The Middle Verb And the Missing Link
Why Judge is the step every method skips — or and how a physicist accidentally built the tools for it: Think of Joseph Cardijn and Eliyahu M. Goldratt as the key link for making the best decision.
Just a note: In my experience, the “judge” phase is where people struggle, even when using scripture, tradition, CST, and even Greek philosophy. So I tested out what you will read here, and it works very well, and the results are more solid and encouraging.
The general in the audience
In April 1963, in the small town of Angicos in Rio Grande do Norte, three hundred rural workers completed a forty-hour literacy course, spread over about six weeks. Most of them had been unable to sign their names when it started.
The closing ceremony drew an unusual guest list. The President of Brazil, João Goulart, came. So did Celso Furtado, the economist behind the development agency for the northeast. And so did a general named Humberto Castelo Branco.
Eleven months later, Castelo Branco became the first military president of Brazil, installed by the April 1964 coup. The man who had designed the Angicos course, Paulo Freire, spent about seventy days in jail and then close to sixteen years in exile.
It is worth being precise about what the new government objected to, because the obvious answer is wrong. They were not frightened that peasants could read. Literacy campaigns were government policy; that is why the President showed up. What frightened them was the middle of the method.
Freire’s course did not begin with the alphabet. It began with photographs and drawings of the learners’ own town — a well, a brick, a hoe, a man’s hands — and a question: what do you see here? The words came from the discussion, not from a primer. And once a room of sugarcane workers has spent an evening deciding for itself what a well means and who owns it, the reading lesson is no longer only a reading lesson.
Freire had not invented that sequence. He had inherited it, largely from the Catholic Action movements he had worked in, which had it from a Belgian priest who wrote it down for teenage factory workers in the 1920s. Three verbs: See. Judge. Act.
Generals and bishops have historically been comfortable with two of them.
The dangerous verb
Joseph Cardijn’s method, formalized in the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne around 1925 and first set out systematically by his colleague Joseph Arendt at the first Belgian JOC congress, was built for people with no formal education and no institutional standing. Young workers gathered facts about their own conditions in notebooks — wages, hours, the girl in the finishing room dismissed for being pregnant. That was See. Then they weighed those facts against the Gospel and Catholic social teaching and reached their own conclusion. That was Judge. Then they did one concrete thing and reported back the following week. That was Act.
Pope John XXIII set out the method in an encyclical in 1961. Mater et Magistra §236 lays out “three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice”: review the concrete situation, form a judgment on it in light of those principles, decide what can and should be done. The official English translation renders the three verbs as “look, judge, act.”
Notice which of the three made people nervous. Nobody objects to workers collecting facts; facts can be filed. Nobody objects to workers doing good deeds; deeds can be praised. The disruptive claim inside Cardijn’s method is that a nineteen-year-old machinist is competent to reach a verdict — that judgment is not reserved to the people with degrees, miters, or capital.
The same holds outside religion entirely. Every serious method of learning has a version of these three moves. Kolb’s experiential cycle has concrete experience, reflective observation, and abstract conceptualization, then active experimentation. Quality improvement has plan-do-study-act. Every strategy offsite has data, discussion, decisions. And in nearly all of them, the middle move is the thin one.
Schools are extraordinarily well equipped for See. That is what a curriculum is: an organized supply of things to look at. Schools are well equipped for Act, because that is what assignments and assessments are. Ask a teacher — of second graders or of second-year residents — what specific, teachable, repeatable procedure students use to get from “here are the facts” to “here is my judgment,” and the honest answer is usually: discussion, and hope.
Judge, left unequipped, collapses into one of three things:
The sermon. The adult already knows the right answer and steers the discussion toward it. Freire’s term for this is “banking education.” Students learn to guess the teacher’s conclusion, which is a real skill, just not the advertised one.
The gut. Everyone shares how they feel. This is warmer and equally unreproducible. Nobody can say afterward why the group landed where it landed, so nobody can revisit it when it turns out to be wrong.
The vote. The disagreement gets counted rather than examined, and 60% of the room is now implementing something they think is a mistake.
What the middle verb has always lacked is instruments. Which is where a physicist comes in, from a direction nobody in Cardijn’s tradition was watching.
