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Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning & Your Life - 3rd Edition | Critical Thinking

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Widely sought as professional development leaders, Paul and Elder have conducted hundreds of workshops for university faculty all over the world. Their work speaks to the universal need to develop a sharp, open, and analytical mind.

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Sharpen Your Critical Thinking Skills - Forbes

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Sharpen Your Critical Thinking Skills - Forbes

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Ask any leader if they value the skill of critical thinking and you'll see them immediately morph into a bobble-head-like caricature of themselves, vigorously nodding up and down as if their neck was a well-oiled spring attached to their shoulders. "Oh, yeah," they'll say, "it's valued, a lot."

Then ask if they can describe what critical thinking is, and instantly, their heads stop bobbling. Further, ask them to describe how they practice critical thinking. You'll see their heads sharply slope down and lifelessly droop as if they've become suddenly unhinged. I witness this reaction all the time. I see it across the senior directors, VPs, managing partners and C-suite executives I meet with.

Critical thinking is a key element of business and career success. Everyone admits they're good at it, but no one seems to immediately understand how to explain exactly what critical thinking is, how to articulate their practice of it or how they develop that acumen in others.

Furthermore, when I ask the same question across multiple people within a company, large or small, private or enterprise, and across all positions and levels, if they can articulate a response, I have never found it to align with any other responses I get.

You'd think that companies that value organized thinking would have an organized process or method everyone can turn to when problem-solving individually or collectively. But most don't. I have yet to work with a company that has a clearly defined critical thinking application or process. It bobbles my neck and mind!

Real leaders understand that leading profitable initiatives alone is not enough, nor is it enough to merely lead people to execute upon those initiatives. Real leaders lead those around them into their potential, and that potential includes developing critical-thinking ability.

I am inspired by the mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) process inherent and ingrained in the McKinsey company culture. According to current and past consultants, you can ask someone on the floor at any McKinsey office worldwide to define their problem-solving approach and they will all cite the MECE process.

Imagine how effective the value of an aligned workforce can be when all involved contributors operate within a shared critical thinking and decision making process designed to create valuable solutions.

From what I've seen among the business leaders I've known and worked with for decades, across countries, cultures and industries, a lack of critical thinking development happens when one or more of the following five conditions occur in a department or organization:

1. People are overworked and too busy to think beyond getting tasks done fast.

2. People run too fast to recognize a need for better ways of thinking and doing.

3. Managers are over-focused on what to do and under-focused on how to do.

4. Culture relies on business processes more than critical thinking processes.

5. The company values "demand-down" work, not "develop-up" contributor talent.

If you find yourself in conditions like the above, as a leader or as a coach who works with leaders, try any of these 14 practical approaches to enrich your critical thinking skills and the skills of those you rely on for success. Chose one to three to focus on this week.

1. Practice planning and organizing daily in solitude. Don't be afraid -- silence won't kill you.

2. Think through how you think things through and solve problems.

3. Fall in love with a problem. When you do, it will speak to you and you'll love it more.

4. Love puzzles. Think through what the fit needs to be for the solution to show itself.

5. Avoid a "refried beans" approach to problem-solving. Think fresh. See fresh alternatives.

6. Imagine and envision what can work better, not just what has worked before.

7. Express the culture you want. Reflect what you value rather than wait for it to arrive.

8. Encourage a fail-forward culture that values continuous, high-performance learning.

9. Stimulate and promote the value of curiosity. Express a "what if" openness.

10. Document problem-solving processes that work. Then share them across your teams.

11. Make your critical thinking processes easy to articulate and simple to apply.

12. Gain team input and cooperation to exercise the process and share use-case successes.

13. Keep the process light and agile. Avoid dogmatism and fundamentalism.

14. Work the process so it becomes a dynamic part of your culture's collective intelligence.

Well-developed and socialized critical thinking skills and processes are to problem-solving and solution creation what scaffolding is to a building: a framework that is easy to assemble and collapse to support a desired outcome. Critical thinking acumen acts like a bridge connecting people and processes to profits.

