00:00:00: Introduction
00:00:54: Categorising judgement
00:01:50: Judgement and decision-making
00:05:25: Stages of the judgement process
00:08:43: Establishing a trusted source
00:13:21: Build on your own strengths and weaknesses
00:16:54: Famous examples of bad judgement
00:18:11: The importance of listening
00:19:24: Andrew’s example of judgement
00:22:33: Common watch-outs
00:27:16: Something surprising
00:29:22: Final thoughts
Sarah Ellis: Hi, my name’s Sarah, and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. This week is one of our Ask the Expert episodes, and you’ll hear me in conversation with Sir Andrew Likierman talking about judgement. I always think judgement is a fascinating topic. Is it a skill; is it a quality; how do we get better at it? It can sometimes feel a bit elusive. How do you get better at reading the room, the Zoom, the Teams meeting, whatever it might be? And I think Andrew has some really practical reflections and ideas that I hope you’re all going to find useful. So, I hope you enjoy listening, and I’ll be back at the end to say bye.
Andrew, thank you so much for joining us on the Squiggly Careers podcast. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.
Andrew Likierman: Well, thanks so much for inviting me.
Sarah Ellis: And we’re going to dive straight into this idea of judgement, because I think it is an elusive behaviour. So, from all of the work and the research you’ve done, is it a quality, is it a skill; what’s our starting point when we think about judgement?
Andrew Likierman: Well, it’s a combination of a quality and a skill, if I can put it that way. It’s not easily categorizable. And that’s exactly why I wrote this book, because I thought to myself, “Here’s something that’s really important, and people value and they say they want, and yet we don’t quite know what it is”. So, that’s the basis of the work. So, to answer your question, is it a quality or a skill, it’s a bit of both. It’s a quality because it’s something which we as individuals have, which combine number of factors within ourselves that we have to use when exercising it. And so, is it a skill as well? The answer is it’s a skill as well because it’s something we can develop, and we can develop it in order to bring out the qualities that we’ve got in ourselves.
Sarah Ellis: One of the things that I got to very quickly when I was reading your book, but also just thinking about this for myself, was the connection between judgement and then choices and decision-making. Because if I think about the why, we often connect more to why’s than what, like, “Well, why do I want to improve my judgement?” typically, or certainly my go-to was, “Because I want to make better decisions, I want to make good choices”, maybe for my career, like, “Where do I want to go next, what roles do I want to do?” or just in my day-to-day, “Should I invest more in project A or in project B?” So, could you talk to us a bit about the relationship between judgement and choices or decision-making?
Andrew Likierman: Decisions are things we make every day, all the time, big and small. We don’t think much about them, not much goes into them necessarily in terms of thought and reflection. So, decisions can be quite straightforward based on sets of variables we already know about. Judgements tend to be more complicated, precisely because they bring in, as I said before, these qualities that we have in ourselves. And we bring them in because it’s more complicated than simply deciding, “Are we going to Starbucks or Costa today?” We need to understand what it is that lies behind what we’re about to make a judgement about.
So, we talk, for example, about having judgement but we don’t talk about having decision-making. That indicates that it is a quality. But also, we know that complex areas of decision-making go into judgement. So, there is a link between the two, but judgement takes it to a different kind of level than we talk about in terms of decisions.
Sarah Ellis: So, it might be people spotting those moments where there’s more complexity, there’s perhaps more factors involved. I once worked in a corporate affairs team and those people often have very good judgement, or certainly that was that was my experience. And what I always thought they were so good at is they could see all the shades of grey and they would recognise when you almost needed to press pause so that you could almost factor in judgement rather than, “Well, let’s make a decision too fast, let’s make a choice”, because maybe there’s lots of people involved, maybe it’s something that you’ve not done before, maybe there are more unknowns. So, are those some of the things that people could perhaps look out for where it’s like, “Actually, I’m just going to think a bit more about my own judgement in this moment”?
