Coaching is characterised as a judgement and decision making process. Practitioners and indeed most professionals who work in human performance are de facto coaches of humans. As such, the quest that unites coaches in different sports and practitioners across disciplines is to develop our professional judgement and our ability to make better choices and decisions over time. There is no endpoint to this journey and so the need to continually hone our judgement and decision making applies irrespective of what stage we are might be at in our career. That said, the question of how we best develop these skills for practitioners at the start of their career versus catering for these aspects in continuing professional development thereafter will likely require different solutions.
CONTEXT MATTERS…
With time and experience coaches and practitioners develop their expertise and understanding of the space they are operating in. Professional judgement is a combination of both these elements. Dealing with ambiguity, uncertainty and incomplete information place a high demand on professional judgement to inform our choices and actions.
Professional judgement is highly context-dependent. Situational factors including the specifics of the scenario, the conditions and constraints of the situation and the individuals concerned will all have a major bearing on what options are available and what the best course of action might be in that particular instance. As such, professional judgement and decision-making do not lend themselves to textbook learning. Whilst observation can be helpful to gain some appreciation, practically these abilities must be developed through hands-on experiential learning with live humans.
PERCEPTION, EXPERTISE AND JUDGEMENT IN DECISION-MAKING…
The role of technology and data has somewhat overshadowed the contribution of professional development in decision making over the recent period. However, the ability to measure everything that matters in the human performance realm will likely always be incomplete. Simple systems lend themselves to data-driven or algorithm-based decision making. Complex systems - particularly complex adaptative biological systems with a mind attached - present much more of an intractable problem.
Dealing with complexity and navigating uncertainty are integral to our work with performers and our interactions with colleagues. Regardless of the circumstances we are inevitably operating with incomplete information.
Making the right judgement in context requires that we are able to evaluate the situation and connect the dots based on the information available. There is equally a need to read the human in front of us. Professional judgement thus encompasses not only cognitive abilities but also emotional intelligence, as it relates both to ourselves and others. Whilst access to relevant data might help to narrow the selection of potential options, the rest is contingent upon our perception and judgement.
Within the human performance realm our expertise and judgement as practitioners thus remain critical to making good choices and well informed decisions in context. One of the rare examples of a framework that emphasises the role of judgement in coaching expertise and practice is the professional judgement and decision making model first proposed by Abraham and Collins.
WHAT GUIDES OUR JUDGEMENTS
Our reasoning and decision making processes differ somewhat according to the circumstances. Decisions in the moment tend to be guided by heuristics or general rules of thumb. Heuristics represent a default position or general guideline that we can revert to when in doubt or when required to make a decision under extreme time pressure. Heuristics are thus a type of decision-making algorithm. A rule of thumb is by definition imperfect, however - in aggregate it might steer us right more often than not, but relying on heuristics alone will mean that we will still get it wrong in many instances.
An alternative that might allow us to reduce such errors is to consider things more deeply, assuming that the circumstances allow us the time to do so. Essentially this means deliberating on the decision, considering the problem from different perspectives and weighing up each of the available options in turn. This process of deliberation is of course more time-intensive as well as more cognitively demanding, hence it is described as thinking slow. It should be noted that this type of slow and deliberate reasoning can also be prone to cognitive distortions and biases. For instance, motivated reasoning describes the tendency to craft a case or a narrative to support our preferred position, so that we essentially reverse engineer our reasoning process to fit our preferred option going in.
Intuition can help to inform decisions in the moment as well as more deliberate decisions based on deeper consideration. Our intuitive judgement is association-based; hence we develop intuition with exposure to relevant and related experiences. Our intuition is also based on cues that we pick up on somewhat unconsciously, so that we know something intuitively without necessarily being able to articulate why.
Practically, coaches and practitioners require the ability to both think fast and think slow. Our experiential learning as coaches and practitioners must be geared to acquiring both these general rules of thumb as well as developing strategies and cognitive abilities for more deliberate decision making. Developing our intuition is another facet of the experiential knowledge to be acrued over time.
AVOIDING PITFALLS AND GETTING BETTER OVER TIME..
As noted, heuristics are imperfect and our subjective judgements are prone to cognitive distortions and bias. Our intuition is also prone to systematic errors. So how do we make our snap decisions less imperfect and take steps to mitigate the effects of bias on our reasoning and judgements when we need to think fast?
