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LEADERSHIP JUDGMENT FALL 2026 A Seton Hall University Publication

The Future of

LEADERSHIP Survey

Insight and Foresight The 2025 study confirms that the classic 1995 trust model — comprising ability, integrity, and benevolence — remains highly relevant for Gen Z, with ability emerging as the top factor for both building and losing trust in leaders. The research reveals that trust is built slowly (13–24 months) but lost quickly (within 12 months for most), and while skills and transparency drive trust-building, self-interest and ethical lapses are the primary causes of trust erosion. Critically, trust in leadership is significantly linked to greater job satisfaction, retention, and leadership development, underscoring its direct impact on organizational success.

The 2026 Survey is now live. This edition broadens the respondent base for the first time to include C-suite and senior leaders, creating a direct comparison between those entering the workforce and those leading it. Results will be released in Spring 2027. CONTACT ruchin.kansal@shu.edu

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

FALL 2026

A Seton Hall University Publication

Discusses what leadership judgment really is, why wisdom is grounded in the heart as much as the mind and how leaders can separate good judgment from good outcomes.

IN THE LEAD WITH ANDREA NEIL

FROM THE EDITOR

LEADERSHIP LESSONS Why leadership success is increasingly determined not by what you know, but how you interpret, evaluate and act on what you face.

BY THE EDITORS

THE EXPERIENCE DIVIDEND

BY MARK A. PFISTER

IN FOCUS

The judgment your C-suite cannot afford to lose.

Jessica Moran believes true leadership judgment comes down to empathy, active listening and choosing wisdom over efficiency.

BY Z. COLLETTE EDWARDS

WHAT GOOD JUDGMENT LOOKS LIKE

BY THE EDITORS

Data abundance does not guarantee better choices. To thrive in the age of AI, organizations must treat human judgment as a discipline — not a innate trait.

IN THE CRUCIBLE Why leaders make better decisions when wisdom is shared rather than concentrated at the top.

BY FAITH GLAZIER

BY TOM DAHLBORG

Leadership depends not simply on knowledge or skill, but on learning to recognize patterns, weigh consequences and act wisely amid uncertainty.

The new role of leadership as an architectural framework for workplace adaptation.

CASE STUDY

READING THE FIELD

BY MIMI BROOKS

BY MAHESH DAAS

POINT/ COUNTERPOINT

BEYOND THE DATA In an era of infinite data and artificial intelligence, a leader’s most critical asset remains the practice of considered judgment. BY LESLIE D. HIRSCH, AND ANDREW F. SIMON

Brian Cantell Smith’s insighful book says that despite dramatic advances in AI, it is nowhere near developing systems that are genuinely intelligent. BY PAULA ALEXANDER AND STEPHEN WOOD

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 3

WHO’S WHO

Mimi Brooks

is the Founder and CEO of Logical Design Solutions, where she advises senior executives on organizational transformation, operating model design, customer strategy and the responsible integration of artificial intelligence into the enterprise. For more than three decades, she has helped Fortune 500 organizations redesign how work is organized, decisions are made and strategy is translated into execution.

is the eighth president of the Boston Architectural College, where Boston Magazine says he is “on a mission to reinvent design education.” An academic leader with three decades of experience across research universities and architectural practice, he is the author of four books, including Leading with Aesthetics, a study of transformational leadership at MIT. He holds a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania.

Tom Dahlborg

was named a healthcare disruptor and a mental health champion by Authority Magazine and a ruckus maker by The Patient Experience Community. He is the recipient of the Certificate of Excellence from the Global Listening Centre and the Harvard Diamond Award. With over 40 years of healthcare leadership experience, Dahlborg is a voice for collaborative governance and dialogue models, multivariate economies, agape-centered care models and servant leadership.

Z. Colette Edwards, M.D.,

Faith Glazier, M.B.A.

Leslie D. Hirsch, M.P.A.,

Jessica Moran

Andrea Neil, M.B.A. learned through elite sport that how a team pursues a result marks the people involved, win or lose. Creator of The Compass of Leadership, she works with leaders in business, sport, and education to examine the patterns that shape leadership, helping them pursue performance in ways that strengthen both people and results. A former Canadian national team captain and Canada's Sports Hall of Fame inductee, she has testified before the Parliament of Canada on institutional accountability.

Mark A. Pfister

Dr. Andrew F. Simon,

FACHE has been president and CEO of Saint Peter’s Healthcare System since 2017, after joining as president in 2015. In a career that spans nearly 50 years, he previously served as president and CEO for New Jersey, Louisiana and Colorado health systems. Hirsch serves on both the American Hospital Association (AHA) and New Jersey Hospital Association board of trustees and as chair of AHA’s Regional Policy Board 2 for New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Mahesh Daas, Ed.D.

is a senior audit associate at KPMG US LLP. A 4.0 summa cum laude graduate of Seton Hall’s Buccino Leadership Institute, she earned an early promotion and serves as an artificial intelligence (AI) champion for the Northeast Commercial Business Unit. Passionate about mentorship, she actively recruits emerging talent. Off the clock, Moran enjoys pickleball, puzzling, her kittens Ron and Remi, and striving to make the grandparents who raised her, immensely proud.

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

M.B.A. is the Founder and Chief Medical Officer of pausitive health, a onestop digital destination for women in all stages of the menopause journey which provides omnichannel education, access to menopausetrained clinicians and physical therapists, Food IS Medicine programming, d-CBT for stress, anxiety, and depression, a 2500 video library of PT-led exercises for musculoskeletal pain and pelvic floor issues, a Music as Medicine offering, and community.

is CEO and chief board consultant of M.A. Pfister Strategy Group, a firm that serves as a strategic advisory council for executives and boards in the public, private, nonprofit and private equity sectors. He is the founder and CEO of the International Board Director Competency Designation (IBDC.D) education and certification program, a board director certification course recognized globally, and was also chairman and CEO of Integral Board Group.

is a senior executive with over 35 years of experience as a Management Consultant to life sciences companies. At Deloitte, Glazer was a member of the Deloitte Consulting Board, and the Deloitte PAC Board. She has an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Business and Economics from Lehigh University, where she serves on the Board of Trustees. She is also a member of the board of Breakthrough T1D.

Ph.D., Psy.D. is the executive director of the Buccino Leadership Institute at Seton Hall University. With more than 25 years of experience in executive education, research and organizational advising, he has worked with senior leaders internationally. His work spans corporate, healthcare, government, nonprofit and education sectors. He earned both his Ph.D. in social psychology and Psy.D. in organizational psychology from Rutgers University.

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GREAT MINDS. Greater Purpose.

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 5

FROM THE EDITOR

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In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

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is a professor of practice at Seton Hall University and founding editor of In the Lead. He is founder of Kansal & Company, advising CEOs and boards on governance and decision quality, and previously held leadership roles at Deloitte, Boehringer Ingelheim and Siemens Healthineers. He is author of Redefining Innovation and the forthcoming Work Signals, with a distinguished record in strategy, innovation and digital health. He earned his M.B.A. from NYU Stern.

Ruchin Kansal, M.B.A.

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Outcome

e make decisions every day. Most seem mundane: what to wear, what to eat, which podcast to listen to on our drive home. Others have longer time horizons: how much to save, where to invest, which healthcare provider to trust. Our decisions have consequences, and they show up in the form of outcomes. Over time, these outcomes become signals of our judgment. We must live with the fruits of our judgment, knowing we will make some good calls, and others not so good. In business, we hire for evidence of past judgment. We promote good judgment. We fire for bad judgment. So how do we assess judgment? Is it the intent, the process or the outcome? Further, as artificial intelligence continues to evolve, a catch-22 situation is emerging. When artificial intelligence can produce exceptional levels of analysis, human judgment becomes a most valued skill. And yet, good judgment is built the hard way, by doing the analysis ourselves, getting it wrong sometimes, and living with the costs. AI now does analysis for us, faster and more confidently than we ever could. Which means the process that builds judgment — the struggle, the failure, the course correction — is disappearing exactly at the time judgment becomes a most valued skill.

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Promote

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What We Hire For, What We Fire For

We are asking people to sharpen a skill while quietly removing its training ground. So how do we build good judgment? For ourselves as leaders and educators? And nurture it in the people we lead and teach? These are the thorny questions this issue of In the Lead explores. Our contributors include college and healthcare presidents, consultants, board advisors, professors, entrepreneurs, and a national soccer team captain. What emerges is this: Good judgment is less a trait than a practice. It requires both head and heart, is built with others, is tested under pressure, and is judged by how you got to your end point, not just by where you landed. Though the practice you build for enhancing judgment will be unique to you, you’ll find foundational building blocks for it in the pages that follow. And because good judgment is a practice, put the lessons you learn in this issue to a litmus test. Apply them to three of the most consequential decisions you have made in the past, and see what — if anything — you would do differently. L

Ruchin Kansal, Editor

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LEADERSHIP LESSONS

The Judgment Advantage WHY LEADERSHIP SUCCESS IS INCREASINGLY DETERMINED NOT BY WHAT YOU KNOW, BUT HOW YOU INTERPRET, EVALUATE AND ACT ON WHAT YOU FACE. BY M ARK A. PF IST ER

eadership is often associated with vision, communication, influence and decisionmaking. While each of these capabilities is important, there is another that influences and shapes them all. It frequently determines whether a leader succeeds or struggles, regardless of intelligence, experience, position or industry. That capability is judgment. In my work consulting and advising board directors around the world, leaders are increasingly facing situations that lack complete information. They encounter competing priorities, uncertain outcomes, conflicting opinions, evolving circumstances and time constraints. Rarely is there a perfect answer waiting to be discovered. Instead, 8

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

leaders must assess what they know, determine what matters most, evaluate risks and opportunities, and move forward despite uncertainty. The quality of that process is leadership judgment. Good judgment often goes unnoticed because its impact unfolds gradually through sound decisions and positive outcomes. Poor judgment, however, tends to reveal itself quickly. Failed initiatives, avoidable crises, damaged relationships, missed opportunities and strategic missteps frequently trace back not to a lack of intelligence or effort, but to errors in judgment. Leadership judgment has always mattered, but it has become increasingly important in a world defined by complexity, speed and an overwhelming abundance of information.

Why Leadership Judgment Matters More Than Ever For generations, leadership advantage was often linked to access. Access to information. Access to expertise. Access to experience. Leaders frequently possessed knowledge that others did not, allowing them to make decisions based on insights unavailable to most people. Those who knew more often held a meaningful advantage over those who knew less. Today, that dynamic is changing rapidly. Information is available instantly. Expertise can be accessed globally. Research that once required days or weeks can now be obtained in minutes. Artificial intelligence can summarize reports, generate ideas, analyze data and answer questions with remarkable speed. The barriers to obtaining information continue to decline, and access to knowledge is becoming increasingly democratized. Yet despite unprecedented access to information, organizations continue to experience strategic failures, operational breakdowns, leadership missteps and poor decisions. Knowing more does not automatically produce better decisions. In many cases, it simply produces more inputs, more variables and more noise. Leadership judgment remains the capability that determines which information matters, which risks deserve attention, which opportunities should be pursued, and which actions should ultimately be taken. Perhaps the greatest reason judgment remains indispensable is that leadership is fundamentally about managing tradeoffs. Most important decisions involve competing priorities rather than clear right or wrong answers. Organizations must balance growth with profitability, innovation with risk, speed with quality, transparency with confidentiality, and short-term performance with long-term sustainability. Information can illuminate these tradeoffs, but it rarely resolves them. Judgment is the capability that helps leaders determine which balance is appropriate within a particular context. Boards are placing increasing value and emphasis on this important balance. Information creates options. Judgment creates direction.

The Age of Answers We are entering what might best be described as the Age of Answers. Yet leadership has never been about possessing answers alone. Leadership has always been

about asking the right questions. Judgment helps leaders determine which questions deserve attention, which assumptions should be challenged, which risks are acceptable, and which opportunities are worth pursuing. It enables leaders to distinguish between activity and progress, urgency and importance, confidence and certainty. Technology may increasingly assist leaders with answers, but judgment remains essential in determining what those answers mean and how they should influence action. A recommendation, prediction or analysis has little value if it is applied to the wrong problem or interpreted within the wrong context. Leadership is often most valuable when certainty is absent. When the path forward is obvious, processes, policies and expertise can often provide the answer. Leadership becomes most important when information is incomplete, outcomes are uncertain, and reasonable people disagree about the best course of action. Judgment allows leaders to move forward despite those conditions rather than waiting for certainty that may never arrive. As machines become increasingly capable of generating answers, the human ability to evaluate, contextualize and appropriately act upon those answers becomes even more important.

Beyond Expertise

Leadership becomes most important when information is incomplete, outcomes are uncertain, and reasonable people disagree about the best course of action.

