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I've Got a Good Feeling About Discernment

Writer's picture: Ajarn Mark CaldwellAjarn Mark Caldwell

AI Generated image of a woman acting as judge for a pie-baking contest. She is holding a slice of pie on a plate in one hand and the blue ribbon for first place in the other.

Continuing with our series on the Six Types of Working Genius, we have covered Wonder and Invention so far. The third type of Working Genius is Discernment.


After you have wondered about a situation, and identified a problem or opportunity that you want to address, and after creative new ideas have been invented, it is time to evaluate those ideas for potential, wholeness, and feasibility. This is the process of Discernment.


In practice, this is often conducted in an iterative Invention-Discernment Loop where the inventor proposes an idea and the Discerner evaluates and asks questions, which often lead to the inventor proposing a refinement of their idea, and so on. Round and round it goes, getting better, clearer, more valuable until the Discerner agrees that it is ready to go to the next step.

The person with Discernment is not working from expertise, but rather intuition and gut feel.

Curiously, the person with the genius of Discernment is not working from specific accumulated knowledge or expertise, although they may have that also, but rather has a way of thinking in patterns and integrative ways; they have a good gut instinct or intuition about things.


The Discerner craves Trust. They want you to trust their judgment, instincts, and assessment of things. This is not blind faith, for they have a history of good judgment on a variety of topics, and they can usually add some context to why they think one idea will work better than another. But they dislike having to argue strenuously for people to believe what their gut is telling them. Asking a Discerner to Prove every detail of their intuition is crushing to them.


Image showing the Crave and Crushed By for Discernment.

Discernment flies at the 20,000 foot elevation. It is still fairly high in the sky, conceptual, but with greater detail. Whereas the invention typically started as a rough draft (unless your Inventor also has Discernment) now we’re working with a complete picture.


You have moved from the Ideation phase and into the Activation phase. Next up is the Genius of Galvanizing.


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