Intellect enables a leader to understand, visualize, and decide and is essential in unfamiliar and chaotic settings.^[1] Judgment, as a key component of intellect, is an ability to make considered decisions and come to sensible conclusions.^[1] Leaders can reflect on how they think and better foster the development of judgment in others.^[1] Problem solving, critical and creative thinking, and ethical reasoning are the thought processes involved in understanding, visualizing, and directing.^[1]

Problem solving involves situation assessment (understanding), imagining (visualizing), and converging on a solution (directing).^[1]

Thinking critically involves analytical, cautious, and convergent judgment.^[1] It checks on the sensibility, relevance, and relationship of meaning and possibility.^[1] Creative thinking is generative, daring, and divergent.^[1] Critical thinking considers what might be wrong, while creative thinking considers what is possible.^[1] The two complementary processes—evaluation and generation—occur in a free-flowing manner depending on what ideas and conclusions stem from thinking in specific situations.^[1]

A goal of all leaders and teams is to think as well and as thoroughly as time permits.^[1] The brain encodes experience as expertise that allows automatic and intuitive responses, which frees up time to apply to other thinking or provides a reserve capacity for addressing the most complex problems.^[1] Intuition can operate rapidly, but the downside is that it can be misapplied.^[1] Intuition operates based on the best or closest match, having no built-in or automatic process that checks on mismatches in cues, and no repair of ill-fitting ideas.^[1] Evaluation, repair, and design are roles of deliberate thinking processes.^[1]

Leaders draw on their knowledge and expertise in the context of each part of a problem.^[1] However, most situations will always have incomplete knowledge.^[1] Thinking is a technique to identify gaps in knowledge.^[1] Experience or a hunch can be used to facilitate a new way of framing (seeing or structuring) a problem or a solution.^[1] Leaders test ideas through visualization or a thought-simulation process.^[1] The thought process judges how well ideas meet goals.^[1]

Everyday thinking switches back and forth from a subconscious process of intuition to deliberate, effortful thought.^[1] The active monitoring of one’s own thinking guides the process, keeping it on track.^[1] Thinking about thinking is metacognition.^[1] Metacognition and deliberate thought are processes that people can learn to improve.^[1] Intuition develops through the natural accumulation of experiences.^[1] Individuals develop judgment intentionally through overt attention to the deliberate side of thinking.^[1]

Thinking about thinking is one way to develop better judgment.^[1]