We are witnessing the need for an evolution of experts to architects. Expertise remains valuable, but leadership eventually demands something more. Experts often focus on what they know, while architects focus on how various elements fit together. Judgment serves as the bridge between the two. A leader may possess deep expertise in finance, operations, technology, health care, education, manufacturing or another discipline. However, leadership requires the ability to evaluate broader organizational implications, competing interests, long-term consequences and strategic tradeoffs. Technical expertise may identify the available options, but judgment helps determine which option is right. One expands the menu of possibilities, while the other determines which path should ultimately be pursued. Organizations frequently promote individuals because of expertise, but they remain successful because of judgment. This transition represents one of the most significant shifts in leadership In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 9

LEADERSHIP LESSONS

development. The qualities that create exceptional individual contributors are not always the same qualities that create exceptional leaders. The most effective leaders are rarely those who simply know the most. More often, they are the individuals who can correctly interpret situations, recognize what matters most, balance competing considerations, and guide others toward sound decisions despite uncertainty. Expertise may earn a seat at the table, but judgment often determines the quality of leadership once there.

The Power of Context One reason judgment remains indispensable is that leadership rarely operates in laboratory conditions. Every decision exists within a unique combination of organizational culture, stakeholder expectations, timing, resource constraints, risk tolerance, competitive pressures and strategic objectives. The same decision can succeed in one organization and fail in another because the surrounding circumstances are different. Facts matter. Data matters. Analysis matters. However, context determines what those facts mean. Leaders who rely exclusively on data without understanding context often discover that technically correct decisions can still produce undesirable outcomes. Conversely, leaders who understand context are often able to identify opportunities, risks and unintended consequences that are invisible to others. This reality helps explain why leadership cannot be reduced to formulas. Effective leaders recognize that context often determines whether a decision is appropriate, achievable and sustainable. Judgment enables leaders to understand those contextual factors and adjust accordingly. Without context, information can mislead. With context, information becomes insight.

The Role of Perspective Another reason judgment varies significantly among leaders is perspective. Judgment is shaped by experiences, assumptions, values, biases and worldview. The same facts can lead different leaders to different conclusions because each interprets them through a different lens. “Judgment is not just what you decide. It is the lens through which you see the decision in the first place,” states Ruchin Kansal, professor of practice at Seton Hall University, author 10

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

Most important decisions involve competing priorities rather than clear right or wrong answers. Information can illuminate these tradeoffs, but it rarely resolves them.

and adviser on leadership and governance. “That lens is ground over years of being in the room, living with consequences, and having the humility to update your thinking when you get it wrong.” Effective leaders understand this limitation. They intentionally seek alternative viewpoints, challenge assumptions, and encourage constructive disagreement. Rather than viewing opposing perspectives as obstacles, they see them as opportunities to improve decision quality. This willingness to test one’s own thinking is often a hallmark of mature leadership judgment.

When Responsibility and Authority Diverge Judgment becomes even more important when responsibility and authority fail to align. When a “responsibility incongruity” exists, tensions commonly emerge when individuals are held accountable for outcomes without possessing the authority necessary to influence them, or when authority exceeds accountability. These situations place additional strain on leaders because success often depends upon navigating constraints rather than controlling them. Leaders may need to influence stakeholders they do not supervise, gain support for initiatives they cannot mandate, or deliver results despite limited authority. In such situations, success depends less on positional power and more on the ability to assess circumstances accurately, influence effectively, and make thoughtful decisions within imperfect conditions. Strong judgment helps leaders recognize these realities early and adapt their approach accordingly. Poor judgment often ignores such constraints, resulting in frustration, conflict and diminished effectiveness. The more complex the environment, the greater the importance of sound judgment.

Optimism Requires Judgment Leadership frequently demands optimism. Teams look to leaders for confidence, direction and belief in future possibilities. Organizations depend upon leaders who can identify opportunities where others see obstacles and who can motivate people through periods of uncertainty. Optimism without judgment can become wishful thinking. Effective leaders balance confidence with realism. They inspire people toward ambitious goals while

consistently make perfect decisions, every leader can improve the quality of their judgment by becoming more deliberate about how they assess situations and arrive at conclusions. Leaders seeking to strengthen their judgment should regularly evaluate themselves against several key questions: • Do I actively seek viewpoints that challenge my assumptions? • Am I solving the actual problem or merely reacting to visible symptoms? • Do I understand the long-term implications of today's decisions? • Am I balancing data, experience, intuition and stakeholder perspectives appropriately? • Have I clearly identified the risks, tradeoffs and unintended consequences? • Do I create environments where others feel comfortable presenting opposing views? • After major decisions, do I evaluate outcomes to improve future judgment? Leaders who consistently ask these questions strengthen one of the most valuable capabilities they possess. Over time, these practices improve not only decision quality, but also credibility, trust, influence and leadership effectiveness.

The Lasting Leadership Differentiator remaining grounded in facts, risks and practical realities. Judgment enables leaders to distinguish between opportunities worth pursuing and ideas that simply sound attractive. It helps leaders avoid the trap of becoming either overly cautious or recklessly ambitious. I frequently profess the importance of maintaining a positive outlook while confronting reality honestly. Leadership judgment serves as the mechanism that makes this balance possible. The most effective leaders are neither pessimists nor blind optimists. They are informed optimists guided by sound judgment.

Evaluating and Strengthening Leadership Judgment Fortunately, judgment is not fixed. It can be developed through intentional practice, reflection, self-awareness and experience. While no leader will

Throughout history, leaders were often valued for what they knew. Increasingly, they will be valued for how they think. The future will undoubtedly bring more information, more automation, more analytics and more technological assistance. What it is unlikely to bring is less uncertainty. Judgment remains timeless because it transforms information into insight, experience into wisdom and decisions into outcomes. It helps leaders navigate complexity, evaluate tradeoffs, balance competing priorities, and act when certainty is unavailable. While technology will continue to expand humanity's access to information, it cannot eliminate the need for thoughtful interpretation, contextual understanding and sound decision-making. Once again, information creates options. Judgment creates direction. In an age overflowing with answers, leadership judgment may ultimately become the greatest competitive advantage of all. L In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 11

IN FOCUS

Jessica Moran CLASS OF 2023 HOMETOWN Berkeley Heights, New Jersey MAJOR Accounting CURRENT EMPLOYER KPMG US LLP

IN THE LEAD Can you tell us about your professional journey and the experiences that shaped your leadership philosophy? JESSICA MORAN My leadership philosophy is anchored in servant leadership — a belief that a leader's primary duty is to empower others, facilitate collaboration and cultivate potential. This perspective was deeply shaped by two defining chapters in my career: Stryker Corporation and KPMG US LLP. During my summer internship with Stryker their core mission — “Together with our customers, we are driven to make health care better” — grew deeply ingrained in me. Operating in the technical accounting and financial compliance space there, I quickly realized that behind every data point was a human experience. This company and how its people operated sparked my servant leadership style, shifting my focus to how prioritizing individual perspectives and experiences can mobilize an entire business toward a shared mission. This people-first alignment is also what drew me to KPMG US LLP after graduating from Seton Hall. As a senior audit associate, I strive to live out our value of “together, for better” in every engagement. To me, it is a constant prompt to ask: How can I collaborate more effectively with my team and clients to elevate our outcomes? In practice, this means exercising leadership judgment that prioritizes the collective good. Mentoring and coaching our summer Interns and full-time associates are not a task to me, but an opportunity to build trust and confidence. Recently, I delivered my first formal performance 12

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

▲ Guided by servant leadership, Moran believes true leadership judgment comes down to empathy, active listening and choosing wisdom over efficiency.

review to a team member, which was an incredible lesson in the power of compassionate candor. During our conversation, I made sure to tell her that I want her to challenge herself and take ownership of her work but that she can always come to me with questions, and we’ll figure it out together. Ultimately, my goal is to ensure that my team has the tools, guidance and confidence they need to deliver exceptional client outcomes and achieve their own professional growth. ITL During your time at Seton Hall, what experiences had the greatest influence on your development as a leader? MORAN My development as a leader was undoubtedly anchored in the Buccino Leadership Institute. As an interdisciplinary program, it exposed me to a rich tapestry of personalities, leadership styles and unique backgrounds. Early in my college career, working on cross-functional projects taught me a vital lesson in team dynamics. As someone with a naturally driven, type A personality, I quickly learned

that effective leadership sometimes means taking a step back. I realized that I didn’t always need to be the loudest voice in the room, and that speaking more does not equate to contributing more. I discovered that active listening is a far more powerful leadership tool — a lesson I carry with me daily at KPMG, where I strive to truly hear and understand both my clients’ needs and the needs of my team members. It was also through this program that I was first introduced to the concept of servant leadership, exemplified perfectly by Mike Reuter, who was the associate director at the time. To this day, Mike remains the greatest example I’ve seen of a servant leader. He placed his students at the absolute forefront of everything he did, operating entirely without self-interest and solely for the betterment of the students and the program. His legacy is the standard I strive to meet in my own career today. ITL Leadership is often associated with decisiveness, but judgment requires nuance. How do you define “leadership judgment” in your own career? MORAN With the rapid rise of AI — and through my experience helping to drive the implementation and education of my firm’s AI tools — I find myself viewing leadership judgment through a brand-new lens. We are living in a world increasingly shaped by automation, which serves as a powerful reminder that our distinctly human qualities, especially a leader’s judgment, have never mattered more. I grew up in an academic and professional landscape that prized two kinds of intelligence: IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence). In the past, that might have felt like the full picture, but I believe AI is forcing a rewrite of that. To me, leadership judgment is the transition from efficiency to wisdom. It is the researcher who connects dots that no algorithm could see. It is the manager who looks past the data to truly understand a client’s pain points. In an AI-driven workplace, leadership judgment is no longer just about making a decision — it is about providing the vision and wisdom that technology can never replicate. ITL In fast-moving or high-pressure environments, how do you approach making difficult decisions? MORAN As one of the “Big Four” public auditing companies, KPMG has an infamous “busy season” — a period when professionals are working overtime for months in a row and tension can be high. In these high-pressure environments, it is tempting to grab

I realized that I didn’t always need to be the loudest voice in the room, and that speaking more does not equate to contributing more.

the quickest solution. But I’ve found that if a difficult decision feels too easy, it’s often worth a second look. While agility is important and quick decisions are sometimes necessary, I believe you must always carve out time and space for the decisions that truly matter. When things are moving fast and the pressure is on, my first step is always the same: I listen. I try to strip away all the red tape and administrative noise to focus on the human element. I ask myself two questions: What does my team need in this exact moment? and What outcome would bring the most immediate value to our client? By putting people at the absolute forefront, the right answer usually surfaces much faster. I might be a bit of a “Potterhead,” but I often think of a quote from Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: “There will be a time when we must choose between what is easy and what is right.” In a fast-paced corporate environment, that is the essence of leadership judgment: resisting the urge to take the path of least resistance, and instead having the courage to do what is right for your people. ITL What role do values and ethics play in your leadership judgment? MORAN Working in the audit space, serving large Fortune 500 public companies, values and ethics are not just abstract concepts — they are the absolute baseline of our profession. The work we do is fundamentally built on public trust, financial integrity and compliance. Therefore, ethics do not just play a role in my leadership judgment; they are the lens through which every judgment is made. In audit, the numbers and data only tell part of the story. When navigating complex reporting or client nuances, there are often gray areas. That is where leadership judgment steps in. Values provide the inner compass that ensures I don’t just check the boxes, but that I do the right thing for my clients, the firm and the public trust. It goes back to choosing what is right over what is easy. A leader without a strong ethical foundation might take the path of least resistance, but a leader driven by values will always have the courage to ask the tough questions and stand by their integrity. ITL How important is listening and collaboration when making leadership decisions? MORAN I believe listening and collaboration are a leader’s fuel. Without them, your decisions are baseless and your outcomes are ultimately fruitless. I was reminded of this recently [Cont. on pg. 46]

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 13

Over an 18-year national team career from 1990 to 2007, Neil earned 132 caps (appearances in international competition) and played in four Women’s World Cups. She helped lead Canada to its best-ever World Cup finish in 2003, while also serving as team captain and later as a coach.

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

In the Lead With...

ANDREA NEIL

In The Lead With is a conversation with industry leaders on key trends and leadership challenges. In this issue, we spoke with Andrea Neil, a pioneer of Canadian women’s soccer. She discusses what leadership judgment really is, why wisdom is grounded in the heart as much as the mind and how leaders can separate good judgment from good outcomes.

RUCHIN KANSAL (RK): Andrea, thanks for joining us. Leaders are judged by their judgment, and artificial intelligence is complicating how we build it: More information doesn’t mean better decisions. So, to start, how do you define leadership judgment? ANDREA NEIL (AN): We tend to think of leadership judgment as an almost purely logical enterprise, and for a lot of people, emotion has no place in it. But for me, leadership judgment is the whole process of making a decision. And when we look at how we actually make decisions, we have to take a holistic view, because we are holistic beings: intellectual and logical, yes, but also emotional, physical, energetic. Even our nervous system plays a role in how we decide. Our emotions, and not just the sentimental kind some people think leaders can’t have, are the energy that moves us. To be cut off from them means we’re missing part of the picture because emotions like fear can drive our judgment in ways that shrink our capacity. So when I think about leadership judgment in an ethical, holistic way, I’m really thinking about wisdom. Wisdom includes the heart: the ability to ground ourselves in a place that’s neither purely logical nor irrationally emotional, but where our thinking and feeling work together, so we can perceive the context around us and discern the best decision for that moment, for that person or for the group. If we operate from pure logic alone, I don’t think we’re operating at our full capacity as leaders. RK: I like the construct of leadership judgment as the process of making a decision grounded in wisdom. But we tend to say wisdom comes with age, experience or failure. So there’s a catch-22: How do you make wise judgments when you’re young? Take your own example: After an accident, you switched from badminton to soccer at a young age. How did you make that call, and was it wisdom that drove it?

