News Release
Critical Thinking: A Survival Skill for the 21st Century
How long can your business survive if your staff makes poor decisions?
We’ve seen bad judgment bring down business giants Enron, Lehman Brothers and AIG. When the stakes are high, there is little room for error. Every business needs to focus on making the right decisions in a complex, rapidly changing and cutthroat environment – with incomplete and imperfect information. There’s not a lot of time to figure out what works and what doesn’t. The winners will be businesses that can respond effectively. The core survival skill is critical thinking at all levels.
Critical thinking is the ability to look at a situation and clearly understand it from multiple perspectives. Critical thinkers think carefully about information and separate facts from opinions and assumptions. They think about different possible outcomes and the consequences of each. They come to correct conclusions, decide on a course of action and implement it effectively and economically.
In less complicated times, we focused on working smarter. Working smarter by streamlining processes, practicing good time management and setting priorities is valuable but not enough. When the ground is shifting, you need to be effective as well as efficient. Saving the automobile industry cannot be done just be making the production line work better.
Critical thinkers are, above all, effective.
We all know very busy people who rush from one meeting to the next, BlackBerry buzzing away, producing an endless stream of emails. Yet too often they’re not working on the right things. They don’t ask the right questions. They don’t make good decisions.
It’s not just the big decisions that require critical thinking. In every area of business: IT, operations, supply chain, law, accounting, finance or human resources, the biggest challenge at all levels is dealing with complexity. Everyone makes many decisions every day. We are bombarded with flawed information that looks good on the surface. It’s easy to miss assumptions and draw the wrong conclusions. Figuring out what’s relevant and trustworthy can be a real challenge.
Critical thinking is a skill that can be developed. Not everyone will excel in it, but almost everyone can get better at it. That’s why successful, competitive companies need to hire critical thinkers and develop critical thinking skills in their staff.
The Watson-Glaser II Critical Thinking Appraisal launches in early June.