Sound and practical judgment
Common sense decisions by definition would first seem to be both practical and sound.
Let us address the issue of what is meant first by sound judgment. Sound judgment
infers that the decision has face validity (it sounds right) that the average person or the
majority of people would concur with the decision (Patton, 2002). In the opening
hypothetical case, sound judgment might dictate that the best the police officer could
hope for would be to make sure that as many citizens as possible were safely away
from the vehicle. An easy way to test whether or not this action would be considered
sound would be to randomly ask people what they would do and see how often this
action was mentioned.
For the decision to be practical the person (or group) making the decision must have
the ability to implement a sound decision given the specific circumstances of the
situation. Restated, a practical decision is a sound decision that is executable. Going
back to the case, the practical question would be whether or not an off-duty officer, an
officer not in uniform, with supposedly just two minutes to spare, could in fact make
sure that people could get out of the way of a potential bomb blast. Sherman et al.
(2007) supported this notion that decisions need to be both practical and sound in their
description of successful strategy implementation. They described successful
implementation as being a function of “the inherent validity or strength of the plan
[. . .] and the ability [of the firm] to produce the changes the plan requires” (p. 407).