AN: I was in a motorcycle accident in the Dominican Republic. Before that I’d gone away on a tall ship to try to find myself and make a decision on my path forward — badminton or soccer. Interestingly, it wasn’t the sailing trip that resolved it, it was the accident. In a moment like that, with a real consequence on the line, things suddenly became clear. I nearly lost my leg; I’d gotten gangrene, which is also life-threatening. In that moment, it became obvious: I chose soccer because I understood it made my heart sing. What drew me toward it was the sense of doing something beyond myself. There’s something different about the collective goals of a team, and that shift changed the course of my life. It taught me to communicate in front of a group, and it began my education in leadership. It also meant doing something uncomfortable because soccer wasn’t the comfortable choice. I was still learning it. The accident transformed me in other ways too. I had this deeper knowing that I was underachieving academically, coasting through university, not using my intellect. The accident made me realize I wasn’t even scratching the surface of my potential. I think we often mislabel good things and bad things because it’s frequently in the falling down that we learn where we’ve erred, or what allows us to thrive. RK: You’ve tied wisdom to the heart, not just experience, and that led you to soccer. Now let’s flip it. You have been both a player and a coach. How do you apply judgment when it’s not about you, but about the team? AN: As a player, your focus is on collective goals, but your perception is still largely about yourself within the team. As a coach, that view widens. It’s no longer about developing one player, but about how you build each individual toward a purpose, and then bring those individuals together. You have to understand where every person is coming from, where their gaps are, in order to move them toward both individual and collective goals. What the accident also taught me is that experience matters because we need contrast to understand what good judgment is and what it isn’t. But wisdom isn't purely cultivated through experience. Experience is a large part of it, but if it were only that, we'd all be wise by now. The deeper, intuitive knowledge that lets us make sound judgment is cultivated not just through information, but through feeling the consequences of our actions. Take winning, the objective of any sport. How you In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 15

pursue that matters because you can go after winning in a way that erodes the well-being of the people on your team. That’s where wisdom comes in. Judgment from a purely logical place, without the heart, can exploit and extract without us even realizing it. RK: You’ve added well-being of others as a dimension of good judgment. This relates to our values. But often there’s a fracture between stated values and how judgment actually plays out. How do you reconcile the two? AN: That’s really at the core of it. If we think leadership only points outward, and don’t understand that it starts inward, we run into that gap: the words on the wall not meeting the actions after decisions are made. That’s a deep incongruency, and it erodes trust in a leader. But I’d flip this a little. I don’t think performance and values are ever in conflict because we’re constantly performing in life, in an interview, in relationships, even brushing your teeth. How well we do something is just inherent. What actually comes into conflict, in moments of pressure that test the words on the wall, are the competing values themselves. You might say your company stands for integrity, that honesty guides your decisions, and then, when push comes to shove, a success metric, or your own reputation, turns out to matter more. Those are the unsaid values running quietly beneath the surface, driving our actions and decisions without us pausing to ask what actually drove them. We have to do that deeper reflection, every day. RK: Would you say self-knowledge of your values is at the heart of good judgment, that leaders need to get very aware of them so they don’t become blind spots? AN: Yes, it’s at the heart of it, because those moments of testing will come, through crisis, pressure, uncertainty. It’s like an athlete developing toward an optimal state. You need to know where you want to go and where you now stand, so you know what to move away from. If we don’t recognize that life will bring resistance, we’re caught off guard. What we’re really talking about, I think, are virtues: trustworthiness, honesty, kindness, courage, moral strength. Values are things we believe are important; virtues are those things lived out, love in action, patience in action. These are what let us thrive as individuals and communities. All discord, I’d argue, begins where love stops — where we stop considering another person as fully as we consider ourselves. 16

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RK: So we’re talking about an internal compass meeting an external environment. But that can sound idealistic, not every leader shows up that way. Many have the urge to dominate, their way or no way. If you’re voting for, watching or trying to influence a leader like that, what do you do? Is it even worth trying? AN: It’s always worth trying. But before you try to address it outside yourself, you have to look at what’s creating domination within you because what we recognize in others, we often fail to recognize in ourselves. Domination leads to harm, exploitation and extraction. It’s the belief that I need to be superior, and therefore you need to be inferior. Confronting that in ourselves is actually empowering because there’s endless material to work with: the voice that says you’ll fail, the voice that says my interests, my fears, count more than my neighbor’s. Think of it like a tree: Our will is the root system. Our will to confront domination, ethically and from a place of virtue, requires developing that root system so the tree can stand against a strong wind. If we don’t confront the vices within ourselves, we develop a weak root system, and we can’t meaningfully confront what’s outside of us either. RK: We’ve talked about the process, self-awareness, the heart, experience, virtue. But most of the time, judgment gets measured by outcome alone, and the faster the world moves, the more it collapses into just that. How do you balance good judgment against the pressure to deliver, whatever it takes? AN: I think the answer lies in balancing doing with being. We’re always doing, performing, achieving — that’s living. But we can’t lose sight of the fact that we’re being at the same time as doing. How we do things matters, and so does the underlying motivation. In sport, the objective is clear: Score one more goal, win. But the laws of the game also carry a spirit around honor: respecting the game, respecting decisions. There’s a deeper purpose baked into the objective itself. Without that respect for fairness and spirit, we’re not playing football anymore, we’re playing fightball. It’s not just what happens on the field; it’s how leaders bend the rules to benefit themselves, where favoritism, fear and retribution creep in. If we can name that as domination, and recognize where it leads, we can choose in our own decisions which compass points elevate us and which push us down. RK: Let me play devil’s advocate: The “how” matters because it affects people now. But fast-forward 500 years, history only remembers the outcome. On that timescale, does the “how” even matter, or should judgment just be about the outcome?

AN: When I read history, I think about impact because written history is only a sliver of what actually happened. I feel the contrast: Lives were affected, courses of history were changed, suffering was created. That’s the domination mindset at work: building hierarchies of whose life is valued more, and whose is valued less. And I don’t think the “how” disappears into the outcome; it shapes what the outcome becomes. When an institution is built on domination, it keeps reproducing that, so what history records as the result is really the “how,” compounded. I try to imagine, 500 years ago, what was valued, and what the consequences of that were, consequences we can still see as scar tissue in our lives today. You might say ancient history doesn’t touch you,

Protecting our own standing in that moment can mean treating others as resources rather than as people. That’s when people get hurt. but we’re all living in the same humanity, generation after generation, and the world still isn’t at peace. So what values brought us to this point, inside ourselves, in moments where something in our gut says “this feels wrong” and we do it anyway? That erosion, that lack of integrity, of authenticity, has consequences too, in our health, our relationships with ourselves and with the world. RK: Fair enough. A couple more questions. First: If you were back in high school or first-year college, what would you tell yourself to get ready for the judgment calls ahead, as team captain, coach, thought leader? AN: I’d say: reflection and self-awareness. Pause from the doing because it’s only by slowing down that we give ourselves room to connect with our hearts and understand what really matters. Think of a boat just 1 percent off course. Left uncorrected, that 1 percent takes you somewhere entirely different over time. Developing an orientation, a compass of the heart, even at a young age, brings so much more clarity to counter the confusion around us and helps chart a determined course. We need clarity to see, a grounded place to feel and decide from, so we have real discernment. And then, will. All of this takes energy and work. RK: On my calendar, I block off “focus time” every day, though my son teases me and calls it “goof-off time.” He’s not wrong, and it’s exactly what I tell my students to do: 30 minutes of doing nothing, no phone, just being. Last question: What should I have asked you that I didn’t? AN: We tend to misunderstand leadership as just gaining more information, more hard skills. There’s a misconception that soft skills are “soft,” they’re not. Hard skills used to mean hardware; soft skills meant everything else. But it’s the fundamental thing, our relationship with ourselves, that lets us relate to other people and situations, and gives us the compass points to ask: Can I orient toward virtue? We can still win, still earn, still create abundance, but do

it in a way that reduces the harm we cause ourselves and others along the way. We go first, ourselves. RK: Our research shows people trust a leader when they see capability (the hardware) alongside integrity and benevolence (the so-called soft skills), and that’s when judgment really earns trust. AN: We didn’t touch on the fact that we’re all going to fail. That’s actually where trust gets built or broken because none of us are all-knowing. That moment can build integrity or break it, depending on whether it creates pride and a lack of humility, or genuine accountability. The incongruency between what leaders say and what they do gets tested most in these moments, setbacks, failures, things not going to plan, and whether we’re willing to acknowledge our role in it first. That’s where the real trade-off shows up. Protecting our own standing in that moment can mean treating others as resources rather than as people. That’s when people get hurt. RK: I’d add one more word to that: courage. AN: Courage, the root word is heart. Without heart, we can’t go forward because there will be vulnerability and fear, and we can’t know what the future holds. What’s the motivating force that keeps us moving forward anyway? It comes from the heart. RK: One of my students recently gave me a great example of good judgment. They hadn’t done what they were supposed to, and instead of coming to me to complain about a bad grade, they owned it: admitted the mistake and proposed solutions to address it. That, to me, was strong judgment at a young age. AN: That’s meaningful action, and that’s how we learn. I think many leaders mistake surface-level change, shifting a policy or a new procedure, for meaningful change. Real change means questioning things at a deeper level: What was the environment that created this problem in the first place? That’s where the real work is, resolving it at the root, rather than just pushing the same problem from one place to the next. RK: Thank you so much, Andrea. AN: Likewise, thank you for your wisdom and your care. At the end of the day, none of us live forever, and this will be our body of work: how we made people feel, how we accomplished it. We have to reckon with that eventually, so why not contemplate it now, and put our lives on a better course while we still can? L In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 17

ERE ARE THE FACTS: 55 million women in the U.S., 2 million more each year, 20 percent of the overall workforce — and growing. These stats refer to the menopause journey, and you’d think they would mean every organization has this stage of life on its radar. And when you consider every woman will experience the menopause journey if she lives long enough, you really have to wonder why it isn’t. There is a second reason to wonder, and it has to do with judgment accumulated over years of leading. Judgment is not a shortcut. Now consider who this affects — women in their mid-40s to mid-50s. That finding presents organizations with a judgment question of their own.

THE EXPERIENCE DIVIDEND The judgment your C-suite cannot afford to lose. BY Z. COLETTE EDWARDS, M.D., M.B.A.

» WHAT IS MENOPAUSE? Menopause itself is the single day when a person has gone 12 consecutive months without a menstrual period. It represents the end of the reproductive stage of life. But this stage of life actually is a journey. It typically begins in the mid-40s in perimenopause, but six percent of women experience the onset of menopause when they are younger than 45. It continues for the rest of a woman’s life in post-menopause.

» THE MENOPAUSE JOURNEY X CAREER TRAJECTORY According to the Society for Women’s Health Research, for most women the menopause transition arrives when they are at the peak trajectory of their career: senior leadership roles, profit and loss ownership, board seats and perhaps the last big promotion or two before retirement planning begins. This timing is a certainty leaders can ill afford to overlook or ignore. It’s a signal about where some of an organization’s most seasoned talent sits and what it will take to recruit and retain that segment of the workforce. Paying attention to it means women who are already succeeding continue to ➤ ➤ ➤ 18

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contribute to the economic health of a company’s bottom line and a deeper bench of talent in the pipeline.

» THE JUDGMENT YEARS: WHAT THE DATA

and developing her team doesn’t reset because she’s navigating a hormonal transition. What changes is whether the environment around her is built to support that track record.

SAYS ABOUT WOMEN IN THIS CAREER STAGE

» THE COST OF GETTING THIS WRONG

When many people hear the word menopause, what often comes to mind is a woman in her 50s who is sweating, moody and faltering in her work performance. The reality is quite different. Women in the age band that overlaps with the menopause journey are an extraordinary cohort. They are among the organization’s strongest decision-makers. The research below is usually seen as leadership effectiveness — read it as evidence of judgment.

A 2023 Mayo Clinic study of more than 4,400 women found the U.S. economy loses an estimated total of $26.6 billion a year in health costs and lost productivity/missed days at work ($1.8 billion) tied to unmanaged menopausal symptoms, with 13 percent of them experiencing an adverse work outcome. A 2024 Society for Women’s Health Research study discovered one in four women considered turning down, or didn’t pursue, a leadership opportunity because of menopausal symptoms, and two in five considered leaving or actually left their jobs.