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Sharpen Your Critical Thinking Skills With These 14 Leadership Practices

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Ask any leader if they value the skill of critical thinking and you'll see them immediately morph into a bobble-head-like caricature of themselves, vigorously nodding up and down as if their neck was a well-oiled spring attached to their shoulders. "Oh, yeah," they'll say, "it's valued, a lot."

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Developing your Critical Thinking leadership skills -  Catherine J. Rezak

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Developing your Critical Thinking leadership skills -  Catherine J. Rezak

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There is a growing recognition that the old, pre-crisis way of doing business is never coming back. In its place is the "new normal". While some classic leadership strategies and skills will continue to be effective, leaders in this brave new world will need to lead differently - and think differently.

Critical thinking enables leaders at every level to understand the impact of their decisions on the business as a whole and ensures both alignment with organisational goals and accountability for results.

The "new normal" is a different kind of competitive landscape, buffeted by geopolitics and global instability, rapid technological change, unique financial pressures, a rising tide of data and information to filter through, and the proliferation of new corporate business models.

The mind-set that made leaders successful in the past probably won't ensure success in the future. In fact, several recent studies and surveys have identified critical thinking as the number one requirement for successful leadership in the 21st century. Yet there is mounting evidence that many current and emerging leaders lack this quality. And it is this competency gap that is shaking up and reshaping leadership as we have come to know it.

Leadership in the "new normal"

In the wake of the economic crisis, we all know what a failure of leadership looks like. The companies that folded in the GFC serve as stark examples of what happens when decisions are based upon erroneous, partially false or incomplete information and when management fails to think clearly and strategically about the full implications of its actions. The resulting fall-out put an end to business as usual and created a "new normal" that looks markedly different from anything anyone has seen before.

Business organisations must be prepared to do things differently if they expect different results. In this demanding, dynamic landscape, it is only natural that they also require a different mind-set from those in charge.

The equation works like this: Thinking drives behaviour; behaviour drives results. So enterprises that want to change the results - and, indeed, change the organisation itself - can achieve the highest leverage by changing the thinking of leaders and managers throughout the organisation.

But what kind of thinking - or rather rethinking - will be required of leaders if they want to succeed in the "new normal"?

Why critical thinking is critical

Critical thinking appears to be exactly what is needed from leaders who are navigating the volatility of the "new normal". Diane Halpern, an award-winning professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College and a widely read author on the subject, offers this definition in her seminal book, Thought and Knowledge:

"Critical thinking is the use of those cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal-directed - the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions ... it's the kind of thinking that makes desirable outcomes more likely."

If ever there was a time for clear, discerning, solution-centric thinking, this is it.

Every two years since 1983, Executive Development Associates (EDA) has conducted an extensive survey on trends, growth and the evolution of executive development. The 2009/2010 EDA Trends in Executive Development: A Benchmark Report revealed trouble on the horizon for corporations seeking future business leaders.

To gauge the readiness of the next generation of leadership talent, EDA asked senior executive development professionals to share their views on the strengths and weaknesses of the incoming leadership group - the people who are most likely to fill executive-level positions in the next three to five years - and the subsequent impact on executive development.

The survey identified "hot topics" in executive development for the next two to three years. At the top of the list was leadership, followed by "business acumen, honing skills in strategy execution, leading / managing change, and talent management."

But when asked "What competencies are your leaders lacking?" their responses indicated little confidence that leaders had what it takes to execute in these critical areas successfully. Here's what they said was missing:

Strategic thinking

Leading change

Ability to create a vision and engage others around it

Ability to inspire

Understanding the total enterprise and how the parts work together

What critical thinking looks like

Having established the need for a mind-set shift to more critical thinking, we need to be clear on what that means in the workplace.