Andrew Likierman: Yes. So, look, the more complex something is, the less you’ve done it before, the more it matters, the more we need judgement. So, judgement comes for those things which are really significant, either in the world of work or at home. Because this isn’t something which we just use, of course, in terms of our working lives. We also need it at home, you know, for health, for finances, for our relationships, and so on. So, this quality is something which is really significant in terms of the big things that matter to us in our lives.
Sarah Ellis: And you do describe in the book improving our judgement as a process, so as a process to follow. And I think when something’s quite potentially complicated, that’s always reassuring. I always like freedom within a framework. A bit of a framework gives you a sense of where to start, where you might go next. And though your framework has lots of different aspects in it, the point that you make is it’s always better to at least have done part of the process than to have done none of the process. So, if people were starting out on judgement, perhaps it’s something they’ve not really thought about before or they are just trying to get better at for the first time, where would you recommend they start in that process?
Andrew Likierman: All right, now you mentioned that it’s a process, and that, I think, is a great start, because if one simply approaches something saying, “Well, I’ve got to make this difficult choice, how am I going to go about it? Well, I don’t know, there’s all these factors swimming around in my mind”. So, I would argue if it’s going to be so important, you actually do need to go through some kind of process here. You said also it’s better perhaps to do any of these than none of them. So, I’m not suggesting that you have to go through all this process every time, systematically. But I am suggesting that any kind of attempt to pin things down is going to be better than simply hoping for the best.
What I’ve described in my book is a process which has a number of stages. The first is starting off with what you know already about something, and it has to be relevant. So, not just knowing a lot of stuff, it’s also about being relevant to what you’re going to make a judgement about. Number two is the question of who and what you trust, because you’ve got information coming in from people, from the web, from other sources and so on, and the question here is, “Okay, so do you trust these sources, because you may simply otherwise find the stuff is misleading?” Number three is how aware you are of what’s going on. When you make a choice, there’s all sorts of issues surrounding that. I mean, for example, are you aware of your emotions at that time? Are you aware of the vibe in the room of what’s going on at that time? It makes a difficult choice. So, awareness is number three.
Number four is our feelings and our beliefs. This is what we feel about something. We all approach things with feelings, we’re biased in some cases, we have emotions. We have all sorts of things which act as filters to the information that’s coming in. Now, we need to be aware of those and to make sure that we understand our feelings and beliefs in order to make sure we’re in a good position to make a choice. I mean being angry, being afraid, these are not good moments, as it were, to make a choice, carefully considered. Then we come to the choice itself. Now, that actually is a process too. That’s an essential part of actually deciding, “Do we do this or do we do that?” And we’ve all sat in meetings where one person has dominated and other people didn’t have a voice, perhaps having been told, “You can either do this or this”, when actually there are perhaps more choices. The process of choice is itself important.
Then finally, there’s a question of can you actually deliver it, because it’s great having an idea and a theory but you’ve got to deliver it in practice. So, there are the elements of the judgement process that I’m suggesting we should consider. And especially if we have time to consider it and it’s a big decision in our lives, I would argue actually what you want to do is stack the cards in your favour and that’s what this process would do.
Sarah Ellis: You know your point around people you can trust, because I found that really interesting, how do we know whether we can trust somebody or not? Because often in work, now people are in big cross-functional teams, you might not know somebody that well. How do people go about navigating that?
Andrew Likierman: If you meet somebody new and you’re going to rely on them, you don’t automatically assume, presumably, that it’s going to be great and you can definitely trust them. What you do is you perhaps look at them and observe what they do, observe the way they say things. You begin to understand a bit about who they are as a person, and then you perhaps look at their track record and say, “Well, can you give evidence?” in the nicest way, of course. You say, “Well, what have you done before?” and you kind of get a feel about whether that fits. You might then go and ask other people about them, if it’s really important and you need a kind of reference, informal, formal, whatever it is, to see how other people have interacted with them. So, there’s quite a lot of ways in which before you put your trust in somebody, you can check it out. Now, nothing is guaranteed, but simply assuming you can trust people we know is often not a good idea.