• Well-known leadership developers, Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, have found a consistent pattern: Women rated as more effective leaders than men on 17 of 19 leadership competencies (including taking initiative, driving for results, practicing self-development, resilience and integrity), and the overall gap between men’s and women’s leadership effectiveness ratings was larger than in the pre-pandemic data, suggesting women’s leadership advantage may become more pronounced, not less, under pressure. • Much of that leadership edge traces back to skills that have been historically designated as “soft,” but which turn out to be quite hard and invaluable. A large-scale study by the Hay Group/Korn Ferry, drawing on data from 55,000 professionals across 90 countries and using the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory, found women outperformed men in emotional self-awareness and empathy, coaching and mentoring, influence, inspirational leadership, conflict management, organizational awareness, adaptability, and teamwork. There’s a direct correlation between high emotional intelligence and the leaders who deliver stronger business results, which makes this data a business case as much as one about leadership capabilities. • Gallup’s analysis of 27 million employees across 195 countries found female managers also outscored male managers on engagement measures.

Organizations that exercise judgment and take action are positioning themselves to attract and keep the experienced, high-performing talent pool every company is competing for. A 2026 SHRM Employee Benefits Study of more than 5,472 organizations found only 27 percent offered menopause support or resources. Deloitte found that at companies it identified as “gender equality leaders,” 62 percent of women say they plan to stay with their employer more than three years, compared with just 13 percent at organizations that lag on gender equity. Read those numbers as a significant problem, because that’s what they represent.

» REASONS WHY A MENOPAUSE-FRIENDLY WORKPLACE MAKES SENSE

Additional research tells a parallel story about what happens when more women hold leadership roles overall. Studies by McKinsey, BCG and Cloverpop found respectively that gender diversity: • Was linked to stronger financial performance. • Meant 19 percent higher revenue related to innovation. • Made good decisions 25 percent more often. These facts don’t change because the menopause journey begins. A leader’s track record for driving results, building trust, 20

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Did you know? • Besides the risk of losing peak performers, there is an additional workplace phenomenon that isn’t as visible. Not quiet quitting, but quiet retreat. Many women take themselves out of the mix of opportunities for promotion, high-profile initiatives and more expansive leadership roles because of the impact of untreated symptoms. • WebMD Health Services’ 2025 Menopause in the Workplace Study found nearly 70 percent of women believe employers have a responsibility to offer menopause support, and more

symptoms for which there are solutions. Their physical and mental health shouldn’t take a nosedive because they weren’t educated about the effect the hormonal changes during the menopause journey can have on their body. And women shouldn’t have to stay silent because of what can be well-founded fear their career will be negatively impacted by erroneous assumptions about their abilities, simply because they’ve entered a new life stage.

» CONCRETE STEPS ORGANIZATIONS CAN TAKE NOW

than 50 percent said menopause-specific benefits would make them feel genuinely more supported at work and positively change how they view their employer altogether. • Twenty-six states have passed menopause-specific legislation or have bills in play, and in July 2026, a bill was introduced at the federal level. Providing the type of support and resources women need during the menopause journey doesn’t have to be a heavy lift, and there are many options to successfully address their symptoms and new-onset health risks. Organizations that exercise judgment and take action are positioning themselves to attract and keep the experienced, highperforming talent pool every company is competing for. Left unsupported, you’re funding your competitor’s leadership bench.

» THE MENOPAUSE JOURNEY IS AN OPPORTUNITY HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT Besides the opportunity to reduce turnover and pipeline leakage of key talent, there are compelling bonuses most organizations leave on the table. Increased productivity. Lower healthcare costs. Improved health and well-being. Reduced risk of both physical and mental health chronic conditions, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome, depression, anxiety and osteoporosis. And an increased return on investment of preexisting care, disease management and employee assistance programs. In 2026, there is no reason for women to suffer from

Supporting the menopause journey isn’t complicated, and it doesn’t require reinventing benefits infrastructure. It does mean expectations set at the C-suite level that ripple through every level of the organization. • Implement a menopause policy distinct from general wellness language. It communicates this is a natural life stage like any other, not a private problem employees have to hide and solve alone, and that women’s needs are taken seriously. • Enhance healthcare coverage and workplace flexibility. Provide access to and coverage of care by menopause-trained clinicians (or those with a track record of expertise and experience) and treatment options, including virtual consultations, hormone therapy, non-hormonal medications, evidence-based integrative modalities like acupuncture, hybrid work options and environmental accommodations. • Normalize the conversation. Employee resource groups, such as “menopause journey champions,” and open internal communication reduce the stigma and stereotypes. Organizations that have taken these steps report their action strengthens trust as well as employee satisfaction and morale. • Train managers specifically. Focused manager training — covering what to say, what adjustments are reasonable and how to apply them consistently, and where to route someone for support and resources — reduces the likelihood of a legal risk management issue and shortens the time it takes for employees to get the help they need.

» REFRAMING THE STORY TO REFLECT REALITY Women within the menopause journey age band are, by most performance measures, among the most effective leaders in an organization. The question to be answered is whether the workplace is built to support, keep and enable them to thrive. It took decades for pregnancy to be destigmatized and supported through benefits, education, workplace policies, and for a culture to develop that (generally) no longer holds a woman’s reproductive stage in the life cycle against her. Though they might not have realized it at the time, companies lost the benefits which accrue to a gender-diverse workplace with women in leadership positions. Let’s not make the same mistake again when it comes to those with some of the best judgment in an organization. L In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 21

WHAT GOOD JUDGMENT LOOKS LIKE Data abundance does not guarantee better choices. To thrive in the age of AI, organizations must treat human judgment as a discipline — not a innate trait. BY FAITH GLAZIER

UDGMENT IS OFTEN defined as “the ability to make a decision, or form an opinion objectively, authoritatively, and wisely, especially in matters affecting action; good sense; discretion.” It’s a word we use constantly in leadership. “She has great judgment.” “That was a lapse in judgment.” Yet most organizations couldn’t tell you how they’d recognize it if they saw it, let alone how to build more of it. As a management consultant for 35 years, I’ve watched leaders exercise judgment in everything from routine promotion decisions to entering new global markets, and the patterns are more consistent than most people expect. The pattern I’ve seen repeated across those decades is that 22

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good judgment draws on data and analysis without being ruled by it, stays open to a case that cuts against instinct, and can explain the trade-off it lands on rather than just defend the number. It shows up the same way whether someone is weighing a promotion or a market entry, which is what makes it a discipline you can examine and build, not a talent some people are simply born with. This question matters differently now. Artificial intelligence has made data, analysis and even recommendations cheaper and faster to produce than at any point in my career. That sounds like good news for decision-making, and often it is, but it also shifts the bottleneck. It used to be that the hard part was getting enough information to make an informed call. Increasingly, the hard part

is knowing which of the abundant, AI-generated answers to trust, when to override one, and when a confident-looking output is missing the one thing that actually matters: judgment.

» HOW DO YOU KNOW IF JUDGMENT IS GOOD OR BAD? The honest answer: Often you don’t, not right away. Judgment gets evaluated on outcomes, but outcomes are noisy. A good decision can produce a bad result, and a bad one can get lucky. What distinguishes good judgment from bad is visible before the outcome arrives, in the process itself. Good judgment starts from a wide enough aperture. It draws on data, but doesn’t stop there, incorporating experience and multiple points of view before narrowing to a decision. I saw the opposite

play out when we measured promotion decisions almost entirely on hours logged on billable client work. The data was clean and easy to defend, but it didn’t capture whether someone spent that time on mundane tasks or on strategic work that moved a client’s business. A leader exercising good judgment looks past the numbers and asks what it represents; one exercising poor judgment lets the number make the decision because it’s easier to defend later. Good judgment also means being willing to be uncomfortable. It is being willing to challenge an analysis everyone in the room is nodding along to. I worked with a client optimizing their sales and operations planning process. We built an algorithm to determine the most cost-efficient batch sizes and schedules. The output was clean and well-reasoned. But the heads of sales, In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 23

production and supply chain still met regularly to review it because the “optimal” answer on paper sometimes would have shorted a strategic client account to save a marginal amount on cost. That’s good judgment: Not ignoring the data but knowing when to override it and being able to explain why. One useful test, independent of outcome: Did the leaders seek out information that disagreed with their instinct? Did they invite perspectives different from their own? Could they explain, not justify, but genuinely explain the trade-off they were weighing? Poor judgment tends to lean on a single data point, resist dissent or default to whatever’s easiest to defend.

» CAN YOU TRAIN FOR GOOD JUDGMENT? Yes, but not the way most companies try to. Judgment isn’t a workshop skill; it’s a craft built through repeated exposure to real decisions, with feedback. • Deliberate exposure to ambiguity. Judgment only develops where the answer isn’t obvious from data alone. Leaders protected from ambiguous calls never get the reps. The consultants and clients I have worked alongside who have the sharpest judgment were given real decision authority early, including room to get it wrong on something that mattered, but not catastrophically. • Feedback loops that connect decisions to outcomes. Most organizations fail here. Decisions get made, time passes, and nobody circles back to ask whether the call was right and why. Without that loop, people accumulate confidence, not learning. • Proximity to people with better judgment than you. This is apprenticeship more than training. Watching how experienced leaders weigh a decision — what questions they ask, what they ignore, where they push back — teaches things no case study can. • A wider library of pattern recognition. Much of what reads as “good instincts” is pattern recognition from having seen many versions of a situation before. It’s trainable through case histories, post-mortems and conversations with people who’ve navigated similar terrain. This is exactly where AI can help — not by deciding, but by surfacing more patterns and precedents faster than any person could recall, expanding the material judgment draws on. What you can’t train is judgment in a vacuum, disconnected from real stakes. Frameworks alone don’t produce judgment any more than knowing chess rules produces a strong player. It comes from playing the game, repeatedly, with honest feedback.

» WHY THIS MATTERS MORE IN THE AGE OF AI This has become more urgent, now that AI can produce analysis and recommendations almost instantly. Abundance of analysis doesn’t equal quality of decision. It shifts where the risk sits. When good analysis was scarce, judgment was tested mostly in gathering the right inputs. Now that AI can generate confident-sounding answers in seconds, the test has moved downstream: Can you tell a genuinely sound 24

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recommendation from a polished but flawed one, and do you have the standing to override it when it’s wrong? This is a harder test, for a specific reason: AI output tends to look uniformly confident regardless of how reliable it is. A spreadsheet missing a key variable usually looks incomplete, but a well-written AI recommendation missing the same variable can look just as authoritative as one that has everything right. The good call and the bad call increasingly arrive looking identical, and only judgment can tell them apart. There’s a quieter risk too: The more leaders lean on AI to produce answers, the less experience they get building the judgment needed to evaluate those answers well. If AI absorbs more of the ambiguous middle ground, running scenarios, drafting recommendations, pre-narrowing options, then leaders risk losing exactly the practice that builds judgment in the first place. As intelligence gets cheap, judgment is what determines whether that abundance produces better decisions or just faster, more confident-looking mistakes.

» WHAT’S NEEDED FROM A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE The first habit is intellectual humility. This requires a genuine willingness to be wrong and to look for evidence that you are, rather than evidence that confirms what you already believe. The leaders with the worst judgment I’ve encountered weren’t unintelligent; they were simply overly confident with familiar domains and excessively cautious in unfamiliar domains. Leaders need to be aware of their own blind spots and to be open to other inputs that judgment depend on. The second is the discipline to slow down on decisions that deserve it. Most judgment failures are failures of speed, not insight. A third, newly important habit is to treat AI output the way you’d treat a smart but inexperienced analyst’s work. It is useful and fast, but not self-verifying. You should treat an AI recommendation the way you would respond to a junior team member’s recommendation. You should ask “What information did you not have access to?” and “What would change your answer?” An inexperienced analyst hasn’t yet built the pattern library that lets a senior leader sense when a confident-looking output is missing something, and AI makes it easy to skip the very struggle that builds this capability. Producing a clean analysis no longer proves an analyst understands the problem; it may only prove they prompted well. Building that instinct now means running the numbers by hand often enough to notice what a shortcut skipped. It also means treating every AI-assisted answer as a draft to challenge, rather than a finished one to submit. Senior leaders have an outsized role to play here: They should be asking the analyst to explain and defend any recommendation. Later, the senior leader should close the feedback loop by circling back on what actually

As intelligence gets cheap, judgment is what determines whether that abundance produces better decisions or just faster, more confident-looking mistakes.

happened, sharing other insights and explaining why a specific decision was made. Skip that investment, and an inexperienced analyst can become fluent at producing answers without ever building the judgment to know which ones to trust.

