If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to add ‘critical thinking’ to the water supply. Or a more practical alternative. Doing nothing is not an option (and very uncritical).
Test yourself, your organization. Do any of these apply?
- Doing lots, too fast, without thinking. High adrenaline, no solid outcomes.
- Doing, fast or slow, but sloppy, and sloppier.
- Having strong ‘logical archetypes’ dominating airtime. Translation: the organization has pervasive ways of thinking and ‘logic’ that act as sacred cows, nobody dares to touch them. (Example: Six months to develop The Strategic Plan, dictates short term actions. In the last 10 years, no Strategic Plan has ever been achieved. Every year the cycle is repeated).
- Repeating mistakes, which comes from either not learning or not unlearning fast enough. ‘Lessons learnt’ is a meeting of folks ticking a box, with a reference to a Harvard Business Review Article.
- Putting a premium value on intuitiveness, agility, entrepreneurial spirit and speed, in a way that uncritically suggests that these are by definition great, no matter what, before one has even attempted to define what each concept really means.
- There is an ever-increasing desire for more information on anything, even when the extra information tends to never change the course of things.
- Mistaking correlation with causality. Routinely assuming that if B follows A, A is the cause of B (try this with ‘great sales’ follows ‘intensive sales training’, but no mention of the competitors screwing up their product launch).
- Banking too much on group discussions, group decisions, group accountability, and group thinking, at the expense of individual reflection. (By proxy: your Outlook calendar is full until February 2023).
- Working most of the time on single-track logic, deterministic views, one way, no options, and lots of ‘therefore thinking’. Particularly when this is not recognised or even denied.
- People equate ‘critical thinking’ with ‘common sense’. A variant: people say ‘we are doing this (critical thinking) all the time already’.
If you recognise one of them, dig deeper. Two, is becoming serious. Three, explore your medical options. Four, Houston you have a problem. Five or over, you need to stop and seriously look for ways to add ‘critical thinking’ to the water supply. If ten out of ten, you are living in a mental cuckooland, an artificial reality and, facing a high risk to your health. If you are successful, you are successful despite yourself.
PS. Critical Thinking can be taught, in the same way that your body can be reshaped by going to the gym on a regular basis.
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APPLIED CRITICAL THINKING
At The Chalfont Project [1], we have crafted a short intervention on Critical Thinking: [2]
- Do you feel like you’re missing the time to reflect and makes changes?
- Do you feel like your team has fallen into bad habits, business is unproductive and no one takes ownership to change it?
In this short intervention we teach you and your team Critical Thinking methods and questions that will help you focus your time on the things that matter, make good and fair decisions and escape the dangers of human biases. We will also help you apply these methods to your everyday challenges in your organization.
You will learn about strategy acid tests and many mind fallacies, including various biases, and the practical Critical Thinking methods that you can use to address these.
This high impact, short intervention will:
- challenge ways of thinking
- provide immediate and trackable actions
- drive change
- develop a better way of functioning across the team, department or organization.