
and organizational consulting pretty much have made me a strong advocate of the
truth of the old saying.
It
seems to me that our country is fairly strong at what I would call skill set
training. We turn out an endless stream of great engineers and great MBAs, and
our technical and process training is superior in almost every regard. However,
we are not as strong at assessing, developing, coordinating, and improving judgment, so the fullest potential of
most skill sets falls behind what it could be. Many executives will fearfully
say that most of their organizational vulnerability does not come from
technology or process, but from human judgment.
I am intent on
bringing greater attention to good
judgment. I do not for a moment believe that good judgment is simply a reality that people are born with or
without. I also reject the idea that good
judgment falls into the category of “soft side stuff” that hardcore,
practically minded organizations and their leaders believe is “fluff” that they
do not have time to give attention. Our problem is that we have created these
wonderful, conceptual theories about realities such as judgment, but we have not coupled our theories with data analytics,
with measures. Edwards Demming, the great guru of modern organizational
transformation theory, taught us long ago that ideas without concrete measures
will have little value or use. I have always been an advocate of conceptual
theories, but I have also always been an advocate of measurement. Let’s talk
about good judgment, but let’s also
talk about measuring it. Anything that can be measured can be improved.
The
fact is that good judgment may be the
element of differentiation that makes or breaks an organization and its
processes. Most executives are not paid big bucks because of where they went to
school, who their parents are, or their good lucks. The best leaders “make the mark”
because of the quality, excellence, and timing of their judgments. The best executives are also gifted at finding people of
solid judgment to come and work for them.
In the
mid-1960s, I became fascinated by the work of a man named Robert S. Hartman. I
had never heard of Hartman, but have spent few days since not giving
consideration to some element of his work. He was first defined for me as the
“father figure” of modern axiology. I had also never heard of axiology.
Axiology
was explained to me as a division of the academic discipline of philosophy, not
psychology, although many practicing psychologists have been influenced by
Hartman’s work. Its primary objective is to understand human beings from the
point of view of their value systems. In other words, while there are many
factors that drive and motivate human beings, values are a powerful force—as is
the absence of values.
This
formative insight made all of the sense in the world to me. My older brothers
had taken me to Neyland Stadium in Knoxville to see the University of Tennessee
“Volunteers” play football. I have been a fan for life. The “values” of my
culture about sports, and football in particular, plus the added “value” of the
perspectives of my older brothers who I idolized had—without question—a
definitive impact on the way I chose to live my life. The same conclusion would
also apply to the formative instruction in “values” that were gained at the
church my parents took me to as a child.
“Values”
are a powerful agent for shaping and molding the directions of our lives. It is
not unusual, in fact, to work with organizations on a regular basis that
espouse a set of organizational “values” that are said to influence the
organization’s “culture” in a way that advances quality and excellence of work
environments and performance/product outcomes. When these organizational
“values” become measurable, they
don’t float off into the irrelevant world of platitudes and window dressing
where they fundamentally become useless decorations.
Today, the fact that almost any work that is
done in modern organizations is done with and through individuals and teams of
individuals makes it decisively important to understand as much about people as
we can in order to accomplish work at its highest level. Understandings about
values and judgments are critical to a full understanding of people. If we can
get skills sets and good judgment into
a mutually supportive alignment, the bar on what we can do is raised to very
high levels of greater potential. I have asserted the following equation for
many years: E = (CSS + CP + GI)J. The equation read: Excellent = Competent Skill Sets +
Competent Processes + Good Information exponentially
enhanced by Good Judgment. Take the equation along with you, and “chew on
it” in your next moment of reflective consideration. The more you think about
it, the more sense it makes.
Hartman,
however, did much, much more than simply extol the virtues of values. He
believed it was altogether too easy to simply think about values, feel deeply
about values in an emotional way, or—most importantly—to talk about values.
Anybody can talk about anything, but
talking doesn’t make it so. For Hartman,
values were ultimately manifested in judgments, decisions, and choices. He had
even begun, when I first came to study with him, an assessment instrument to
measure values in a way that a catalyst for assessing and improving judgment was created. I have spent
nearly 50 years advancing Hartman’s teachings, writing extensively about
Hartman, and developing applications of his assessment instrument. These
applications have included ways to improve workforce selection in hiring and
promotion, enhanced teambuilding, and all forms of organizational development
from leadership development to succession planning. We have even developed
special applications that relate to unique areas of concern such as wellness,
stress management, work/life balance, and safety. We have learned to approach
every levels of an organization from the most entry-level jobs to the executive
suite. Our wide variety of validation, correlation, and performance outcomes
studies has shown exceptional results.
In
these blog postings, which will appear within the first week of each new month,
I will talk about judgment, and try
to begin to show all what we have learned and continue to learn. I plan to
range deep and wide, and hope that a mechanism of dialogue will be developed. The
last thing the world may need is a new blog, but there is little question that
the world needs all the good judgment that
it can find. There is a massive amount of information to share, and a million
stories to tell. I will look forward to scattering these seeds, and will hope
they find fruitful lodging in your life and work.
What
we have tried to accomplish in this first blog is a first step in what can
become a sustained journey of inquiry and discovery. I am starting a
conversation which I hope will be continued and enhanced by your responses and
input. I have never seen myself as an “answer man,” but I do put strong
emphasis on attempts to ask and pursue the right questions. Questions about
understanding and improving good judgment
in almost any aspect of the modern world constitute “right questions.”
Book
Suggestion of the Month: Brian Grazer, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger
Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015.
Quote
of the Month: “Across
the last generation, we have made gigantic strides forward in technology, but
we are still using the same human resource tools that we used decades ago. What
you have here in the Hartman assessment is the next generation human resource tool.” -- Bob Worthington, former
Chief Strategy Officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee
Picture of the Month:
