In the world of leadership, reasoning is not simply about being clever. It is the act of assuming responsibility. Every serious action confronts us with a world that is uncertain, contingent, and morally contested—and demands that we decide. To reason, in this sense, is not merely to compute or to feel, but to locate oneself within a field of tension between what is and what ought to be.
Yet most contemporary leadership discourse ignores this complexity:
⛔ Data-driven decision-making outsources value judgments to optimisation, pretending priorities are merely technical.
⛔ Evidence-based practice collapses empirical findings into ethical conclusions, as if descriptive knowledge could determine what ought to be done.
⛔ Cost–benefit analysis imposes economic efficiency over all other values by design.
⛔ Intuition and gut feeling mystify the internalised structure of experience and render judgment unaccountable.
⛔ Stakeholder deliberation displaces substantive normative conflict with procedural inclusion, evading the question of which values should prevail when interests diverge.
⛔ Spiritual or ancestral wisdom is either romanticised beyond critique or infantilised as pre-rational, in both cases shielding its normative hierarchies from interrogation.
Each of these approaches gestures toward a relevant dimension of reason—but also systematically evades others. Practical reasoning, properly understood, is not just choice. It is a structured moral act through which a person situates themselves between a value and a world, accepting the burden of judgment.
It exhibits a necessary triangular structure:
Moral Horizon: What is the good? What values are being prioritised, and in what lexical order?
Empirical assessment: What is happening? What are the situational constraints, causal dynamics, interests, and feasibilities at play?
Situated agency: What must I do? How does the self mediate between purpose and context in this particular case?
The syllogistic structure of reasoning is critical. Remove the normative foundation, and all that remains is instrumental calculation. Remove the empirical and ontological assessment, and we drift into abstraction, unable to turn thinking into action. Remove the agent, and no judgment occurs at all.
So, to reason well is to explicitly integrate what most frameworks divide:
What values am I presupposing—and what values am I excluding?
What is the actual context of the situation—causally, politically, relationally?
What is my role—and what action does responsibility demand of me here and now?
Every real decision encodes moral commitment. If we deny it, or disguise it by democratic or participatory decision-making, we only bury its terms. And in doing so, we render structural powers unaccountable, values unexamined, and agency underdeveloped.
Leadership begins when we stop pretending decisions are just intuition, process, or instrumental choice: To reason is to take a stand.
#Leadership #Reasoning #Judgment #Philosophy #DecisionMaking