» WHAT’S NEEDED FROM A SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE • Decision rights that match decision risk. When I worked with a pharmaceutical client evaluating 30-plus countries for global expansion, the data and analysis were extensive. We evaluated population, market size, the regulatory environment and the healthcare infrastructure. But the final call was made by the leadership team, not the analysis, because the organization had built decision rights that put the highest-stakes calls in the hands of the people with the most relevant experience and the most at stake in getting it right. In addition to the analysis, they also considered their personal experience in the markets and where they had relationships. Organizations that let analysts or models make consequential calls by default, simply because the output looks rigorous, are optimizing for speed and against judgment. • Metrics that don’t accidentally punish good judgment. If your measurement systems reward the easily quantified proxy (e.g., hours logged, cost of goods sold, top-line sales) over the harder-to-measure but more important outcome, you train your best people to stop exercising judgment and start optimizing the metric instead. Systems should be designed to make room for

the qualitative override, not penalize it. • Multiple points of view built into the process, not left to chance. The sales and operations planning team’s good collective judgment wasn’t an accident; the organization built a recurring forum where sales, production and supply chain operations were required to weigh in together because no single function’s data told the whole story. • Psychological safety to challenge the data. None of this works if people are afraid to say, “I think the model is wrong here.” Organizations that punish dissent, even subtly, end up with leaders who defer to the analysis because that's the safer call to defend later. • Explicit checkpoints where a human, not a model, signs off. Organizations need to deliberately decide which decisions can be automated and which require a human to review the recommendation and have real authority to overrule it. Leave that line implicit, and it gets drawn by default in favor of speed. Good judgment isn’t a trait some leaders are born with. It’s personal discipline and organizational design, built and reinforced over time. As AI makes intelligence cheap and abundant, judgment is what determines whether that abundance produces genuinely better decisions or just faster, more confident versions of the same mistakes. The leaders and organizations that take it seriously now, while everyone else assumes the tools will handle it, are the ones who will still be making the right calls when it matters most. L In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 25

READING THE FIELD Leadership depends not simply on knowledge or skill, but on learning to recognize patterns, weigh consequences and act wisely amid uncertainty. BY MAHESH DAAS, Ed.D.

HE PITCH is enormous, and for long stretches, Lionel Messi barely moves through it. He strolls, hands loose, reflective, eyes tracking something the cameras haven't found yet. Defenders drift past him unconcerned. Then a back line shifts to cover a run, and something in his stance changes — a half-turn of the hips, weight onto the balls of his feet. The ball arrives, not to where he was, but to where the defense’s shape has just quietly broken. Three touches. The net ripples before the crowd has finished processing that he moved at all. At 39, during the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Messi covered less distance per 90 minutes than any of the 618 outfield players who logged at least that much time on the pitch.1 Nearly two-thirds of his movement was simply walking.2 Yet Argentina won six of its seven matches, reached the World Cup final, and Messi finished among the tournament’s leading scorers with eight goals. His brilliance did not deliver the trophy by itself; soccer, like leadership, is ultimately a team sport. But his performance revealed something deeper than technical skill. The stillness was never idleness. It was reconnaissance. What separates Messi from the players sprinting past him is not skill, exactly — plenty of them can strike a ball as cleanly. It is judgment: the capacity to read a scene most people are still watching unfold, to know what a shifting defense is about to become before it becomes it, and to act only when the position is worth acting on.3 The goal is the visible decision. Everything that made it inevitable — the reading, the patience, the timing — never shows up on the highlight reel. Judgment is related to decision-making, but it is not a decision. It is the cultivated capacity from which decisions arise — the ground, formed and enriched over years through experience, reflection and revision. Individual decisions are the plants that emerge from it. The quality of what grows depends substantially on the richness of the ground. Education has long emphasized knowledge and skills. But leadership demands something beyond technical expertise. What ultimately matters is whether a leader can interpret a situation, weigh competing values and consequences, and make a sound

decision amid uncertainty. The longer I have worked in academic leadership, the less convinced I have become that education gives sufficient attention to how that capacity is formed. We know how to teach skills, competencies and knowledge. We know far less about how experience, reflection, responsibility and consequence combine to make someone more judicious over time. Knowledge answers what. Skills answer how. Competencies demonstrate that one can. Judgment answers whether one should. Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis begin their book Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls with a parable. A novice asks an accomplished leader what accounts for his success. The answer is good judgment. Asked where that came from, the leader points to experience — and when pressed about the source of experience, he acknowledges the role of bad judgments.4 Many experienced leaders recognize themselves in this story. Careers are shaped by good decisions and mistakes: missed signals, flawed assumptions, lessons learned in hindsight. Yet the story is incomplete. If experience automatically produced good judgment, every leader would grow wiser with age, and every additional year in office would improve the quality of decisions. We know this is not so. Some people repeat the same mistakes for decades. Others develop real judgment in a remarkably short time. The difference lies not in how much experience someone accumulates, but in what they learn from it — a distinction less between experience and inexperience than between examined and unexamined experience, as John Dewey5 and later Donald Schön each argued from different angles.6 Reflection of two kinds — reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action — is what turns experience into a revised mental model. Reflection-in-action keeps today’s decision aligned with tomorrow’s purpose. Reflection-onaction makes tomorrow’s judgment wiser than today’s. No leader sets out to make a bad judgment. The initial choice usually feels defensible given the information, assumptions and constraints at hand. Only later do consequences reveal what was missed. The decisive question is what follows: Does the leader defend the decision and move on, or ask what assumptions failed and what must change before the next call? Ideally, the next decision is made by someone who is no longer quite the same person who made the last one. This is why leadership is so thoroughly an exercise in judgment. In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 27

Who do we hire, trust, promote or remove? Which opportunities deserve scarce resources? When should an organization preserve what it has, and when should it break with precedent? Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal offer a powerful framework: judging the frame through which the situation is being understood.7 Their four-frame model asks leaders to examine organizations structurally, through roles, rules and systems; humanly, through lived experience; politically, through competing interests, alliances and the work of securing support; and symbolically, through meaning, culture and identity. Most consequential decisions contain all four dimensions, even when one appears dominant. A budget cut may look structural, but it is also human, political and symbolic. Judgment requires recognizing which realities the initial framing has left out and then making the right call. The Bolman and Deal framework is useful, but I came to believe it left out an important dimension: how disparate considerations are made coherent. In Leading with Aesthetics: The Transformational Leadership of Charles M. Vest at MIT, I examined how a presidency transformed an institution through judgments about space, design, human experience and identity.8 These decisions braided together mission, risk, institutional culture and competing constituencies. Aesthetic judgment was how those disparate elements became coherent institutional action. Judgment has a useful analogue in jurisprudence. A judge does not rule from instinct alone, but through evidence, precedent, interpretation and an obligation to explain the decision. Leadership judgment differs from judicial judgment, yet the analogy is instructive. Neither is an innate talent. Both are cultivated through experience, reflection and disciplined reasoning, requiring an honest understanding of the situation, the

ARCHITECTURE OF JUDGMENT PRACTICE – ACADEMY INTEGRATION THROUGH REFLECTION

REFLECTION examine question reframe synthesize learn

PRACTICE real world experience context clients constraints complexity responsibility consequences

REFLECTION IS THE JOINT WHERE EXPERIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE MEET, TRANSFORMING EXPERIENCE INTO JUDGMENT.

people involved and one’s own blind spots. There is an important distinction, too, between judgment in this sense — judiciousness — and being judgmental in human relationships. Judiciousness delays conclusion long enough to consider context and the possibility that one’s first read is wrong. A genuinely educated person should become less judgmental toward others and more judicious in decisions. How, then, does judgment develop — and how would an institution know it was happening? The difficulty is that classroom success and real-world success are not the same thing. A student can learn to satisfy a professor, master assigned material and perform well within known criteria. Professional life is not so orderly. The client is not a professor; the board is not an examination committee. The problem is rarely given in advance, the criteria are contested, and the consequences are borne by people other than the decision-maker — the kind of “wicked problem” Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber described decades ago.9 Most educational models separate learning from responsibility: Students study first and practice later or alternate between the two through internships and co-ops. These have real value, but they connect education and practice episodically rather than continuously and reflectively. The Boston Architectural College (BAC) has long operated differently. Students study and practice simultaneously, with workplace learning built into the degree — tracked, assessed and connected to academic outcomes, not adjacent to the curriculum but one of the roots that sustains it. I have described this model elsewhere as “an inconvenient education.” The inconvenience is not incidental. It comes from refusing to isolate learning from responsibility. Students do not

RETURNS TO PRACTICE renewed action new decisions new consequences

REVISED JUDGMENT deeper understanding better decisions wider perspective awareness of blind spots ethical responsibility

ACADEMY theory research critique history/precedent methods/evidence disciplinary depth alternative perspectives

inputs (forces) reflective joint (transformation) cycle of judgment

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

FROM KNOWLEDGE TO JUDGMENT ▼ CONCEPT

▼ QUESTION IT ANSWERS

▼ NATURE

▼ EXAMPLE

Knowledge What do I know? Facts, concepts, principles

Understanding building codes, finance, leadership theory

Skill What can I do? A learned capability

Sketching, negotiating, coding, public speaking

Competency Can I reliably perform?

Managing a project, leading a meeting, designing a building

Integrated knowledge, skills, behaviors applied to a defined task

Judgment

What should I do Discernment here, now and why? under uncertainty

first acquire knowledge in the protected environment of school and only later test it in the world; they do both at once, carrying the pressures of practice back into the classroom while taking academic ideas immediately into professional settings. The value is not simply earlier experience — it is the recurrence: action, reflection, learning, revision and renewed action, week after week. A difficult client meeting can return to the classroom as something to be examined rather than merely endured. A design decision made under pressure can be reconsidered through critique. Practice exposes the limits of academic knowledge; education interrupts the habits of practice. That friction is where experience becomes reflection, and reflection becomes judgment. An institution can assess this directly — not merely the answers students give, but the quality of the reasoning that produces them. Students can be presented with discipline-specific situational judgment cases involving incomplete information and real consequences, then evaluated on how they frame the problem, weigh alternatives, and revise their position as new information appears. Lawrence Kohlberg and Anne Colby offer a model for scoring the structure of reasoning rather than the conclusion alone;10 Donald Schön adds reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action; Tichy and Bennis extend the assessment through preparation, the call itself, execution and long-term results. Together, these let an institution measure judgment as a developing proficiency rather than a single test score. Two kinds of evidence support the claim, corresponding to before and after graduation. During the program, students do not advance year to year by grade alone; portfolio reviews function as a gate, requiring students to demonstrate readiness before progressing — a check on judgment under real, if bounded, stakes. After graduation, the stronger evidence is what the profession itself entrusts to graduates on its own terms. The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards reports that the average candidate takes 13 years after graduation to become licensed. BAC students complete NCARB’s Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure before graduation at a rate eight times the national average; seven BAC graduates in this cohort satisfied all the requirements for licensure upon graduation. According to the federal College Scorecard data,

Deciding whether to preserve historic building, postpone a merger or change a design under conflicting constraints

BAC’s B. Arch graduates post the nation’s highest median earnings five years out, while its M. Arch. ranks second highest. By the College’s surveys, corroborated by the practice portfolios every student assembles, 46 percent of graduating students already hold positions managing others on graduation day. Yes, on graduation day. If judgment shows itself in what others are willing to entrust to you once the stakes are real, this is what that entrustment looks like: faster licensure than the national average, and rapid advancement into roles where the cost of poor judgment is high. The purpose of education is not to protect students from error or postpone responsibility until the degree is complete. It is to create conditions in which decisions can be made, reflected on, revised and tried again while the stakes are still manageable. Good judgment may grow from experience, but only reflection turns experience into learning. That is why education for judgment is necessarily inconvenient: It places knowledge in contact with consequence and asks students to act before every answer is available. Its real test is not what graduates know when they leave, but whether they go on becoming more judicious. Messi’s eight goals will be replayed for years — each one a burst of three touches, a net rippling, a crowd on its feet. What won’t be replayed is the walking: the long, unglamorous stretches when nothing appeared to be happening, when he was reading a defense that hadn’t yet revealed its shape. That is where the goal was actually made. An inconvenient education does not shorten that walk. It insists that students take it while someone is still there to help them read the field. L 1 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), FIFA World Cup 2026™ Statistics, https://www.fifa.com/en/tournaments/mens/worldcup/canadamexicousa2026/statistics 2 Reuters, "Messi walked, Mbappé sprinted: What World Cup tracking data reveals," July 21, 2026. 3 Javier Fernández and Luke Bornn, "Wide Open Spaces: A Statistical Technique for Measuring Space Creation in Professional Soccer," MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, 2018. 4 Tichy, Noel M., and Warren G. Bennis. Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls. Portfolio, 2007. 5 Dewey, John. Experience and Education. Macmillan, 1938. 6 Schön, Donald A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books, 1983. 7 Bolman, Lee G., and Terrence E. Deal. Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership. 7th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2021. 8 Daas, Mahesh. Leading with Aesthetics: The Transformational Leadership of Charles M. Vest at MIT. Lexington Books, 2015. 9 Rittel, Horst W. J., and Melvin M. Webber. "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning." Policy Sciences, vol. 4, no. 2, 1973, pp. 155–169. 10 Colby, Anne, and Lawrence Kohlberg. The Measurement of Moral Judgment: Theoretical Foundations and Research Validation. Vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, 1987.

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 29

BEYOND THE DATA In an era of infinite data and artificial intelligence, a leader’s most critical asset remains the practice of considered judgment. BY LESLIE D. HIRSCH, M.P.A., FACHE AND ANDREW F. SIMON, Ph.D., Psy.D.

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

HAVE SEEN THIS MORE THAN ONCE.

