What Is Common Sense

What is common sense?
(1) Answers: Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge; native good judgment.
(2) Thesaurus: The ability to make sensible decisions: judgment, sense, wisdom.
1. Where does common sense come from? How did we acquire our common sense?
The answer is not that straightforward. There are two basic routes to acquire it: individual
experience and either intentional or unintentional social sharing. Individually, our perceptions
and understanding of the things around us and the relationship between them and to us originate
from our sensing and interacting with them. All normal humans have senses of sight, hearing,
taste, smell, touch, temperature, pain, etc.
On our own, sensing the things around us and trying to understand their meaning to us is the only
route for us to acquire knowledge about them and judgment for how to interact with them.
Exploration of unknown objects gave us knowledge, a sense. A sense is a kind of effectiveness

of our action, a reliable link between things we do. The sense of what to eat is acquired from
experience, so
In addition to individual experience, intentional or unintentional social sharing is also an

important route.
We do not live alone; actually we would find it hard to live in complete isolation. We are tied
together with variety of visible and invisible links, formal or informal groups, and our knowledge
may come from family, education, work, media, social events, etc. Some knowledge is
intentionally transmitted, we want to know or others want to share with us, some unintentionally
or even without our awareness. It is hard to cut clear between the routes of individual experience
and social communication. A piece of knowledge often is a kind of mix of social communication
and individual experience, which may vary from pure experience to pure social communication.
How similar are my sense and yours? It depends. Some common senses are universally same.
“Many intellectuals, as well as managers, who in the past ignored or tried to bypass the authority
of the official common sense doctrines paid highly for their disrespect.”
As for knowledge, common sense is often not only knowledge, but also means a mental power to
make practical or sound judgment, either by natural mental capacity or by inference based on
certain knowledge. The depth of knowledge and common sense are different too. Knowledge can
be low or advanced, but common sense stays within much narrower range, neither very low nor
advanced. Intuition is perception without conscious thinking process, and can be called “direct
sense” imitating wording of common sense. intuition varies greatly from bare basic sensing like
seeing to very complicated judgment like physician’ s instant judgment of disease of a patient.
Intuition is the unconscious operation in the brain that is formed by freezing or setting sensing
and judgmental process. By contrast, common sense usually does not repeat itself so many times
to attain such efficiency, and may include simple thinking process. Another major difference is
that intuition is always individual, and common sense is of social nature. In terms of response
efficiency, common sense can be regarded as early stage of intuition, a “baby or slow” intuition.
Intuition acts like other basic human senses and can contribute to the formation of common
sense.
The value of common sense in managerial decision
1. Common sense provides basic logic map for personal judgment and decision Every body
uses more or less his/her common sense for solving problems or making decision. In fact,
it is hard to prevent a person from using common sense. What role can common sense
play in helping make decision? The easy way to understand what and how common sense
help us in making decision is to compare those with common sense and those without.
2. Common sense provide a general map of interrelationship of things we are dealing with,
it will give idea of which direction is what, and what if going this way or that way, and
with them we can quickly get to possible course of action.
3. Common sense is more suitable for operational decision making, and should be used
with caution for strategic decision making.
Is it possible to develop common sense more efficiently?
Everybody will develop certain common sense after having lived or worked for a few
years. Common sense is natural fruit of experience and time. The question is whether
we can develop more efficiently, which makes sense for us facing a fast-changing world.
Common sense is individual and also social. Keeping frequent social contact will share
knowledge, either hard or soft. Common sense is always in change, it is necessary to
keep relevant contact. Hands-on experiencing from time to time will keep up your
knowledge and thinking with others. For managers, understanding common sense
among employees and other target groups is important for managerial purpose. Of
course, keeping social contact means cost of time, so the contact frequency can be
maintained just enough for timely sharing of knowledge.
Common sense will come naturally with experience. Effective way of development of
common sense is hands-on styled education. Because common sense training is in
nature close to craftsmanship-style training or psychological training, it seems that it is
not what conventional business education is good at or wants. Personally conscious
efforts are helpful to quicken development of common sense, such as: try one’s own
individualistic way to improve ability of sensing and understanding what is being done
or observed, try doing independently, and keep necessary social contact to share
knowledge timely.

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What Is Common Sense

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What is common sense?

Exploration of unknown objects gave us knowledge, a sense. A sense is a kind of effectiveness

In addition to individual experience, intentional or unintentional social sharing is also an

The value of common sense in managerial decision

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