That critical thinking is an important skill and is essential to have is being increasingly recognized. As a matter of fact, the World Economic Forum puts critical thinking very high in the top ten jobs skills for success in the workplace. And six of the other skills listed there need critical thinking as a foundational skill. So what exactly is critical thinking and how does one go about building this into the organization?
There are two elements to Critical thinking, the first of which is 'how to think critically about an issue', and the second one is more fundamental, which is 'How to think'.
Thinking critically about an issue: All of us quite have partial experience of this skill that comes into play when trying to solve a problem, resolve an issue, evaluate multiple decision options and making or evaluating plans and strategies. However, it is quite likely that we are not aware of all the elements of thinking critically about an issue, and will frequently overlook some critical elements such as:
- Ensuring that our inferences or conclusions are actually based on available evidence and that our evidence provides an adequate reason for making the inference we have actually arrived at.
- Overlooking and not explicitly articulating critical assumptions that are implicitly made while making the inference or evaluating shortlisted solutions and options.
- Clearly understanding the implications of our inferences or the decision options we have chosen. Quite likely that some of the decisions we make would not have actually been made if we had evaluated the implications of the decision.
- That any decision impacts multiple stakeholders, and we often fail to consider the viewpoints of other stakeholders. For example, when a Sales manager opts to drop the price to match a competitive price drop, he is looking at it from his focused viewpoint of doing everything required to maintain sales and sales growth. Rarely do people simultaneously articulate or evaluate what could be the opinions of other stakeholders. For instance, in the example quoted, the Marketing Head would probably say spend more on advertising than dropping the price as price drops impact brand perceptions.
How to think critically: The process of making inferences, that is moving from premises to conclusions requires a good understanding of logical reasoning. Similarly justifying claims based on premises also requires good logical reasoning skills. While we are reasoning day in and day out, the fact is, we can't be sure that our reasoning is good because we haven't been equipped with the skills or knowledge to reason well, or to evaluate reasoning presented by others. Our education system has not taught us to reason logically, nor has this been a part of corporate training programs for a long time. In effect, even if we are good at considering all the elements of thinking critically about an issue, if we are not trained in logical reasoning, it is eminently possible that the inferences we make while thinking about an issue not be reliable.
Apart from learning logical reasoning, becoming a good critical thinker also requires an understanding of fallacies and cognitive biases that derail our judgments and lead to poor decisions.
To become a good critical thinker we need to understand and use a critical thinking framework, we need to know how to reason logically, we need to understand fallacies and cognitive biases. All four elements are necessary.
So how does one systematically build a culture of critical thinking in the organization: There are two considerations here:
The first being that people need the knowledge about logical reasoning, fallacies and cognitive biases. After all, people can't be asked to be good at something that they don't know or been taught formally.
The second consideration is that even after people acquire the knowledge, it is quite likely that they will not automatically start exercising critical thinking. What is needed here is to incorporate critical thinking elements into the decision making and problem-solving processes itself.
For example, when a plan is made, employees can be asked to: briefly explain their reasoning, and explicitly articulate the assumptions and implications, thereby giving any evaluator a clear picture of all the variables considered while making the plan. The other thing to do would be to have monthly or bi-monthly interventions in terms of training in order to deepen the learning. These sessions could be a combination of extended and deeper learning combined with analyzing case studies using the critical thinking framework.
No matter how it is done, that it needs to be done is without question, There is probably no other single initiative that reduces the risk of poor decisions as much as a culture of critical thinking will do.