Leaders make up their minds about a decision, believe they have thought it through and are ready to take action. In one instance, a hospital CEO colleague had decided to replace his contracted group of anesthesiologists and sought input about the decision. This is not a small move. Replacing a contracted hospital-based group of doctors is one of the most consequential and politically charged decisions a hospital leader can make. But this CEO was confident in his choice. When pressed on whether he had the organizational alignment he needed, whether his medical staff leadership was fully behind him and the groundwork had been laid, he went quiet. “Probably not,” he said. To his credit, he waited, did the work that was needed, and a year or two later made the change successfully. This was a judgment call, and it turned out to be the difference between a potentially disastrous situation and success. ➤ ➤ ➤ In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 31

For decades the assumption in most organizations has been that better information produced better decisions. Build the right systems, hire the right analysts, get the right data to the right people and good outcomes would follow. Today, we see artificial intelligence (AI) taking this assumption to its logical extreme. Huge amounts of information are now available and arriving faster than most leaders can meaningfully absorb. This has exposed something that the best leaders have always known: Data and information are not judgment. The person making the call must decide what all the information means, what may be missing and what needs to happen.

» A MORE COMPLICATED STORY One of the reasons the judgment of leaders is so important these days is because AI is not delivering the bias-free information originally predicted. It is well documented that humans are biased decision-makers. Our emotions can interfere with our judgment. We also have tendencies that shape our perceptions and decisions. So, it is no surprise that some of the early promise of AI was appealing. We could remove or at least reduce the biases in decision-making if we removed the human from the equation. But the research is telling another story. AI is demonstrating biases in its own decision-making. For instance, when AI systems have been fed information generated by another AI along with information generated by a human and 32

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

asked to combine the data and draw a conclusion, the AI places a greater value on the information generated by the other AI. This may just be the tip of the iceberg. Bias may be lurking within AI systems in ways we do not yet understand. Leaders handing over decision-making to AI, assuming the output is cleaner than their own thinking, may be magnifying the bias problem.

» WHAT GOOD JUDGMENT ACTUALLY REQUIRES In our view, good judgment is not a personality trait or some inherent quality built into one’s DNA. It is a discipline developed through practice. What follows are the core components of good judgment. Rather than a formula, this is a way of thinking that the best leaders build into how they work. The basis of good judgment starts with trust. Every decision a leader makes either builds or erodes the confidence of the people around them. Leaders who understand this treat every call, large or small, as a moment that adds to or subtracts from the trust placed in them. Trust is built through consistency over time. Keep your word, be honest about what you do and do not know, and be transparent with people even when the news is hard to deliver. Good judgment is also inextricably linked to an organization’s mission. Is what we are about to do consistent with why this organization exists? That question alone eliminates a surprising number of bad ideas before they gain momentum.

Part of what anchors good judgment to mission is the discipline of thinking through consequences before acting. Who will be affected by this decision and how? What is the sequence of events that follows once we commit? What are the unintended consequences we have not yet considered? Leaders who ask these questions before they move are not being indecisive. They are doing the work that separates a good decision from one that simply felt right in the moment. Consider, for instance, a merger situation. While the instinct here is often to move fast and sort out the impact on people later, this is a common formula for exactly the kind of instability that leads to failed mergers. Good judgment also lives in the relationships you hold with the people around you. The leader who makes every significant call in isolation is making decisions, but not necessarily exercising good judgment. Getting honest input requires that the people around you feel safe enough to give it. If your team is telling you only what they think you want to hear, the problem is not them. Leaders create a safe environment by making it clear through their own actions that disagreement is welcome and contrary views are not only tolerated but necessary. There is a meaningful difference between building consensus and managing

In the end, good judgment and the integrity that goes with it is not a feature of a system or an output of an algorithm. It is, instead, the most essential thing a leader offers the organization they serve. by consensus. The first makes you better informed. The second leaves you waiting for the group instead of leading it. None of this can be fully learned from a book or a framework alone. Judgment improves with experience. Leaders get better at making decisions over time because they have lived through enough consequential choices to recognize patterns, anticipate reactions and catch themselves before they repeat old mistakes. There is no substitute for that and no shortcut to getting there. That is what the CEO with the anesthesia group skipped. He had information and a seemingly solid rationale, but he had not considered the full organizational landscape he was about to

change. Because his medical staff leadership was not aligned, the groundwork had not been laid. Moving forward would likely have triggered exactly the kind of institutional crisis that could cause a CEO to lose their job and potentially disrupt patient care. It only took a few well-pointed questions to redirect his attention toward a better understanding of the situation and what he needed to do in advance to be successful. This kind of perspective shift caused him to question his confidence and pause before moving forward. Unchecked confidence of this sort is one of the most common roots of poor leadership decisions.

» WHEN EMOTION TAKES THE WHEEL Another factor that derails even the most experienced leaders is emotion. While our feelings and reactions and those of our team can provide information, we need to be wary of when our judgment is being distorted. Anger can limit openness. Fear can trigger a need for action. A sense of urgency can push someone to act impulsively. In the middle of a crisis, the mood of the room can feel like a signal when it is nothing more than noise. Leaders must have the discipline to step outside their impulses and treat a situation as an observer would rather than as someone caught in the middle of it. We need to ask ourselves, What am I not seeing here? Situations often are not as they first appear. Leaders who have learned to pause before that first impulse hardens into a decision make better calls and have fewer calls they later regret. Emotion can activate the very distortions in thinking that careful judgment is designed to prevent. None of this means AI does not have a place in our organizations. It does. In health care, we are already seeing what it can do when it is used well. The nursing shortage is real, and AI is helping expand what clinical staff can accomplish in ways that benefit patients. What matters is how leaders engage with it. We want our physicians to consider what AI has to say, but we want the doctor making the final call. A physician who weighs what an algorithm recommends and then decides differently based on what they know about a patient is using technology instead of being used by it. That distinction applies to every leader in every organization. Using AI well is itself a judgment call, and the leader is the one who has to make it. What we have described here is not a new idea. Great leaders have always needed to know their people, stay anchored to their mission, manage their own emotions and build the kind of trust that makes honest input possible. What is new is the environment they are operating in. Leaders now have more information, more speed and more complexity than any previous generation faced. That knowledge of how to navigate it lives in the leader and in the relationships and experience they built over time. In the end, good judgment and the integrity that goes with it is not a feature of a system or an output of an algorithm. It is, instead, the most essential thing a leader offers the organization they serve. L In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 33

IN THE CRUCIBLE

The Wisdom Circle

WHY LEADERS MAKE BETTER DECISIONS WHEN WISDOM IS SHARED RATHER THAN CONCENTRATED AT THE TOP. BY TOM DAHLBORG

have watched brilliant leaders make decisions in isolation that later cost them everything. Not because they lacked intelligence, but because they lacked a circle. Good judgment, I’ve come to believe, is rarely a solitary act. It is built in relationship, tested in trust, and sharpened by the courage to be truly seen and truly heard. This is the story of how we discovered that, and how Circle changed the way we led, decided and cared for one another. Leader isolation silently alters judgment by narrowing perspectives, increasing stress and filtering out candid feedback.” (Think C-suite and the privileged seclusion of the ivory tower.) “Without a sounding board, leaders often make reactive calls, fall into cognitive biases [e.g., confirmation bias, overconfidence, anchoring], or rely too heavily on intuitive-based judgments over balanced, strategic risk assessment.”¹ Additional barriers to improved judgment include emotional factors (such as stress and fear) and environmental pressures (time constraints, information overload, peer pressure). 2 Linking strongly with these barriers is the lack of self-awareness — not having the ability to accurately assess one’s own biases, emotions, shadow, blind spots and other limitations.

Circle Process In a traditional hierarchy, leaders often hear what people think they want to hear. In a circle, leaders hear what they actually need to hear to improve judgment and make sound decisions. The circle process improves judgment by replacing 34

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

When leaders are willing to prioritize trust over performance, performance almost always follows.

isolated perspectives and thinking with collective, empathetic and holistic dialogue. Circle removes hierarchies, requires and cultivates deep active listening, encourages “speaking from the heart” and “listening with discernment,” trains one to witness their own internal state in preparation for looking deeply into their own mirror and honoring candid feedback received, and ensures each viewpoint, each lens, each voice is valued equally. At the Hygeia Foundation d/b/a True North Health Center a nonprofit research institute, innovation laboratory and integrated multispecialty group practice, is the first healthcare organization to utilize Circle process as the model of governance. The circle became our culture. We did so based on a combination of the ideas Christina Baldwin presented in her book Calling the Circle, the teachings of Paula Underwood and the guidelines of RelationshipCentered Care by the Fetzer Institute.

SIMON SINEK, LEADERSHIP EXPERT

Principles of Circle Process at True North • Rotating Leadership We leveled the playing field. While one person’s title, experience and gifts are as important as another’s,

leadership shifts according to the needs of the circle, and deferring to expertise (see High Reliability Organization, or, HRO principles). We continually found the wisdom and the resources needed to accomplish our goals most efficiently and effectively while engaging and empowering each member of our team in decision-making — embracing diverse perspectives, candid feedback, and improving our overall judgment and ability to execute. • Shared Responsibility Each person asks for what they need and offers what they can, trusting one another’s integrity and believing someone will step forward with sound judgment to meet the circle’s needs, complete the essential task, and honor our mission, all while living our values. • Consensus Decision-Making We made decisions through consensus building (while not succumbing to groupthink — we each spoke our truth with intention). Where all voices are listened to, where each lens of those in the circle was seen through, where all felt heard, respected, cared for. Where it was encouraged to agree to disagree. This led us to far better judgment and far better decisions based on the safety we created, the empathy we developed, and the ability for each circle member to share their voice even if initially it might have been a lone voice. As the executive director of the Hygeia Foundation (2005–11), I found that within the circle I shifted from a fixer to a witness as I suspended the urge to react immediately and strictly seeing through my own lens. I no longer listened to respond or even to understand in an effort to achieve my own goals, but rather I listened because I trusted, I respected, I valued the multiple lenses and I truly cared for each circle member — and thus my judgment became more measured, much more inclusive, and far more deeply informed. • Covenants and Agreements The use of covenants and agreements, such as We will hold stories or personal material in confidentiality and We listen to each other with compassion and curiosity, positioned all members to have a free and profound exchange, to respect a diversity of views, to enhance one’s judgment and the judgment of the circle, and to share responsibility for the well-being and direction of the group. Pathways to honor and achieve covenants and agreements were revised in circle by the circle as goals of the circle (and the circle itself) evolved (see PDSA quality improvement methodology). This allowed for better judgment and continuous improvement, as

we studied what was working and what was not and sought optimal impact for all those we were blessed to lead and to serve.

When we sit in a circle, we experience a stronger sense of community. Every person in the circle shares responsibility for its functioning [and improved judgment and decisionmaking.] THE CIRCLE WAY

Judgment and Decision-Making Research cited by Harvard Business Review suggests that strategic plans and initiatives frequently fail to achieve their intended outcomes, with estimates ranging from 60 percent to 90 percent. Our decision-making process, while sometimes taking longer than a traditional hierarchical model, always led to greater engagement and buy-in, deep and meaningful discussions, greater multi-lens understanding and improved judgment, enhanced communication pre-, during-, and post-decisionmaking, and an expedient and most effective implementation and execution. All voices were heard, were honored, were understood, and were incorporated throughout the process. Kristen Lombard, Ph.D., PMHCNS-BC (one of the original founders of the Hygeia Foundation) noted the simple guidelines of circle process provided a structure that allowed leaders, providers and the entire team to practice how to be more present with themselves and with others and to be more judicious. According to Lombard, “[Circle] increases our confidence, courage, trust and connects us more strongly with a sense of meaning in our work.”

Measurement According to Restorative Circle expert Kay Pranis, “Good judgment requires emotional data just as much as factual data. The circle process provides leaders with the psychological context that spreadsheets always miss.” Circle process positioned us to improve our collective judgment as we moved beyond limited measurement beliefs. Like many, I was a proponent of the theory “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I figured, “If Deming and Drucker (two quality and performance experts) said it, who am I to argue?” But over time, I learned they actually never said it — and — they never believed it. In health care specifically, we have been wasting resources, wasting people chasing after data that is not helpful, does not improve judgment, does not turn the dial, and does not position ourselves, our teams and our organizations to flourish. And thus, we must make peace with the fact that some performance indicators simply cannot In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 35

IN THE CRUCIBLE

be measured, and through circle process and our enhanced measurement belief, this is exactly what we did. And in doing so, we improved our judgment and were able to achieve, innovate and execute effectively in a variety of areas: peer review processes to improve care delivery, multivariate economic models to improve access to high-quality care, individualized patient care model creation in conjunction with high-integrity research protocols to translate current research to best meet the needs of the individual, credentialing and integrative care model creation to expand beyond limited thinking, the instilling of cultural respect and competence processes and beliefs to meet people where they are, and more.