Sarah Ellis: And you describe this process of reading the room or, as it often will be for lots of people now, reading the Teams meeting or the Zoom meeting. I personally do find it harder at a distance to kind of read how people are feeling, you perhaps see lots less of people’s body language, people might have cameras turned off. How can you start practising doing that, almost like I would describe as situational awareness and understanding different people, particularly sometimes maybe what’s not being said, in a way when everybody might be virtual and you might actually have never met that person?
Andrew Likierman: Well, look, we know that being remote is more difficult in terms of reading people, in terms of understanding them, in really getting a feel for who they are as individuals. I mean, being together in a room with someone is a very different kind of experience, exactly as you said. So, it’s a challenge. There’s no question about that. And yet, again, once you’re aware of the fact that you need to understand more about them, particularly if you’re going to have any kind of relationship with them of dependence, some kind or other, you need to actually work at that. So, on camera, you need to look at them, look at their expressions, look at the way they respond; but also listen very carefully to what they say and how they say it, because those are going to give you the clues. What are they not saying? Are they moving too swiftly across something? Are they focusing too much on one aspect of what you’ve asked?
Now, in some cases, this is no different to being in the room, because let’s say, for example, somebody is selling a project to you and they want to tell you it’s a great project and you ought to support it, and so on. And on screen, just like in person, you think to yourself, “Wait a minute, this person’s selling this really hard. Have they thought about the alternatives?” and so on. So, not everything is necessarily difficult or different online. We can have certain areas in which we can do the same kinds of things to make sure we understand who they are and what’s happening.
Sarah Ellis: I was almost thinking you could probably, very practically, ask some questions that would help with some of what you’ve just described. So, if you’ve only heard somebody talk about the good stuff to do with the project, like what’s going well, I would think, well there’s no way there’s only things that are going well in any project. So, you could ask, in an encouraging and in a supportive way, “What’s on your worry list at the moment, or what do you think might get in the way of the delivery of this project?” to try and sort of encourage people to share that other side, if you’ve not heard it.
Andrew Likierman: Look, you’re absolutely right, and if it’s a one-to-one, you can do that. More difficult when you’re in a meeting, you can’t start having an agenda of your own, starting to ask other kinds of questions, and it’s maybe a bit late by the time you get to the end, as it were, when you won’t any longer have the chance to have those follow-up questions.
Sarah Ellis: I also think you can learn a bit from looking at the people across your organisation who you do think role-model good judgement. Back to your point about track record, I think one of the ways that I improved my judgement was from working with people who had very good judgement. And almost the nature of their roles meant that actually, it was a really critical part of what they did, and they really prioritised building relationships, almost before they need them. So, they were very good at mapping, “Well, who might I need to know?” so that when the time comes to make a judgement, which I might need to make quickly if it’s sort of a bit more of a crisis mode, actually I don’t want to be building the relationship in that moment, I want to be building the relationship before the moment. And initially, I remember seeing that and thinking, “Oh, that’s a bit inefficient. I don’t need to go and talk to that person”, because it’s not on the agenda, it’s not going to help me deliver what’s on my to-do list today. And then you start to realise it’s actually really strategically done, because then something big would go wrong or we’d have a big issue or something was going to be in the papers, and suddenly you can phone that person up.
So, that was one of the other things that I think I learned, was the kind of building relationships before the moment you need them perhaps. Any others that really stand out for you, from talking to lots of different people and then summarising them as part of the book?