In general, critical thinking is the ability to deal with the contradictions and problems of a tumultuous environment in a reasoned, purposeful, productive way. Decisions are made using an approach that is fair, objective, accurate and based on information that is relevant to the situation.

Critical thinking is also reflective and focused, constantly evaluating the thinking process itself. It is thinking with a purpose. Critical thinking requires a healthy dose of skepticism and an equal measure of good judgement.

For decades, companies have relied on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal, a widely used assessment tool for evaluating the cognitive ability of current and future leaders. Developed in 1925, the model identifies factors that are key to critical thinking and decision making and predicts judgment, problem solving, creativity, openness to experience and other leadership behaviours.

Five sub-tests measure critical thinking as a composite of attitudes, knowledge and skills:

Inference

Recognition of assumptions

Deduction

Interpretation

Evaluation of arguments

Professionals with high scores in these sub-tests are able to identify and examine the assumptions, influences and biases that might sway them. They stand back from the fray and strategically assess the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems. They make business decisions that answer the right questions, solve the right problems, mitigate risk and improve productivity. They also lead from a position of strength, being able to motivate and move people both inspirationally and intellectually by providing solid reasons for actions.

Whether they lead teams, departments or entire enterprises, leaders who apply the skills of critical thinking to their roles perform at a higher level and offer their organisations a distinct competitive advantage.

Critical thinkers think differently about their impact on the organisation - understanding how their decisions and actions influence business both inside and outside their narrow functional silos. These leaders are able to balance department or team issues with broader company issues and embrace a larger responsibility for the success of the organisation. This keen sense of accountability is what enables them to execute for results now while fulfilling their obligations to positively impact the future.

Leaders who engage in critical thinking also understand the total organisation and how the individual parts work together. Context is key. Now more than ever, business acumen is foundational to effective leadership. It is impossible to apply critical thinking skills to the business of making money without an understanding of the business drivers that connect day-to-day decisions and actions to key financial and strategic performance goals of the organisation. It is one thing to understand one's role as a leader. It is altogether another thing to understand how to set direction and directly affect the outcomes.

Critical thinking is big-picture thinking too. As Hagemann describes it, "Leaders need to be able to comfortably climb to the 30,000-foot view and analyse a dynamic system, while simultaneously and adeptly analysing information to quickly make decisions across levels." Critical thinkers operate from a broad perspective in order to make sure the correct problems are addressed and they are taking acceptable risk. They recognise the difference between short-term gains and sustainable, long-term results and lead accordingly.

The advantages of this kind of leadership behavior are readily apparent. Critical thinking enables leaders at every level to understand the impact of their decisions on the business as a whole and ensures both alignment with organisational goals and accountability for results. It's exactly the type of leadership behaviour demanded by the "new normal" - and exactly what's missing. And this disconnect is likely to intensify over time.

Given the critical-thinking competency gap exposed by the EDA survey and other research, the obvious assumption is that the traditional development process that businesses have relied upon in the past to prepare leaders simply hasn't kept up. So, what's the solution? To accelerate development and raise leadership accountability to a whole new level of awareness and action, there needs to be a new emphasis on critical thinking in leadership development.

Learning to think like a leader

The good news is critical thinking is a skill that can be taught. According to Halpern, "There is a large body of evidence showing that people can learn to think better. Of course, education makes us all more intelligent, but critical thinking is more focused. Everyone can learn to recognise and use the skills of critical thinking, and we can always get better."

New competencies, however, may require a deeper, more analytical approach. The challenge today is not to discard what has been learned in the past, but to build upon traditional competencies with a whole new and more complex set of skills, tools and sensitivities.

Leaders in the new normal need to learn how to be discerning, how to think clearly and wisely, and how to be accountable for their impact on the business.

Discovery learning in leadership courses

Critical thinking can be impacted by the right leadership courses. However, the process can be more challenging than improving a behavioural skill, because you can't easily measure it. Success is demonstrated in results.