Research and Circle Some years ago, I was blessed to co-chair the Hygeia Foundation Research Circle with Dr. Joe Semmes, hospice and palliative medicine certified, clinical assistant professor of medicine at Tulane University, and former physician and research lead for the Hygeia Foundation. And now as I reflect on the current state of clinical research and its healthcare implications: • “Evidence-based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialization of academia …” — British Medical Journal: The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine • “Only one in 10 medical treatments [10 percent] are supported by high-quality evidence …” — Journal of Clinical Epidemiology • “The problem is so widespread that the publication of fraudulent science is outpacing the growth rate of legitimate scientific publications.” — Northwestern University: “Organized scientific fraud is growing at an alarming rate, study uncovers” 36

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

Circle is the practice of imperfection and constant learning. Its capacity to hold us in moments of profound insight, transformation and heartfulness is unmatched. CHRISTINA BALDWIN

• “Only 18 percent of clinical recommendations are evidence-based.”— HealthExec.com: “Actionable Data. Informed Leaders. Optimized Outcomes.” Even more so, I cherish the Research Circle and its integrity and judgment to always ensure that only the highest-quality evidence was put forth and when/ if a study did not lead to the outcomes expected to transparently and accurately share the outcomes.

The Circle’s Impact • Circle Process is a tool to rehumanize health care (and business and beyond), build consensus, improve judgment, foster authentic team relationships, and expedite goal achievement through improved implementation and execution. • Circle eliminates executive isolation, encourages integrity and raw truth shared within reverent participatory relationship, exposes leadership blind spots, and leads to better judgment. • Circle provides a structured, iterative method where multidisciplinary teams regularly meet in an egalitarian format to discuss ethical dilemmas. • Circle slows down reactions, encouraging reflection (see the seven-second pause) as we listen to understand and because we truly care — all while reducing emotional bias as the process allows time for complex multi-angled data (including the measurable and unmeasurable) and additional views to be heard and understood and judgment improved. • Circle deepens empathy as trust and safety leads to deeper sharing and deeper understanding and caring. • Circle focuses on underlying root causes moving teams past surface-level symptoms of a problem to the driver(s) through multivariant lenses. • Circle secures authentic buy-in leading to deep understanding, better judgment and ease in execution. • Circle integrates human values with performance and impact. At the True North Health Center, circle process also helped to heal many of the multidisciplinary wounds we all felt (including moral injury), and nurtured our leaders, our providers and our entire team, personally and professionally — thus best positioning all of us to optimally engage patients and families and one another with good hearts and with good judgment for the betterment of all. L

1 Leadership in Isolation, Publication Workplace Weekly Leadership & Management & Supervision, January 09, 2026. 2 How Can Decision Making Be Improved?, Harvard Business Review, 2008.

EMPOWERING ENTREPRENEURS. STRENGTHENING COMMUNITIES. Entrepreneurship can be a pathway to opportunity. Through ImpactNJ: Urban Ventures Collaborative, Seton Hall’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship helps entrepreneurs across Northern New Jersey turn ideas into sustainable businesses and existing ventures into opportunities for growth. With practical training, mentorship and ongoing support, ImpactNJ gives entrepreneurs the tools to build stronger businesses — and stronger communities. PLE A SE VISIT

shu.edu/impactnj LEARN MORE

GREAT MINDS. Greater Purpose.

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 37

CASE STUDY

Brave New Purpose

THE NEW ROLE OF LEADERSHIP AS AN ARCHITECTURAL FRAMEWORK FOR WORKPLACE ADAPTATION. BY MI M I BRO OKS

very generation inherits defining leadership challenges. For some, it was industrialization. For others, globalization, quality or digital transformation. Baby Boomers face something different. For the first time in history, humanity is developing technologies capable of transforming how we learn, decide, create, communicate and solve problems at extraordinary speed and scale. The opportunities are immense. So are the responsibilities. The question is no longer simply whether organizations will change. The question is whether leaders can help people adapt while ensuring that technological capability remains aligned with human purpose. Leadership has entered a new era of responsibility. For generations, leadership has been understood primarily through the lens of the individual. We study great leaders. We celebrate their vision, admire their courage, and seek to understand the decisions that shaped organizations, institutions and societies. Leadership development has traditionally focused on strengthening the capabilities of individuals — improving communication, decisionmaking, influence, emotional intelligence and strategic thinking. These capabilities remain essential. Organizations will always need leaders who can inspire confidence, navigate uncertainty, and make difficult choices. Yet something important is changing. The environment in which leadership occurs is becoming more complex, more interconnected and more dynamic than at any point in modern history. Organizations face accelerating technological change, evolving workforce expectations, increasing stakeholder demands, and growing volumes of information. Decisions that once unfolded over

In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication

months now unfold over days. Problems that once remained within organizational boundaries now span functions, industries and geographies. The challenge is not simply that leaders must work harder. The conditions under which leadership occurs are changing. As a result, leadership itself is evolving. For much of modern organizational history, leadership was largely concerned with directing activity. Leaders established priorities, allocated resources, monitored performance, and intervened when results fell short. Those responsibilities remain important, but they are no longer sufficient. The defining leadership challenge of our time may be different. It may be creating the conditions that enable people to adapt successfully to a world changing faster than any previous generation has experienced. That means leadership judgment is expressed not only through the decisions leaders make, but through the environments they intentionally create for others to exercise sound judgment as well.

Leadership and Human Systems Leadership has always been a human endeavor. People follow leaders because they trust them. Organizations succeed because people contribute their talents, judgment, creativity and energy toward a shared purpose. Communities thrive because individuals work together to accomplish what none could achieve alone. Yet leadership never occurs in isolation. It occurs within human systems. These systems include the formal structures through which organizations operate. They also include culture, relationships, decision-making processes, information flows, incentives, norms and shared expectations. Together, they shape how people work together, how decisions are made, and how organizations respond to change. Organizations shape economies, communities, public trust and the technologies that increasingly define everyday life. The quality of leadership within them therefore extends beyond business outcomes. It influences how successfully people adapt to change, how consistently sound judgment is exercised throughout the organization, and how responsibly organizations fulfill their broader role in society. At their best, human systems create clarity, trust, accountability and alignment. They help people understand what matters, how decisions are made, and where they can contribute most effectively. At their worst, they create confusion, friction and fatigue. This distinction matters because many of the challenges organizations face today are not primarily technical or strategic. They are adaptive. As Ronald Heifetz, co-founder and principal of Cambridge Leadership Associates has argued, adaptive challenges cannot be solved by expertise or authority alone — they require people to learn, adjust and develop new ways of working as conditions change. The question is not simply whether organizations can change. It is whether people can adapt successfully within them. Leadership’s ultimate responsibility is to create the conditions that make that adaptation possible.

Complexity Is Not the Problem We often speak about complexity as though it were the primary obstacle facing modern organizations. Complexity is certainly increasing. Markets are interconnected. Technologies evolve rapidly. Customer expectations shift continuously. Global

Leadership cannot eliminate complexity. It can, though, create conditions that allow people to navigate it with confidence.

events create ripple effects across industries. Yet complexity itself is not necessarily the problem. Complexity is often unavoidable. Ambiguity, however, frequently is not. One of leadership’s most important responsibilities is not eliminating complexity. It is reducing unnecessary ambiguity. Many organizations unintentionally create environments where people struggle to understand priorities, decision rights, ownership or accountability. Teams spend valuable time determining who should make a decision, whether a decision has already been made, or which objective should take precedence. Each instance may appear insignificant. Collectively, they create a substantial burden. Every unresolved ownership question, conflicting priority or unclear decision pathway consumes energy that could otherwise be directed toward customers, innovation, problem-solving or growth. The cost is not simply inefficiency. The cost is diminished adaptive capacity. Adaptive capacity is an organization’s ability to respond effectively to change. It reflects the collective ability of people to learn, adjust, experiment, solve problems and move forward together as circumstances evolve. Organizations often focus on financial capital, technological capital and intellectual capital. Increasingly, adaptive capacity may prove just as important. When organizations exhaust that capacity navigating avoidable ambiguity, they become less responsive precisely when responsiveness is most needed. Leadership cannot eliminate complexity. It can, though, create conditions that allow people to navigate it with confidence. That may become one of leadership's most enduring responsibilities.

The Speed of Change and the Need for Adaptation Organizations have always had to adapt. What has changed is the pace, frequency and scale at which adaptation is now required. Across nearly every dimension of organizational life, change is becoming more continuous. Technologies evolve rapidly. New competitors emerge unexpectedly. Workforce expectations shift. Skills become obsolete more quickly. Customers demand greater responsiveness and personalization. As a result, adaptation is no longer an occasional In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 39

CASE STUDY

requirement, making continuous agility a core organizational capability for long-term survival. That reality changes the role of leadership. Leadership can no longer focus exclusively on directing work and evaluating results. Increasingly, leaders must create environments where learning occurs quickly, information flows effectively, decisions can be made with confidence, and people feel capable of navigating uncertainty together. The organizations that adapt most successfully are rarely those with the most elaborate plans. They are often those that learn fastest. At its core, adaptation is a human endeavor. People learn when they feel safe enough to ask questions, challenge assumptions, share concerns, and experiment with new approaches. They learn when information is accessible, trust is present, and mistakes become opportunities for insight rather than occasions for blame. These conditions do not emerge accidentally. Leadership creates them.

Why Artificial Intelligence Raises the Stakes Artificial intelligence is often described as a technological revolution, and rightfully so. Yet its 40

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Artificial intelligence can accelerate analysis, but it cannot determine what is meaningful... Those remain distinctly human responsibilities.

greatest significance may not lie in the technology itself, but in the extraordinary capabilities it places in human hands. For the first time, organizations can augment knowledge, accelerate discovery, automate decisions, and generate insight at a scale and speed that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. The opportunities are profound. They hold the potential to improve health care, education, scientific discovery, public services, business performance and countless aspects of everyday life. History suggests, however, that every transformational capability carries responsibility alongside opportunity. Artificial intelligence is no exception. As intelligent technologies become more capable, the questions leaders must answer fundamentally change. Leaders must ask not only what can be built, automated or accelerated, but also what should be built, what should always remain fundamentally human, and what responsibilities accompany unprecedented capability. For centuries, organizations operated in a world where information was scarce and expertise was concentrated. Leaders often created value because

they possessed information others did not. Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing those assumptions. Information is becoming abundant, analysis is increasingly accessible, and intelligence itself is becoming widely available. As capability expands, an entirely different set of leadership qualities grows in importance. Judgment, trust, purpose, ethics and accountability become increasingly valuable precisely because they cannot be delegated to technology. Artificial intelligence can accelerate analysis, but it cannot determine what is meaningful, define an organization's purpose, earn trust, or decide what values should guide difficult choices. Those remain distinctly human responsibilities. The rise of intelligent technologies therefore does not diminish the importance of leadership — instead, it's elevated. Leadership is no longer responsible only for organizational performance. Increasingly, leaders are responsible for ensuring that technological capability serves human purpose. Their role is not simply to adopt new technologies, but to exercise the wisdom and stewardship required to ensure those technologies strengthen people, organizations and society.

Leadership as a Design Responsibility Leadership is often evaluated by behavior — how leaders communicate, motivate and make decisions. These capabilities remain essential, but they represent only part of the leadership challenge. Increasingly, leadership also carries responsibility for design. Leaders shape the conditions under which people work together. They influence how information flows, how decisions are made, how accountability is established, and how learning occurs. Over time, these choices become embedded in the organization itself. They influence whether people experience clarity or confusion, trust or uncertainty, collaboration or fragmentation. These design choices matter because they determine how well an organization can adapt. They shape whether people can respond confidently to change, whether knowledge moves effectively across the organization, and whether good judgment can emerge consistently at every level. Importantly, this does not make leadership less human. It’s quite the opposite. The purpose of designing effective human

The challenge is no longer simply to adopt new technologies or improve organizational performance. It is to ensure that innovation strengthens people, reinforces trust, and remains aligned with purpose.

systems is not greater control. It is to create an environment where people can think clearly, collaborate effectively, exercise sound judgment, and contribute at their highest potential. The strongest organizations rarely depend upon a handful of extraordinary leaders. They create conditions in which leadership can emerge throughout the organization. Their resilience comes not only from individual capability, but from cultures that cultivate trust, learning, accountability and adaptability at every level. In an age of accelerating technological capability, thoughtful organizational design becomes an expression of responsible leadership.

The Leadership Challenge Ahead The future will undoubtedly require capable leaders. It will also require a broader understanding of what leadership demands. Leadership remains deeply personal. Character matters. Integrity matters. Courage matters. Empathy matters. Those qualities have always distinguished exceptional leaders, and they always will. At the same time, leadership is increasingly expressed through the conditions leaders create. The choices they make about organizational design, information flow, accountability, learning and technology shape an organization’s ability to adapt, innovate and fulfill its purpose. Artificial intelligence does not diminish that responsibility. It only magnifies it further. As organizations gain unprecedented capability, leadership becomes less about directing activity alone and more about ensuring that extraordinary capability is matched by equally thoughtful judgment. The challenge is no longer simply to adopt new technologies or improve organizational performance. It is to ensure that innovation strengthens people, reinforces trust, and remains aligned with purpose. The organizations that thrive in the years ahead will not simply be those that move fastest. They will be those that learn continuously, adapt thoughtfully, and remain deeply human while embracing increasingly intelligent technologies. In the end, leadership may be measured less by the outcomes leaders achieve than by the conditions they create — conditions that enable people to adapt, organizations to fulfill their purpose, and technological progress to advance human progress. L In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 41

POINT / COUNTERPOINT

When Reckoning Isn’t Enough

WHY DECISION-MAKERS MUST DISTINGUISH BETWEEN AI CALCULATION AND HUMAN ACCOUNTABILITY.