Andrew Likierman: Well, the key thing here is not that there’s one which is more important than another one, but you get the right ones for you. And this starts then with understanding your relative strengths and weaknesses, what are you really good at; what are you not so good at? And perhaps then focusing on the things you’re not so good at and saying, “What can I do specifically to help me get better at those things?” But also, I think one should build on one’s strengths, because these are things that help one make really good judgements, and those are the things one should develop. Perhaps identifying your own personal weaknesses, the things that you feel, “I’m not so good at this, I’m not so good at perhaps being aware of what’s going on. Perhaps I tend to get carried away by emotions when I do something”. Now, if that’s so, then these are perhaps the things you should address yourself. So, I don’t think there’s anything in general here, it’s all very personal.
Sarah Ellis: I think what’s really nice about that though is you’re almost starting to create your own playbook for good judgement in describing the different parts of your framework. There were parts where I was thinking, “Oh, okay, well, I naturally do that. That’s a natural talent I’ve got”. But then, you also look at those areas where you think, “Oh, okay, well I’m naturally optimistic. Now, that’s a good thing a lot of the time”, but then, that might mean that you are less open to bad news, that you don’t want to see when numbers are going in the wrong direction for a few months in a row. And so, I think almost taking that self-awareness and then thinking, “Well, how could that then get in the way of good judgement?” And even practically, I was starting to think you could almost map those two areas and sort of go, “Well, this is where I’ll be at my best, these are my watch-outs”.
Andrew Likierman: Definitely. And you can look at yourself and say, “Look, I’m naturally optimistic”, or, “I’m naturally pessimistic”, and as long as you understand that, you don’t have to change yourself. But you have to be aware of that when you go in to make a choice. And we can’t necessarily do everything ourselves, so that’s why we work with other people. And finding other people who perhaps have got the strengths that we haven’t got in certain areas is another important way to improve the judgement that you make.
Sarah Ellis: And so, reading the book, some of the examples are quite famous that people will have heard of before, of bad judgement, where things have gone wrong. Can we learn from those people, or do we just think, “Well thank goodness that wasn’t me”?
Andrew Likierman: Very often in the press, we see some famous figure, and there are many of them, who say, “It was an error of judgement”, if they’ve been found out to be in the wrong position or having done the wrong thing. And looking at that, one of the things that very often comes up is overconfidence. Overconfidence, especially for famous people who say it was an error of judgement as they resign, is the cause often of their problems, because they then think, “Well, I’m terrific, I don’t need to listen to anybody anymore. I’m really good at what I do”, and that’s the sign that judgement starts to go down. So, if we think that actually, we kind of know it all and we don’t need to learn anymore and we don’t need to listen to people, I would say that’s a really bad signal.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, Satya Nadella, who’s the CEO of Microsoft, he talks about, “The learn-it-all will always do better than the know-it-all”. And just, it’s interesting, the kind of topics that have come up today, we’ve actually talked about listening a lot. And I think leaders that listen are always the ones that you want to work with and work for. And actually, there’s an interesting article we’ll share as part of the show notes, that listening is often a skill that leaders overestimate their own capability in, because we think we’re listening but actually we’re waiting to speak, we think we already know the answer, we’re worried about the next meeting that we’ve got. So, that sort of humility and that listening, that feels like that goes kind of side-by-side with judgement.
Andrew Likierman: Well, look, all of us surely like to work for somebody who listens to what we say. It’s something we really appreciate. And similarly, if we’re in charge of other people, they’re going to appreciate the fact that we’re listening. Now, listening is one part of this, but you’re right to identify it as an important part, and it’s something all of us can do.
Sarah Ellis: So, thinking about yourself now and your own experiences, you do share a couple of examples in the book. Maybe you could share with our listeners a bit about you, maybe an example of a good judgement or a bad judgement, or a bit of both, and what you learnt from it as a result.
Andrew Likierman: Okay, well look, let me give you an answer.
Sarah Ellis: If you don’t mind!
