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Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

 March 16, 2023 |  Behavioural Change, Building Remarkable Organizations, Critical Thinking, culture and behaviours, Management Thinking and Innovation, Organization architecture, Problem solving, Viral Change, Workplaces Of The Future |  Get Daily Thoughts by Email |  Email This!
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Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply?

  1. Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure of solid outcomes.
  2. Doing fast or slow, but sloppy and sloppier.
  3. Having strong ‘logic archetypes’ dominating airtime. Translation: the organization has pervasive ways of thinking and ‘logic’ that act as sacred cows nobody dares to touch. (Example: Six months of developing 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.)
  4. Repeating mistakes comes from either not learning or not unlearning fast. ‘Lessons learnt’ is a meeting ticking a box and not enough.
  5. Putting a premium value on intuitiveness, agility, entrepreneurial spirit and speed in a way that un-critically suggests that these are by definition great, no matter what, before one has even attempted to define what each concept really means.
  6. There is an ever-increasing desire for an extra supply of information on anything, even when the extra information never tends to change the course of things.
  7. 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’, not mentioning that the competitors screwed up their product launch).
  8. Banking too much on group discussions, group decisions, group accountability, and group thinking at the expense of individual reflection (by proxy: your calendar is full for months).
  9. 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.
  10. People equate ‘critical thinking’ with ‘common sense’. A variant: people say, ‘we are doing this already (critical thinking) all the time’.

If you recognise one of them, dig deeper. Two, it’s becoming serious. Three, explore your doctor’s options. Four, Houston, you have a problem. Five or over, you need to stop and seriously look for ways to put that ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply. If ten out of ten, you are living in an artificial reality and at a high health risk. If you are successful, you are successful despite yourself.

PS. Critical Thinking can be taught in the same way that your body can be re-shaped by going to a gym on a regular basis.
Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here.

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