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 not occur in a vacuum.
These support tools are distinguished from reasoning styles, which the earlier post defined in the following terms:
- A reasoning style is a mode of judgment or inference. It names how reasoning is being carried out. Systems reasoning, ethical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, narrative reasoning, and categorical reasoning are examples.
- A valid reasoning style is a legitimate and potentially useful mode of reasoning that can contribute to good judgment when appropriately used. Twenty-one valid reasoning styles have been identified. (These in turn are distinguished from distorted reasoning forms – ways in which reasoning becomes narrowed, oversimplified, self-confirming, rhetorically inflated, or otherwise unreliable, and distorting conditions – factors including contextual, emotional, relational, institutional, or cognitive-environmental pressure that bend reasoning toward distortion. These forms and conditions will be examined in later posts in the series).
In board deliberation, most attention is rightly paid to the issue at hand and the decision or outcome sought. Yet the ecology of judgment reminds us that good reasoning does not depend on valid reasoning styles alone. It also depends on the supports that make disciplined reasoning possible before, during, and after deliberation. Let us now consider the three kinds of support measures: enabling capacities, enabling infrastructure, and reasoning scaffolds.
Enabling Capacities
An enabling capacity is a human or collective capacity that helps boards reason well under pressure.
The following table lists seven enabling capacities and describes both what they support and what they guard against. It also highlights how attention to these support measures offers both strategic and risk management benefits.
Enabling Infrastructure
Enabling infrastructure refers to the organisational systems, records, knowledge sources, advice pathways, and review routines that make disciplined reasoning possible. Through this infrastructure, relevant knowledge becomes available, usable, testable, and reviewable. Examples include expertise, experience, stakeholder knowledge, institutional memory, dashboards, board papers, decision logs, and post-decision reviews.
Enabling Infrastructure is not a reasoning style and it is not a personal capability.
As for the enabling capacities, the following table describes what enabling infrastructure supports and how it protects.
Reasoning Scaffolds
Reasoning scaffolds are the tools and structures that help boards use reasoning styles more consciously and effectively. Under that umbrella concept, three different kinds of scaffold can be identified:
- Named thinking traditions (practice-level scaffolds)
- Mental models (representational scaffolds)
- Reasoning frameworks (procedural/methodological scaffolds)
- Named Thinking Traditions
These are broad practice traditions or recognised vocabularies of thought, such as: systems thinking; design thinking; strategic thinking; futures thinking; critical thinking; evaluative thinking.
They are usually composite. They often bundle several reasoning styles, tools, habits, and practices together. For example, systems thinking may involve systems reasoning, ecological reasoning, recursive reasoning, nonlinear reasoning, and sometimes topological reasoning.
Named Thinking Traditions therefore function as practice-level scaffolds. They help boards recognise familiar modes of work, but they are not themselves the elemental reasoning styles.
- Mental Models
Mental models are simplified representations that help people think within a reasoning style. Examples include: loop; chain; threshold; balance scale; ecosystem; map; spectrum; branching tree; centre and periphery.
They are more specific than named thinking traditions in that they provide a cognitive image or structure that guides attention. For example, a feedback loop supports recursive or systems reasoning; a threshold supports nonlinear reasoning; a balance scale supports proportional reasoning; a branching tree supports probabilistic, counterfactual, or morphological reasoning. Four examples of these are illustrated below.
Consequently, Mental Models function as representational scaffolds.
- Reasoning Frameworks
Reasoning frameworks are structured methods, models, or procedures that organise inquiry, deliberation, decision, review, or learning. Examples include: Toulmin model; Ladder of Inference; Double Diamond; Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA loop); Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) / Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA); Theory of Change; Context-Input-Process-Product (CIPP); Cynefin; Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. Selected examples of these are hihglighted in the next chart.
They are more procedural than mental models and usually more explicit than named thinking traditions. They help directors sequence questions, test claims, structure inquiry, compare options, or review outcomes. The Toulmin Model of Argumentation is widely used to support disciplined reasoning. Its logic helps boards consider more objectively the relationship between the grounds for a claim and the claim being made. That relationship is informed by the warrant, backing, qualifier/s and rebuttal, as described in this chart:
Reasoning Frameworks therefore function as procedural or methodological scaffolds.
Summarising Scaffolds
The summary table below compares the ways these three kinds of scaffolds support disciplined reasoning, along with selected examples:
| Scaffold type | What it does | Selected Examples |
| Named thinking traditions | Provide broad practice vocabularies that often bundle several reasoning styles | Systems thinking, design thinking, futures thinking |
| Mental models | Provide simplified cognitive representations that guide attention | Loop, chain, threshold, ecosystem, spectrum |
| Reasoning frameworks | Provide structured methods for inquiry, testing, decision, review, or learning | Toulmin model, Ladder of Inference, Double Diamond, Plan-Do-Check-Act |
Governance implications
Recognising that effective reasoning requires support means that boards should give deliberate attention to the supports built into their governance systems. Enabling capacities, enabling infrastructure, and reasoning scaffolds do not appear automatically. They need to be cultivated, resourced, and used with discernment.
For nonprofit boards, this has practical implications for director development, meeting design, board papers, dashboard design, committee structures, use of external advice, and post-decision review. Governance committees can consider what refinements would strengthen the board’s capacity to reason well, especially under pressure, uncertainty, or complexity.
Boards and governance committees may wish to ask:
- Which enabling capacities are strongest in our board, and which need further development?
- Do our meeting practices support critical-thinking skills, attentional discipline, evidential discipline, and emotional regulation?
- How well do we bring empathic judgment and moral imagination into deliberation when human consequence, dignity, legitimacy, or vulnerability are at stake?
- Do our board papers, dashboards, and agendas make disciplined reasoning easier or harder?
- Do we have access to the expertise, stakeholder knowledge, external advice, and institutional memory needed for sound judgment?
- Are significant decisions documented in ways that preserve assumptions, rationales, and lessons for later review?
- Do we undertake post-decision reviews in a structured way, especially for major, uncertain, or contested decisions?
- Which reasoning scaffolds are already useful to us, and which might strengthen our practice in strategy, risk, evaluation, or decision review?
- Do directors understand the difference between a reasoning style and the scaffolds that support its use?
- How should these supports be reflected in induction, continuing director development, and board evaluation?
Seen in this way, disciplined reasoning is not only an individual skill. It is also a governance capability that can be intentionally designed, supported, and improved over time.
Boards are often urged to make better decisions. Yet better decisions usually depend on better judgment, and better judgment depends on more than information or goodwill alone. It depends on whether the board has cultivated the repertoire, capacities, infrastructure, and scaffolds that make disciplined reasoning possible.
* The term ‘Ecology of Judgment’ was coined by Duncan Helm and Autumn Roesch-Marsh in their article The Ecology of Judgment: A Model for Understanding and Improving Social Work Judgments, The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 47, Issue 5, 1 July 2017, Pages 1361–1376. It has been adapted here to apply more broadly to deliberation and decision-making by nonprofit leaders across all sectors.