With growing experiential knowledge we can refine the heuristics that we employ, so that they become more sophisticated over time. How we use these rules of thumb also has scope to evolve. With time our relationship with uncertainty will hopefully develop, so that we become more comfortable and amenable to dealing with uncertainty in our decision making. Front-line experience should also teach us to become more open to considering the possibility that our initial snap judgements might be wrong. Both of these things are of course contingent on remaining grounded in reality and possessing humility.
Given that intuition is based on associations with previous experiences, one strategy to mitigate the risk of being steered wrong by our intuitive judgements is to recognise that when we encounter a scenario which appears similar to what we have seen in the past it is however not the same. This is a crucial and fundamental distinction: no two situations are identical. Being equally attuned to not only the similarities but also the unique features of the situation at hand is thus helpful to temper the level of certainty we have in our automatic judgements.
We can also strive to create conditions that are most conducive to making good decisions. A good first step is to ensure we make best use of the available time. Part of this is exercising the discipline to consider the problem from different perspectives before we leap to any conclusion. To that end we should also aim to keep viable options in play as long as possible, rather than latching onto to a preferred option early on and allowing that to bias our reasoning process from that point onward.
Where applicable data are available they can also serve to help anchor and calibrate our subjective judgements. A good example is the use of metrics from game play to help guide our evaluation of a player’s performance following a game. When making assessments it similarly makes sense to do this more than once; if our first two judgements are not too far apart we can take the average, otherwise we might make a third attempt and take the average of the two that have the closest agreement.
Finally, a sound strategy to account for uncertainty and factor it into our judgements is to employ probability-based assessments. Essentially this means prompting ourselves to assign a value to our level of confidence or degree of certainty in our prediction. For instance, I might assign an 85% degree of confidence or level of certainty in my evaluation. Once again, this helps us to consider our level of certainty and more importantly acknowledge the possibility that we might be wrong.
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS…
Whatever we are using as the basis of our judgements and decisions, a robust process is required to increase the odds of success in the short-term. By extension, if we are to improve over time then clearly this begins with having some means to review our decisions and a process for reflecting on the reasoning process behind our judgements. When engaging in after action reviews we can employ tools of varying sophistication, from simply keeping a decision journal to employing decision support systems that capture relevant data. In either case the intention is to provide an objective record in our attempt to be systematic in evaluating both our judgements and our process.
Clearly a major part of the after action review is to objectively evaluate the decision or judgement made, based on the information that was available to us at the time. After the event we obviously have the time to consider decisions and judgements made in the moment under time pressure. Our aim in doing so is to help refine our heuristics or intuitive judgements so that our ability to think fast improves over time.
For more deliberate decisions, assigning a number to our level of confidence in the judgement or prediction ahead of time allows us to objectively evaluate these elements in greater detail. For instance, if we assigned an 85% level of confidence to our judgement and we turned out to be right, we would score higher than if we made the same judgement but only had a 60% level of confidence.
Beyond evaluating our predictions against the outcome, to improve our judgements over time it is equally vital that we interrogate our reasoning process. Walking through each step in the logic behind our decision will allow us to identify flaws in our reasoning and highlight unsupported leaps in our logic. Furthermore a systematic review process can provide insights into recurring flaws in our thinking or highlight biases we might be prone to, particularly when the debrief involves input from others.
IN CLOSING…
Our ability to be effective is contingent upon making the right choices and taking the appropriate actions according the unique demands of the scenarios we encounter in our day to day practice. The critical role of context and the human element place huge emphasis on professional judgement for those of us in the human performance realm. Developing these capabilities over time thus represents one of the most critical aspects of our continuing professional development as practitioners, particularly when we serve in a leadership role.
There are some meta-abilities (notably meta-cognition) that allow us to be aware of the reason processes behind our judgements and thus permit us to learn from our experiences over time. Having some awareness of how we arrive at judgements and decisions in difference scenarios, including under time pressure, is important to develop these respective abilities.
Beyond awareness, adopting some sort of regular process to allow us to be systematic in evaluating our decision-making process in an important part of our strategy to improve our judgement over time. Regularly engaging outside assistance in this endeavour is similarly critical to provide some objectivity and avoiding developing blind spots.
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