As with any skill, intellectual or otherwise, the key to building critical thinking - and achieving successful results - is practice. Research has demonstrated that people learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process and engaging in the behaviours they want to learn. But what's vital in developing critical thinking skills is framing the concept of practice within a relevant, job-related context.

Acquiring critical thinking skills requires participating in learning experiences that force you to consider new ways of thinking about and acting within complex situations that are directly related to the work you do. You need the opportunity to respond to issues, reflect on and reframe your experiences, develop new thinking, and, in turn, engage in new behaviours and actions that are relevant to your position and objectives.

Developing your critical thinking skills

In addition to participating in these types of leadership courses, leaders can take charge of their own critical thinking development by taking these actions:

Get some feedback about your critical thinking skills from a trusted boss, colleague or coach

Are you jumping to conclusions or using a reasoned, analytic process as you work toward a goal? Are you able to put aside biases and assumptions during analysis and decision-making? What kind of "thinker" are you perceived to be and why?

Challenge yourself to develop a deeper understanding of your company's business, especially its financial and strategic drivers of success

Are you clear about what drives the organisation's decisions, how financial success is achieved and how you impact both strategy and the bottom line? Are you making decisions that are aligned with this understanding?Is your knowledge of the business strong enough to drive behaviour and to engage teams and employees?

Use multiple sources of data to form an "information web" before making a decision or forming a conclusion

Are you asking a lot of questions? Identifying stakeholders and their issues and opinions? Separating facts from assumptions?Are you using the Internet as "one" source of information rather than "the" source? Can you analyse information from different perspectives and viewpoints?

Take time to think

Are you rising above the fray when it's important to make a decision, take action or form an opinion? Are you aware of the distractions getting in the way of your thinking time and taking action to minimize these distractions? Are you finding time and space to let your mind focus and reflect on important issues?

Ask for input, critique and opinions from others as you analyse alternatives

Are you checking tentative conclusions with others? Using peers, coaches or mentors to critique your thinking process? Are you willing to open your mind to other ideas or alternatives?

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international institute of directors and managers

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Developing Your Critical Thinking Leadership Skills

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By taking responsibility for your own leadership critical thinking processes, you are taking action to analyse and adapt your approach to decision-making and problem-solving. You put yourself - and your company - in a much stronger position to lead and succeed in the "new normal" business world.

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Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone in your company "how are you?" they are more likely to answer "busy" than "very well, thank you"? That is because the norm in most companies is that you are supposed to be very busy - or otherwise at least pretend to be - because otherwise you can't be all that important. The answer "I am not up to much" and "I have some time on my hands, actually" is not going to do much for your internal status and career.

However, that you are very busy all of the time is actually a bit of problem when you are in charge of your company or unit's strategy, and responsible for organizing it. Because it means that you don't have much time to think and reflect. And thinking is in fact quite an important activity when it comes to assessing and developing a strategy.

The CEO of a large, global bank once told me: "It is very easy for someone in my position to be very busy all the time. There is always another meeting you really have to attend, and you can fly somewhere else pretty every other day. However, I feel that that is not what I am paid to do. It is my job to carefully think about our strategy".

I believe his view is spot-on. And there are other, successful business leaders who understand the value of making time to think. Bill Gates, for example, was famous for taking a week off twice a year - spent in a secret waterfront cottage - just to think and reflect deeply about Microsoft and its future without any interruption. Similarly, Warren Buffet commented "I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think".

If you can't find time to think, it probably means that you haven't organized your firm, unit or team very well, and you are busy putting out little fires all the time. It also means that you are at risk of leading your company astray. As the famous Management professor Henry Mintzberg described, much of strategy is "emergent"; it is often not the result of a strategic plan just being implemented, but driven by opportunistic responses to unexpected events. Stuff happens. Companies often engage in new activities - customers, markets, products, and business models - serendipitously, in response to external events and lucky breaks. But this also means that business leaders need to make ample time to reflect on the configuration that has emerged. They need to systematically analyze and carefully think it through, and make adjustments where necessary. Many leaders don't make that time - at least not enough of it.