A physicist with a toolkit
Eliyahu M. Goldratt (1947–2011) was an Israeli physicist who backed into management by being asked to fix a friend’s factory. He built a production scheduling method out of it, then a business novel about it — The Goal, 1984 — and then spent twenty-five years generalizing the underlying idea into the Theory of Constraints: in any system aimed at a goal, performance is set by a very small number of limiting factors, and effort spent anywhere else is mostly theatre.
The part that matters here is what he did in the 1990s. Goldratt became convinced that the real constraint in most organizations was not a machine or a budget but the way people reasoned — specifically, their inability to examine the assumptions holding a problem in place. So in It’s Not Luck (1994) he laid out a family of logic tools he called the Thinking Processes, and in 1995 he set up a nonprofit, TOC for Education (TOCfE), to put simplified versions of them in the hands of children. Not as a business curriculum. As thinking equipment.
Two of his lines are worth keeping:
Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement.
The goal is a win-win solution in which no one is harmed.
The first is a Judge-phase statement. The second is a Judge-phase commitment. He was, without using the vocabulary, building exactly the instruments that the middle verb had always been missing.
Three tools, one phase
TOCfE reduced the Thinking Processes to three tools that a child can draw and an adult can use in a meeting. Each one answers a different Judge-phase question.
1. The Cloud — for when two goods collide
Judge-phase question: We each want something reasonable and we cannot both have it. What is actually forcing the choice?
Goldratt originally called it the Evaporating Cloud. Five boxes:
Read as a chain: To have A, I must have B; to have B, I need D. To have A, we must have C; to have C, you need D′. But D and D′ cannot both happen.
The first thing this does is relocate the fight. It is not at A — you already agree there, or you would not be in the same room. It is usually not at B or C either; asked directly, most people will concede the other side’s need is legitimate. The whole conflict lives between D and D′, two proposed actions. That is a much smaller argument than the one everyone thought they were having.
The second thing it does is the actual work. Every arrow rests on an unstated “because.” To satisfy C, you need D′ — because… Say the because out loud. Often enough, someone hears it and says, “Wait, is that true?” When an assumption fails, you add what Goldratt called an injection — a new action or condition that satisfies both B and C without requiring either D or D′. The conflict does not get split down the middle. It stops existing. That is why he called it evaporating: the cloud burns off rather than being cut in half.
One correction that matters, because this tool is taught wrong constantly: B and C are needs; D and D′ are actions. If your D′ box says “safety” or “fairness,” you have put a need where an action goes, and the diagram will not work. “Safety” is a need. “Require everyone to remain on site” is an action. Getting that distinction right is most of the skill.
Recess, in full:
A — We both have a good recess.
B — I need my turn to count. → D — I use the swing now.
C — She needs her turn to count. → D′ — She uses the swing now.
An adult would call this trivial and impose a ruling. But when a seven-year-old fills in box C in her own handwriting — she needs her turn to count too — something has happened that no ruling produces. She has written down, in evidence, that the other party has a legitimate need. “Count to thirty out loud, then switch” is then not a punishment. It is hers.
A fifty-year-old going back to school, in full:
A — I finish the credential, and my family is stable.
B — We need my income. → D — Keep working full time.
C — I need real study hours. → D′ — Cut back to part time.
The assumption on the last arrow is usually that study hours can only come out of paid hours. Sometimes true. Often not: prior-learning credit, employer tuition schemes, asynchronous cohorts, a compressed term, a shift swap. The adult learner who builds this cloud stops seeing the situation as a personal failure of discipline and starts seeing it as a structure with a seam.
2. The Branch — for when an action has a tail
Judge-phase question: If we do this, then what — and then what after that?
The Branch is a chain of “if… then…” statements built forward from a proposed action or backward from an unwanted outcome. Its most useful move is what TOC practitioners call trimming a negative branch: you like the action, you can see the bad consequence coming, so you find the specific link in the chain where the bad consequence enters, and you break that one link, rather than abandoning the action.
This is the tool that turns Judge from a verdict into a forecast. “We will ban phones entirely”—if we do, confiscation becomes the discipline system; the discipline system consumes the relationship between teacher and student; then… You have not been told no. You have been shown the third link and asked to fix it.
3. The Ambitious Target Tree — for when the obstacles are real
Judge-phase question: We know what we want, and it looks impossible. What is actually in the way, and in what order?