THE PROMISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: RECKONING AND JUDGMENT

RE VI EWED BY PAU L A AL EX ANDER , Ph.D., J. D., and STEPHEN WOOD, M .S .

By Brian Cantwell Smith

October 8, 2019

hile we are striving to stay current, we are not experts on artificial intelligence (AI), and the field is moving at light speed. Those who are experts may see much in Brian Cantwell Smith’s writing that we have missed or perhaps have been mooted by subsequent developments. That said, we think Smith’s primary value is in laying a foundation for discovering and discussing a borderline — one that is increasingly elusive — between a machine that does not care and humanity, which does. 42

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The MIT Press

Judgment, as used by Smith, refers to a quality of mind (someone has “good” or “poor” judgment, or perhaps “wisdom” or “understanding”); a faculty of mind, (what might be referred to as “prudence” — the capacity to weigh advantages and disadvantages and resolve thought into action); and an act of the mind.1 In this later context, Bertrand Russell said, “In every act of judgment, there is a mind which judges and there are terms concerning which it judges.” Using these three subcategories, the notion of judgment and the divide between a machine (AI) and the human mind can begin to be clarified and understood.

The Great Divide: What is Registered and What is Reality The comedian George Carlin did a bit about a tough guy who had a tattoo of barbed wire encircling his bicep. Carlin made hay by pointing out that the tattoo was only an image of barbed wire, rather than barbed wire itself. He mused on the fact that an image was hardly as intimidating as the real thing. Carlin’s comedy bit hinged on the wide gap between reality and a representation of reality. In the world of AI, Smith refers to this representation as registration, i.e., how computer systems must necessarily function — through the medium of electronic storage of data. Registration is based on counting.

involves a system’s giving priority to the world, over its internal state and representation — and over the patterns exemplified by any inputs, machinations and ‘interior’ processes.”6 What does Smith mean, “giving priority to the world”? In so many words, he is making a plea for understanding the nature of existence, of being itself. While this question occupies many philosophers and religious thinkers, it takes on an urgency now at the dawn of this new, powerful technology as we seek to maintain sovereignty over the technology. Smith writes: … the third level of commitment must be to that which we register — to that which we take to be a table, in the case of a table; to that which we register as a person, in the case of a person; and so on. Not (first stage) to the representation “table” or “person,” and not (second stage) to the table as registered as a table or to the person as registered as a person (since that would not leave us in a position to be able to say “that isn’t a person after all” — or even “what you are taking to be a table isn’t even a coherent object”). Rather only if we are committed (third stage) to that which we take to be a table, person and so on, will we be in a position to hold the registration to account. (Emphasis added.)7

In The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment, Smith is pointing out the same basic concept. What he calls “registration” is the data AI uses. It cannot actually “capture” real barbed wire around an arm, but it captures a sentence describing barbed wire around an arm, or a digital image of barbed wire. Smith argues that real intelligence goes beyond the first-level concern that “understanding” has a primary root in how the world is registered in data systems. Second, that the capacity to develop and define the registration systems and concepts for AI’s use is itself an act of intelligence. And third, that anything approaching judgment requires something altogether more demanding: a commitment to that which is registered — a commitment to its truth, its existence outside of the registration schema, and perhaps a commitment to its ultimate “un-registerability” (our word, not Smith’s). In our example, AI cares about neither a tattoo nor real barbed wire, yet we care about the man and what the barbed wire says about him, whether is it merely an image or if it is real.

Topic: Can a Reckoning System Exercise Judgment? “Reckoning” is the term that Smith uses “for the types of calculative prowess at which computer and AI systems already excel.”2 Smith is concerned that our reckoning systems “lack the ethical commitment, deep contextual awareness, and ontological sensitivity of judgment.”3 In other words, AI systems are good at counting (reckoning) but not at judgment. Smith offers multiple important insights as to the constitution of judgment, ranging from the intuitive and thoughtful, to the philosophical and esoteric. For example, he points out that judgment is constituted with the properties of intention and semantics, and as such, is not about describing physical effect or occurrence, nor is a description of facts about what is in the machine. Consequently, “any question about the presence of judgment is a question about the system ‘under interpretation,’ not about its mechanical form.”4 Secondly, judgment exists at a meta level of how a system works, how things are tied together, how conflicts are resolved, how it responds, how it sorts. Smith argues that as such, “judgment is unlikely to be an isolable or categorical property of an architecture.”5 Third, and perhaps most importantly, “judgment

A reckoning system is content to operate on registrations of the world, whereas a system with judgment must be committed to, concerned with, and care about the world thereby registered. BRIAN CANTWELL SMITH

It is this accountability to “that which is” that becomes the line in the sand. Do we have accountability? Once this prime directive comes into focus, all the other battlefields are clarified. Who uses AI, who develops AI, is it the province of “private enterprise” or the regulators, or the Chinese, or rogue actors? Whose data feeds the database? Is surveillance of every electronic remnant from every private person’s every action merely a data point available to those who can scrape it, store it, and sell it? And while these questions are front and center facing us as a society, managers at any level, at whatever stage their organization has traveled down the path of AI, can look to the concept of accountability in how they adopt, adapt, limit, promote or exploit the promise of AI. Accountability to all stakeholders, to regulators, and to the truth of “that which” the world is. Smith sets forth the standard that would constitute a system of full-scale judgment:8 1. Systems existentially committed to the world they register, represent and think about. In the Lead | A Seton Hall University Publication 43

POINT / COUNTERPOINT

2. Systems that will go to bat for the truth, reject what is false, balk at what is impossible — and know the difference. 3. Systems not only in and of the world, but for which there is a world — a world that worlds, in the sense of constituting that to which all is ultimately accountable. 4. Systems that know what the world that hosts them, the entities they reason about, and all of humanity and community as well, must be treated with deference, humility and compassion. (Emphasis added) Smith offers the opinion, published in 2019, that he does not see the near-term possibility of constructing systems capable of full-scale judgment. He opines that it is humans who exercise judgment, and that to be fully human, a person must exercise judgment. Smith’s discussion of AI includes both first-wave AI (what Smith calls “good old-fashioned AI,” or GOFAI) and second-wave machine learning, or ML AI. But the principles and concepts of Reckoning and Judgment are still relevant and important to understanding AI, even though we have advanced to large language models, reasoning and learning models, and agentic AI. Recent predictions are that we will have artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 2028 or 2030. With AI “brains” harnessed to physical “bodies” — vehicles, robots, weapons, etc. — we will be faced with entities that can not only learn, predict 44

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and self-improve, but also to respond to goals rather than prompts and to take physical action. Experts in the philosophy of moral boundaries of waging a “just” war are already urging a universal ban on lethally autonomous weapons (LAWs).9 Perhaps your attention just skipped right over the phrase “respond to goals rather than prompts” in the previous passage. We think of AI as a computing “brain,” but when this brain is harnessed to vehicles, robots, drones and weapons, it can be autonomous in taking independent physical action. A “machine” that can take action and at the same time can set in motion the achievement of a goal is a very different sort of entity from one that merely offers an answer to a prompt such as “make a list of ways I can sell more widgets than my competitors.” Imagine a machine that can implement actions when given the goal “make my competitors fail.” Such a capacity raises real ethical challenges. Smith then raises the question: “What could lead a system to judgment?”10 His answer compares it to child-rearing practices, which are interactive and “progressive, building on prior experiences, and which use norms or standards.”

Conclusion: What Are We, as Managers, to Learn from Smith’s Book? He explores the nature of the divide — representation vs. reality — in spite of human limitations, human error, human bias, etc., perceiving [Cont. on pg. 46] Paula Becker Alexander, Ph.D., J.D.

is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Management at the Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University. She developed the curriculum for Corporate Social Responsibility, a core course in the school’s M.B.A. program. Routledge published her business ethics textbook, Corporate Social Irresponsibility, in 2015. Her research focuses on firm financial performance, executive comp and socially responsible management.

Stephen Wood, M.S.

consults and writes on policy topics after 43 years on Wall Street and in governmental finance. He specializes in infrastructure and project finance, public-private partnerships, federal and state grant and finance programs. He is also an expert in financial modeling for large, complex capital programs. A speaker at numerous industry conferences, he teaches about corporate social responsibility at Seton Hall.

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IN FOCUS [Cont. from pg. 13] when I had the opportunity to give a presentation on “AI in the Audit” to about 500 interns at our National Intern Training program. While I stood onstage at the front of the room, speaking for about 45 minutes, the most valuable part of that entire day was the final 15 minutes of Q&A. That was when I stopped talking and started listening. Getting to hear the real concerns, raw questions and forward-looking thoughts from our future talent was incredibly grounding — it was feedback I could take back and help advance our firm and AI network with. It proved to me that leadership is never a one-way street. If you make decisions in a vacuum without leveraging the brilliant, young minds around you (yes, young, not just old!), your strategy lacks a real-world foundation. True collaboration means creating space for those 15-minute windows — moments where you actively absorb the energy, challenges and insights of your team to fuel the path forward. ITL How has your approach to judgment and decision-making evolved throughout your career? MORAN Early on, my naturally type A personality would constantly tell me: “Jess, you have all the information, now figure

POINT / COUNTERPOINT [Cont. from pg. 40] reality and the notion of the “thing being the thing that it is.”11 To read Smith’s book is to take a dive into the heavy philosophy of knowing, of ontology, (the formal representation of knowledge), epistemology (the theory of knowledge itself) of truth, of where one finds the divide between understanding the world and merely processing data representing the world. We all know the typical conversation about AI: We muse on how it affects our jobs, how it saves time, 46

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this out yourself.” I used to think that even if I listened to others and gathered their feedback, the final decision still had to be made entirely on my own. I carried a lot of pressure believing that solo decisionmaking was what leadership required. Over time, I’ve learned that making decisions with others — rather than just for them — not only takes the pressure off your shoulders, but almost always results in a much more well-rounded, fulsome solution. I now allow myself to be a little more vulnerable. I’ve realized that leaning on my managers and managing directors to join me in the decision-making process isn't a sign of weakness; it’s a tool that helps us cross the finish line together. ITL What advice would you give students and young professionals who are still developing confidence in their own judgment? MORAN My biggest piece of advice is to release yourself from the pressure of thinking you must have all the answers right now. When you’re starting out, it’s easy to confuse “good judgment” with “knowing everything.” True leadership judgment isn’t about being a lone hero — it’s about knowing when to lock arms with your team and your mentors to make the best call. Build your confidence by being curious. Ask questions, seek out different perspectives, and don't be afraid to

how it is scary, how it is overblown. These conversations tend to be at the level of what AI does and how it either does things well, or it affects efficiency, or it weakens human learning, to name a few topics. And although AI has advanced considerably since the book was published, Smith lays out a foundation of principles and concepts that endure as technology advances. As we develop machines that have the capability to exercise “judgment,” it is critical for managers and decision-makers to understand how slippery the notion of a machine without empathy and authenticity

say, “I have a path forward on this, but I’d love to talk through it with you.” Lean on the experience of those around you. When you view decision-making as a team sport rather than a solo test, the pressure melts away, your confidence will naturally grow, and your judgment will become sharper. ITL When people reflect on your leadership, what do you hope they say about your judgment and decision-making? MORAN Ultimately, I hope people say that my judgment and decision-making was authentic, selfless and always rooted in respect for my team. My goal is to cultivate an environment where high achievement is celebrated, but never at the expense of autonomy, quality or mutual support. I’ve realized that true leadership judgment means recognizing it’s not about how I work best, but how we work best as a collective. As a now “in-charge” senior associate, my team is made up of brilliant individuals who often approach problems and tasks differently than I do. I strive to actively embrace that reality because it is precisely that diversity of thought and working styles that empowers us to navigate our complex, high-pressure audit engagements. At the end of the day, that shared, selfless environment is exactly what enables us to successfully sign off on our audit and get the Form 10-K out the door on filing day. L

is offering ideas and taking autonomous action at a foundational level. L 1 See Chapter on Judgment from The Great Ideas, by Mortimer J. Adler, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992. 2 Page xvii 3 Page xvii 4 Page 128 5 Page 128 6 Page 128 7 Page 143 8 Page 145 9 See David Roscoe’s presentation, “AI and Better Health: Challenges to Trust and Governance,” at the CUHK Centre for Bioethics 10th anniversary symposium, given on February 21, 2025. 10 Page 130 11 The concern with “being the thing that it is,” hearkens to the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, and his concern Being and Nothingness, as well as Martin Heidigger, and his concern with being (Sein) and non-being (Dasein).

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