If you are in charge of an organization, force yourself to have regular and long stretches of uninterrupted time just to think things through. When you do so - and you should - here are five guiding questions that could help you reflect on the big picture.

1. What does not fit? Ask yourself, of the various activities and businesses that you have moved into, do they make sense together? Individually, each of them may seem attractive, but can you explain why they would work well together; why the sum is greater than the parts? As the late Steve Jobs explained to Apple's employees when he axed a seemingly attractive business line, "Although micro-cosmically it made sense, macro-cosmically it didn't add up; the sum was less than the parts". If you can't explain how the sum is greater than the parts, re-assess its components.

2. What would others do? Firms often suffer from legacy products, projects or beliefs. Things they do or deliberately have not done. Some of them can be the result of what in Organization Theory we call "escalation of commitment"; we have committed to something, and determinedly fought for it - and perhaps for all the right reasons - but now that things have changed and it no longer makes sense, we may still be inclined to persist. A good question to ask yourself is "what would other, external people do, if they found themselves in charge of this company?" Intel's Andy Grove called it "the revolving door", when discussing strategy with then CEO Gordon Moore; let's pretend we are outsiders coming new to the job, ask ourselves what they would do, and then do it ourselves. It led Intel to withdraw from the business of memory chips, and focus on microprocessors. This resulted in more than a decade of 30 percent annual growth in revenue and 40 percent increase in net income.

3. Is my organization consistent with my strategy? In 1990, Al West, the founder and CEO of SEI - the wealth management company that, at the time, was worth $195 million - found himself in a hospital bed for three months after a skiing accident. With not much more to do than stare at the ceiling and reflect on his company's present and future, he realized that although they had declared innovation to be key in their strategy, the underlying organizational architecture was wholly unsuited for the job. When he went back to work, he slashed bureaucracy, implemented a team structure, and abandoned many company rules. The company started growing rapidly and is now worth about $8 billion. As a consequence of his involuntary thinking time, West did what all business leaders should do: he asked himself whether the way his company was set up was ideal for its strategic aspirations. What would your organization look like if you could design it from scratch?

4. Do I understand why we do it this way? When I am getting to know a new firm, for instance because I am writing a case study on them, I make it a habit to not only find out how they do things but also explicitly ask why. Why do you do it this way? You'd be surprised how often I get the answer "that's how we have always done it" [while shrugging shoulders] and "everybody in our industry does it this way". The problem is that if you can't even explain why your own company does it this way, I am quite unconvinced that it could not be done better. For example, when more than a decade ago I worked with a large British newspaper company, I asked why their newspapers were so big. Their answer was "all quality newspapers are big; customers would not want it any other way". A few years later, a rival company - the Independent - halved the size of its newspaper, and saw a surge in circulation. Subsequently, many competitors followed, to similar effect. Yes, customers did want it. Later, I found out that the practice of large newspapers had begun in London, in 1712, because the English government started taxing newspapers by the number of pages they printed - the publishers responded by printing their stories on so-called broadsheets to minimize the number of sheets required. This tax law was abolished in 1855 but newspapers just continued printing on the impractically large sheets of paper. Many practices and habits are like that; they once started for perfectly good reasons but then companies just continued doing it that way, even when circumstances changed. Take time to think it through, and ask yourself: Do I really understand why we (still) do it this way? If you can't answer this question, I am pretty sure it can be done better.