You state the target, then list every obstacle honestly — no editing for optimism. Then, for each obstacle, you write the intermediate objective that would mean the obstacle no longer blocks you. Then you sequence them, because most of them only make sense in a particular order.
This is the tool that carries you across the border from Judge into Act, and it is the one adults underuse most. It takes “we could never do that here” — which feels like a conclusion — and turns it into a list, a different kind of object. Lists can be worked.
Why adults need this more, not less
There is a persistent assumption that thinking tools are scaffolding for children and that competent adults have outgrown them. It is backward, for a reason adult educators have documented for fifty years.
Jack Mezirow built transformative learning theory in the late 1970s out of studying women returning to college. His sequence: a disorienting dilemma, then critical reflection on assumptions, then rational discourse with others, then a changed frame of reference. Read that sequence again next to the Cloud. Mezirow described exactly what has to happen and demonstrated that adults mostly do not do it unaided — because by adulthood our assumptions are load-bearing. A child’s assumption about swings costs nothing to revise. A forty-five-year-old’s assumption about what makes someone a good manager is holding up a career, a self-image, and a marriage’s worth of decisions. The Cloud is useful for adults precisely because it lets an assumption be examined on paper, in the third person, at one remove from the person who has been living inside it.
Malcolm Knowles’s andragogy points the same way: adults arrive with accumulated experience, need to know why before they will engage, and want to work on immediate problems rather than deferred ones. A tool you can run on tonight’s actual argument satisfies all three. A lecture on critical thinking satisfies none.
And Freire is not a separate tradition here — he is the same one. “awareness” is what happens when people acquire the standing and the equipment to judge their own conditions. He got the sequence from Cardijn’s movements; what he did not have, and what Goldratt later supplied from an entirely different direction, was a set of drawable instruments for the middle step.
Where this actually gets used with adults: workplace conflict and union negotiation, professional development, clinical teams, boards and nonprofits that keep re-litigating the same split, parish and adult faith formation, parenting programs, prison and re-entry education, counseling, and — TOCfE’s own list — special education, dyslexia support, juvenile justice, sports teams, and civic groups. Their reported reach is more than 250,000 people trained across twenty-plus countries, affecting some eight million children, with casework from Israel, Japan, Poland, Somalia, and Latin America. Those are the organization’s own figures, self-reported rather than independently audited, and should be read that way.
The weave
Laid against Cardijn’s method — and against the fourth verb I have argued elsewhere the method needs — the tools sort themselves cleanly:
The claim is narrow, and I want to keep it narrow: TOCfE did not invent a pedagogy, and it does not replace See-Judge-Act. It supplies the missing hand tools for one phase of a method that was already a century old and already worked. Cardijn gave people the right to judge. Goldratt, from a machine shop, arrived seventy years later with the equipment.
Two limits belong in the open, because both are the kind that cause harm quietly. Judge without See is ideology — a Cloud built on invented needs and imagined constraints will produce a confident, well-drawn, wrong answer, which is why the fact-gathering is load-bearing rather than a warm-up. And not every disagreement is two legitimate needs. Bullying, harassment, threats, abuse, and discrimination are not Clouds. Treating them as conflicts to be resolved tells the person being harmed that their safety is one of the negotiable boxes. Say that out loud before you hand the tool to anyone.
Coda
A general sat in a schoolyard in Angicos in April 1963 and watched three hundred farm workers receive certificates. Within a year he governed the country, and the man who taught them was in a cell.
Nobody was afraid of the letters. They were afraid of the middle verb — of a room of people who had been handed both the standing and the method to look at their own conditions and reach their own verdict.
That is the strange symmetry in this story. A Belgian priest and an Israeli physicist, seventy years and an entire universe of vocabulary apart, neither of them aiming at the other’s field, arrived at the same finding. Cardijn found it in a Brussels parish among fourteen-year-olds who had been told their observations did not count as knowledge. Goldratt found it in factories among managers who had all the data in the world and still could not decide anything. Both concluded that the binding constraint was never the supply of facts. It was the untouched assumption sitting between the facts and the decision — and that the people closest to the problem were entirely competent to go after it, if somebody handed them a way in.
