Management

Hypothesis: When Lenore writes of extraverted judgement, she means a managerial attitude.

Management comes down to sorting complicated things into simple buckets, and then dividing responsibility among people in terms of those simple buckets.

For example, think of managing an artistic collaboration, like putting on a play. The set designs, costumes, direction, and acting are all filled with endless subtleties and complexity. From the perspective of managing the whole production, though, you simplify set design down to "Are the set designs done yet? Who's going to do them? How much money will it cost?" From a management perspective, you don't care if an artistic job is 90% done, or the designer is starting to feel some inspiration. None of those translate into whether you can cross that particular item off your list. From a management perspective, you really, really don't like it when buckets start interacting in unpredictable ways, like the new set design giving the writer some new inspiration, requiring the director to re-do whole scenes. When you hear something like that, if you're taking a management perspective, you don't look for how to make the most of the new inspiration, you try to "bucket" the effects of the change: "So, which scenes will need to be re-done?" You try to set boundaries around the work and divide it into manageable chunks.

An artistic attitude is just the opposite: it's all about making an organic whole. Every element can and should be reflected in every other. The richness and complexity are why you are engaged in something artistic. You can't really define your results in advance of creating them, because art is all about discovering what you can't fully anticipate. (See Introverted Judgement.)

Extraverted thinking is management in terms of "objectively" determinable goals and criteria. The whole is organized in terms of subgoals that add up to the goal, and choices that maximize results according to the governing criteria. The goals, subgoals, and criteria are all stated in terms that anyone can easily understand and agree upon. There is no doubt in anyone's mind whether a goal has been met or which of two choices gets a higher measure according to the government criteria.

Extraverted feeling is management in terms of shared values and feelings. Through the vocabulary of rituals, people can easily understand what other people's feelings are. Rituals, from saying hi in the hallway to birthday gifts to weddings, provide a vocabulary in terms of which people can take a stand in a way that all others in the community can recognize. I invited you to my wedding. That says something about how I feel about you. You RSVP'ed and came. That says something about how you feel about me. None of this runs very deep, but, like the management of the play, it provides a workable arrangement for genuine feelings, in all their complexity, to be easily expressed, categorized, and recognized.