5. What might be the long-term consequences?The final question to ask yourself, when carefully reflecting on your company's strategy and organization, is what could possibly be the long-term consequences of your key strategic actions. Often we judge things by their short-term results, since these are most salient, and if they look good, persist in our course of action. However, for many strategic actions, the long-term effects may be different. Consider a practice adopted by many of the UK's IVF clinics - of selecting only relatively easy patients to treat, in order to boost short-term success rates (measured in terms of number of births resulting from the treatment). The practice seems to make commercial sense, because it (initially) makes a clinic look good in the industry's "League Table". But, as my research with Mihaela Stan from University College London showed, it backfires in the long run because it deprives an organization of valuable learning opportunities (in the form of patients with challenging underlying etiologies), which in the long run leads to a lower relative success rate. When you start a new strategy or practice it is of course impossible to measure such long-term consequences ex-ante, however, you can think them through. For instance, when we asked various medical professionals in these clinics what might be the benefits of treating difficult patients, they could understand and articulate the learning effects very well. They could not measure them, but with some careful thought they could understand the potential long-term consequences before even engaging in the strategic action. Actions often have different effects in the short and long run. Sit down and think them through.

Strategy, by definition, is about making complex decisions under uncertainty, with substantive, long-term consequences. Therefore, it requires substantial periods of careful, undisturbed reflection and consideration. Don't just accept the situation and business constellation you have arrived at. Leadership is not just about doing things, it is also about thinking. Make time for it.

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Leadership Is About Thinking: Make Time For It

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Have you ever noticed that when you ask someone in your company "how are you?" they are more likely to answer "busy" than "very well, thank you"? That is because the norm in most companies is that you are supposed to be very busy - or otherwise at least pretend [...]

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What makes a great leader? Management theorist Simon Sinek suggests, it’s someone who makes their employees feel secure, who draws staffers into a circle of trust. But creating trust and safety -- especially in an uneven economy -- means taking on big responsibility.

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How Leaders Should Think Critically - HBR

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How Leaders Should Think Critically - HBR

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If you want to succeed in 21st Century business you need to become a critical thinker. Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management figured this out a decade ago and as dean, has been working to transform his school's business curriculum with greater emphasis on critical thinking skills. As Lane Wallace explained in the New York Times, what Martin and many others are seeking to do is approach learning and problem solving from a multicultural platform that borrows from academia, business, the arts and even history.

Critical thinking has always been a prized attribute of leadership, but over the years, especially as business schools have emphasized quantitative skills over qualitative ones, critical thinking dropped by the wayside. Now as the rate of complexity rises, the need for critical thinking resurfaces.
David A. Garvin of the Harvard Business School told the New York Times, "I think there's a feeling that people need to sharpen their thinking skills, whether it's questioning assumptions, or looking at problems from multiple points of view." With this, Garvin, who is a co-author of Re-Thinking the M.B.A.: Business Education at a Crossroads, neatly summarizes a foundation for how to begin to instill a critical thinking mindset.

Let me expand further what you need to do to think critically:

Question assumptions. Critical thinkers are inquisitive and look to find the what and the why behind every proposition. We saw the need for this when our financial markets melted in 2008. Crisis can bring out the best critical thinking because it forces you to question how and why you ended up in trouble.

Adopt different perspectives. Take advantage of the genders and cultures represented in today's diverse management landscape. An Indian-trained engineer may not view a problem the way one raised in Iowa will. Both may have the same problem-solving tool kit, but their different experiences can provide valuable insights.

See potential. Assumption-busting and harnessing multiple perspectives are deductive skills. Critical thinkers should also have a creative bent that allows them to see opportunities where others see obstacles. For example, one executive may see a production snag as a problem whereas a savvy thinker must view it as an opportunity to revamp the process to produce something new.

There is one additional aspect of critical thinking that is vital to today's leader: managing ambiguity. The speed of business, intertwined as it is with global factors and complex supply chains, dictates that you will never know all the variables. Therefore, you need to get comfortable with operating in an environment where change is constant and rapid decisions are required.

In a world of growing uncertainty one thing is certain; we will need sharp critical thinkers who can size up the situation, realize the potential where others may not, and seize opportunities through prompt decision-making.

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If you want to succeed in 21st Century business you need to become a critical thinker. Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management figured this out a decade ago and as dean, has been working to transform his school's business curriculum with greater emphasis on critical thinking skills.