Neither man’s contribution works alone, which is why they belong in the same sentence. Cardijn without instruments produces conviction that runs out of road: a group that knows something is wrong, argues, and eventually defers to whoever is most senior or most tired. Goldratt without Cardijn produces a very well-drawn diagram in a room where nobody was ever entitled to the conclusion ~ a technique for optimizing decisions that other people have already made. The right and the equipment have to arrive together.
That is the link.
And this is not, finally, a school subject. Judgment is a civic capacity. A family deciding about a parent’s care, a team arguing over a layoff, a parish council split down the middle, a town meeting on a rezoning, an engineer who can see the third link in a chain and has thirty seconds to say so — every one of those is a Judge-phase problem carried by people who were taught how to gather information and how to complete tasks, and were never taught the thing in between. We generally call the result stubbornness, or politics, or a personality clash. Most of the time, it is an unexamined assumption with no one in the room holding a pen.
The lesson, in one page
If you take nothing else from this, take the working parts. They fit on an index card.
One. Never judge on borrowed facts. Before the argument, see the step: go and get the actual numbers for your actual situation. Cardijn made teenagers write theirs in notebooks. It is still the hardest and least glamorous step, and skipping it is what turns judgment into opinion.
Two. When you are stuck between two goods, draw the five boxes. Name the shared goal, name both needs, name both proposed actions — and remember that needs and actions are different animals. The fight is rarely where the shouting is.
Three. Say the “because” out loud. This is the whole method in four words. Every arrow in the diagram, and every deadlock in your life, rests on an unstated because. Most of them have never once been spoken in the presence of the person who would immediately know they were false.
Four. Look for the injection, not the compromise. A compromise divides the loss. An injection is a new condition that makes both needs simultaneously satisfiable, so there is no loss to divide. Ask it plainly: what would have to be true for us both to get what we need? Sometimes the honest answer is nothing, and you have a real trade-off, and someone has to decide. That is not failure. You have just turned a mess into a clear choice, with everyone’s needs written down where they can see them.
Five. Before you commit, run the tail. If we do this, then what — and then what after that? Find the link where the damage enters, and break that link rather than the plan.
Six. Turn “impossible” into a list. Obstacles, honestly stated; for each one, the intermediate objective that would clear it; then put them in order. “We could never do that here” is not a conclusion. It is an unsorted list wearing a conclusion’s clothes.
Seven. Then incorporate it. A good decision that lives only in the memory of the people who made it will die with them. Write it into the schedule, the rota, the statutes, the way the room is arranged. Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement — and no improvement survives that is not built into something.
Teach the seven to a seven-year-old, and you get a playground where children settle their own disputes. Teach them to a faculty, a ward, a board, or a shop floor, and you get something rarer: a group that can disagree productively about something that matters, on the record, and know afterward exactly why it landed where it did.
A century of educators have defended the right to that verdict. Fewer have handed anyone the instruments for reaching it well.
Five boxes and two arrows is not much of a toolkit. It is more than most people have ever been given.
Sources
Angicos 50 Anos — “The experience” and chronology, Instituto Paulo Freire
Paulo Freire — Britannica biography (1964 coup, imprisonment, exile)
Paulo Freire and the Jocist movements — Cardijn Research
Paulo Freire: dialogue, praxis and education — infed.org
See, judge, act with Joseph Cardijn — seejudgeact.org
Mater et Magistra endorses the See Judge Act (§236) — Cardijn Research.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt, It’s Not Luck (North River Press, 1994) — the Thinking Processes, including the Evaporating Cloud
Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal (North River Press, 1984)
Transformative learning theory (Mezirow) — disorienting dilemma, critical reflection, discourse
Evaporating Cloud — Wikipedia
See, Judge, Act, Incorporate — Innovate~Educate~Collaborate
Nota Bene: I welcome readers from all educational, career, and faith backgrounds, as well as those still seeking to find out what it is all about. Being a human.
I am grateful to use the See-Judge-Act framework developed by Joseph Cardijn and the Thinking Processes introduced by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.
I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years of experience in Silicon Valley’s tech scene and in education, where I now focus on the Anthropology of Technology to understand better what it means to be a human being and the difference it makes. My work examines how we use sustainable innovations, how digital devices change our lives, and how cultures adapt to new tools. I study how technology affects our communities, workplaces, environment, schools, institutions, and daily routines. I believe technology always reflects the culture it comes from, and this belief shapes my work as both an AI ethicist and a storyteller.
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