Deferred judgement is the heuristic move of temporarily setting aside a decision you are going to make, so you can explore options and criteria: putting divergent thinking before convergent.
"We're all out of pizza sauce and our supplier is out, too."
"We should just take the day off, then. No sense running a pizza place without sauce."
"What? We should just go to Price Club and buy some."
"No. Costs too much. We'd be losing money on every pizza."
"Aw, you never listen to me."
The above describes a typical "rush to judgement". When you get into a situation like this, you can often find a pretty good solution to your problem by deferring judgement. Instead of staking out a position and then defending it through argument, both people can together brainstorm options and then together brainstorm factors relevant to making a decision.
For example:
"Ok, what are some options?"
"Shut down for the day."
"Buy some pizza sauce from Price Club or someplace like that."
"Make pesto pizza."
"Make pizza bianco."
"What are some factors for and against these?"
"Price Club is too expensive: we'd lose money on every pizza."
"Most people expect regular tomato-sauce pizza, not something weird like pesto or bianco."
"Even if we lose a little money per pizza, we still gain market exposure by staying open today. We will continue to build our base of repeat customers."
"Let's look at the numbers and see how much we'd be losing. Mmmm, looks like about $0.02 per pizza."
"And how many pizzas do we typically sell on a Wednesday?"
. . .
At some point, all the main choices and reasons for and against them are clearly out on the table and understood by both parties. And then it is usually easy to make a decision that you are both confident of.
There are two keys here:
| 1 | The mental activity of judgement--settling on one conclusion and excluding all others--is separated from the opposite activity--exploring options beyond what you've currently thought of, and exploring connections to other things. When these two opposite activities, one diverging and the other converging, are separated, both work better. When you converge on a decision after exploring options, you're usually choosing from a more informed field of options, plus your understanding of the relevant factors is more refined. |
| 2 | Both people are cooperatively engaged in the same activity at the same time. In the usual sort of argument that comes from rushing to judgement, each person uses his intelligence and creativity to counter the other. You propose an option, I think of a factor to shoot it down and end the discussion ASAP. The adversarial relationship creates little synergy. When you're cooperating at each stage, you build off of what the other person has said. You are each helping to make a more intelligent decision. You need not fear that allowing a factor to be heard will drown out a factor that you want heard. |
It's even possible to do this alone, though in practice it's more fertile with more than one person.
The only problem is, you need to find someone who's willing to defer judgement. Many people have a knee-jerk opposition to it, thinking that cooperating for five minutes wastes time (compared to arguing for five minutes), or they see the world exclusively in competitive terms, where making the other person back down (or "compromise") is more important than making a good decision that both parties are happy with.
On the other hand, a (moderately) adversarial/judgemental response from one of the participants could be productive as long as the criticism is focused on a particular aspect of the proposed solution that needs improvement -- as long as it is not meant (or understood) as an overall "final verdict". In other words -- if it spurs further refinement rather than retreat.
would a closure be a good programming example of a deferred judgement?
Would opening like usual and seeing what happens when the customers arrive be deffered judgement?