Andrew Likierman: No, no, on the contrary. I mean, one of the things I’ve learnt is that I can learn, that actually it’s about learning. And one of the huge benefits of having done — I’ve had the fortune to do a number of different things in my life, is that I hope I’ve learnt from each of them. Years before Amazon started up, indeed before the internet, I started a business to provide books quickly to organisations who needed them quickly. And I thought to myself, “Here’s a gap in the market”. But at that stage, Amazon didn’t exist, the internet didn’t exist, it took three or four weeks often for books to arrive. And so, I thought, “Look, I can get things to people in a couple of days, and this will be a fantastic idea”. Well, it wasn’t, because it turned out that companies didn’t want to pay for this speed. And I thought it was a great idea, and I still think it was a great idea, and I don’t regret starting it. But then, after it was clear it wouldn’t work, I kept on for much too long trying to make it work.
So, if you like, I thought it was a good judgement, a risk worth taking to try this out. The bad judgement was not seeing quite quickly this wasn’t going to work, shutting it down and moving on.
Sarah Ellis: What do you think stopped you? Do you think it’s because you just loved the idea and you wanted it to work?
Andrew Likierman: Absolutely. There’s a great example of poor judgement based on my feelings and beliefs. The answer is, I felt I wanted to make it work, I had to make it work, my pride wouldn’t allow me to say, “Actually, this was a terrible idea”. Now look, I learned from that. It’s not in every case, but if you’ve decided that something is not going to work, you have then to look at yourself and say, “Is it simply my feelings here that’s keeping this thing going?” You take a wrong route, you go down the road and you think, “I think I should have turned left there, not right”. But nevertheless, you keep on going.
Sarah Ellis: You persevere!
Andrew Likierman: There you are, you see, there’s another example from everyday life.
Sarah Ellis: You could be mistaken for thinking, “Well, there’s lots of sunk costs there. I put loads of time and effort and I got that wrong”, and it doesn’t feel great, but you will have always learned something for next time. So, I do feel like you kind of iterate over time. And even when you make those judgements which, in hindsight, you do wish you’d done something different or you trusted the wrong person, you can at least then think, “Well, what did I learn from that? How can I be that bit smarter, that bit better for next time?
Andrew Likierman: Well, you’ve given an example of a sunk cost bias and I think we’re all liable to have that, aren’t we? We think to ourselves, “Well, we’ve put so much effort in, we’ve got to keep going”. But as I say, all these things potentially are learnable. And that, I hope, is a cheerful sign of what one can do with judgement, that one is not simply born with it or not, this is something that one can develop all the way through one’s life.
Sarah Ellis: And are there any other watch-outs or mistakes that you see people commonly make around judgement? I think feelings is one we’ve talked a bit about. Just watch out for your feelings getting in your way. Anything else for people to look out for?
Andrew Likierman: I come back to my original comment saying, “It’s all very personal”. So, I think one’s got to look out for things for oneself. Let’s say you just don’t have the experience. I mean you can get the experience, you can find out about things, and so on. If you’re not very aware of what’s going on, you can learn about that, you can check with other people about what’s going on. If you feel that the choices you’re being offered are not quite right, you can check on that, you can ask other people. So, I think it’s, again, being aware of what’s possible here that gives one the power, as it were, to make better judgements.
Sarah Ellis: It’s always an interesting one when you talk about instinct and gut feeling, because we know that that can be notoriously inaccurate. But I do also feel that if you notice you are feeling uncomfortable or unsure, that that might also be a signal or a sign to go and have another conversation or find out a bit more or slow down by 24 hours, because we know we need to think fast and slow. But often, I think people are like, “Oh, I’m not sure about this, but I’m not as senior as that person, so that person must be right”, just because they’re at a different level in the organisation or they’ve got a big job title. But often, in my experience, when people do spot something or see something that just doesn’t feel quite right, actually just sitting with that and perhaps having the confidence to just explore more, maybe get a few data points, have a few conversations, even if you do that and then you think, “Oh no, actually, it’s fine”, it’s better to do that due diligence than to not, because I haven’t done it a couple of times and always really regretted it.
