Many writers over the years have drawn our attention to the value of contrast. Contrast isn’t just a physical phenomenon – in reflective practice it’s how we process meaning, build resilience, and truly value the gifts we are given. The Shadow Deck of Distorted Reasoning Forms and Distorting Conditions introduced in this post is not… Continue reading The Light and Shade of Reasoning
Governance OF and WITH Empathy
This series of posts on The Ecology of Judgment has been weaving two related strands to argue that reasoning and empathy are essential partners in nonprofit decision-making. This post extends on that argument by focussing on how empathy interacts with and balances the use of the 21 valid reasoning styles that comprise your full Reasoning… Continue reading Governance OF and WITH Empathy
Factors shaping Reasoning Style Selection and Orchestration
Earlier posts in this Ecology of Judgment series have argued that good judgment depends not only on having access to valid reasoning styles, but also on the conditions that enable them and the human capacities that keep them disciplined. The post on ‘Enabling and Supporting Reasoning‘ examined the practical scaffolds, and the enabling capacities and… Continue reading Factors shaping Reasoning Style Selection and Orchestration
Calibrating Relationship, Judgment, and Action with Lucid Empathy
Lucid Empathy was defined in my post Empathy at the Core as “an integrative form of empathy that balances emotion, cognition, ethics, boundaries, and perspective in order to act with clarity under pressure”. The balancing capacity referred to here has several expressions. The reference to calibration in the title of this post invites us to… Continue reading Calibrating Relationship, Judgment, and Action with Lucid Empathy
Expanding Your Reasoning Repertoire
An earlier post, Your Reasoning Repertoire, introduced a Minimum Working Set of nine valid reasoning styles. That set was designed to give nonprofit leaders and boards a practical starting point. This post expands the view to the full repertoire of 21 valid reasoning styles. A board may have substantial expertise and goodwill, yet still lack… Continue reading Expanding Your Reasoning Repertoire
Empathic Windows: Calibrating Empathic Receptivity, Involvement, and Agency
Previous posts in this series on the ‘ecology of judgment‘ have characterised Lucid Empathy as the disciplined capacity to keep human consequence visible while regulating the force of empathic concern through evidence, role clarity, fairness, proportionality, systemic awareness, temporal perspective, and accountability. In empathy practice, it calibrates engagement; in deliberative reasoning, it calibrates judgment. This… Continue reading Empathic Windows: Calibrating Empathic Receptivity, Involvement, and Agency
Enabling and Supporting Reasoning
The first post in this extended series on the ‘Ecology of Judgment*’, Your Reasoning Repertoire, identified nine valid reasoning styles within the minimum working set normally required for effective deliberation. This post now turns to the enabling capacities, infrastructure, and scaffolds that support the use of those reasoning styles – acknowledging that effective reasoning does… Continue reading Enabling and Supporting Reasoning
Empathy at the Core
Lucid EmpathyIn my previous post, Your Reasoning Repertoire, I described Lucid Empathy as an essential balancing capacity whenever deliberation has human consequences. It appeared at the centre of the ring of 21 valid reasoning styles because it performs a distinctive role: it helps boards and leaders reason with people in view. This post expands on… Continue reading Empathy at the Core
Your Reasoning Repertoire
Nonprofit boards reason constantly. They interpret evidence, test explanations, weigh risks, judge proportionality, consider consequences, and decide what should happen next. Yet when director skills are described, reasoning is usually collapsed into broad terms such as “analytical skills,” “strategic thinking,” or “sound judgment.” This post explores the minimum working set of reasoning styles nonprofit leaders… Continue reading Your Reasoning Repertoire
Stuck on Repeat? How ‘Loop Thinking’ Can Save Your Strategy
To understand where we are going, we must first look at where we have been. Loops are everywhere it seems. They appear in idiomatic speech, as in ‘close the loop‘, ‘keep me in the loop‘, ‘I’m out of the loop‘, ‘let’s loop back around on this‘, ‘they were thrown for a loop‘. (Jargon bingo cards… Continue reading Stuck on Repeat? How ‘Loop Thinking’ Can Save Your Strategy