Andrew Likierman: Intuition is something we all recognise is important. We have intuition, we use our intuition. Authorities differ hugely on this. We’ve got Danny Kahneman you mentioned, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. He actually thinks intuition is not a very good guide. Other people, Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, thinks it’s a great idea. All right. So, I would argue that intuition is actually important to us, but we have to be careful because intuition is actually the accumulated knowledge that we’ve got, all the things we know and also influenced by how we feel. So, for intuition, my guidance would be your intuition is a great guide as long as you’ve done something a number of times before. Because actually, intuition is then informed by that experience. If intuition is simply out of the blue, comes from nowhere, you’ve never done something before, then I would be quite cautious about using intuition.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah that’s a really good filter, also a really practical filter for people, how much of a beginner are you; have you done this lots of times before? If I think about a difficult situation we had over the past couple of years, I had done something a few times, we were managing a risk, I’d done something a few times but not enough actually to feel really confident in my own judgement. And that is where I did phone an old boss, who I knew would have done the thing that I was grappling with four or five times more than I had. And then, actually, it was really interesting to hear her perspective, because then I think that really helped me to develop my own judgement. So, that was just that filter of back to where we kind of started today’s conversation, that how much does it matter. That judgement in that moment actually really mattered to me. And so, if it hadn’t mattered as much, I probably could have been like, “Oh, I’ve got enough intuition here”, and those experiences are helpful. I was like, “Oh no, actually, this is really reputationally important. I do actually want to go and seek, from somebody I trust, an extra perspective”, and I think we got to a better judgement because of that.
Andrew Likierman: Well, you rightly point to the question, does it matter? Because of course, if it doesn’t matter, then really so what.
Sarah Ellis: Yeah, you can move on fast.
Andrew Likierman: But if it really does matter, then you ought to be quite careful about intuition. The other thing is you mentioned risk, and you’re right to mention risk, because the answer is we need to know how much risk we’re taking. We may decide we want to take risk and that’s fine, as long as we’re aware of the fact that we’re prepared to take a certain risk. Now, risk comes all the way through judgement, and understanding risk is an important part of that. So, risk is an element in intuition in very much the way you described.
Sarah Ellis: And from all of the work that you’ve done, the conversations you’ve had, what surprised you the most about judgement, from everything, like from your own experiences but also from the research that you’ve done?
Andrew Likierman: Well, what surprised me most is how some people are prepared to make really important choices for themselves, at work and at home, with almost no judgement, as it were, applied. In other words, they simply say, “I just think this is the right thing to do”, without actually exploring it, without testing it, without at least finding some way to make it a more systematic basis. Now, when there’s a lot at stake, frankly it’s not very wise. I mean, people, for example, get duped out of their savings by people who look plausible, who they trust for all the wrong reasons, without thinking through, “Well, should I be putting all my money with this person?” People make choices about their health, you know what I mean, often on the basis of no information at all, not enough information, not understanding what’s going on, and so on. So, I would say, actually folks, the stakes here are really high and it’s worth doing a little bit of work here just to try and stack the cards in your favour.
Sarah Ellis: And as well as your book, Judgement at Work: Making Better Choices, where else could people go to find out more about you and your work?
Andrew Likierman: Well, it’s very kind of you to ask. I’ve got a course online run by the London Business School. If somebody wants to go into that in more detail, they might find that useful. But I hope the book also covers a lot of the questions that people might want to ask about judgement, and also I hope gives some practical tips.
Sarah Ellis: Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today. You’ve demystified judgement for me, and also made me take it that little bit more seriously than I think I did a month ago before I discovered you and your work. So, thank you so much.
Andrew Likierman: Thanks so much for having me.
Sarah Ellis: Thank you for listening to today’s episode of the Squiggly Careers podcast. I hope you found it useful, and if you do have other ideas of experts that you’d love to hear from, you can always email us your suggestions. We’re helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com. But that’s everything for this week. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll be back with you again soon. Bye for now.