Think Well & Prosper

Critical Thinking: the Case for Staff Training

ISBN First Edition: 9780991680634

Copyright 2013 by Steve Bareham and Summa Publishing

Information in this book is provided for informational purposes, and it is sold

with the understanding that neither the author, nor publisher, is engaged in rendering

professional advice. Although the author and publisher have made every reasonable

attempt to achieve complete accuracy, they assume no responsibility for content errors

or omissions. Use information as you see fit and at your own risk. Your particular

situation may closely parallel examples illustrated, but there may also be significant

differences that require information and recommendations to be adjusted accordingly.

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents Reviews

The Author

Upfront: The Quest for Better Thinking

Productive vs. Reproductive Thinking

Productive Thinking is Better

Hurson’s Productive Thinking Model

Raising the Intellectual Bar for the Workforce

Staff Training Impacts Global Competitiveness

The Rest of the World Gives Chase

Asians See the World Differently

Improved Thinking Skills Boost Productivity

What is Productivity?

What the Best Employees Know How To Do

Emotional Intelligence: Another Training Priority

Understanding our Bio-computer Brain

Beware the Green Light to Right

Improving the Quality of Decisions & Plans

The World is Complicated: Get Used to It!

Thinking Skills & Processes Questionnaire

What Many People Don’t Know They Don’t Know

Decoding and Interpretation

More Key Parts to Critical Thinking

Analysis

Analysing What Job Descriptions Can Do

Reasoning and Reason

Judgment and Evaluation

Can We Infer that it is Reasonable to Assume?

The Drawing of Inferences

The Wise Man from Mount Inference

What We Should Do When We Synthesize

The Components of 8C Thinking

Questions are the Engines of Thought

Level 6 Questions Ensure Better Answers

The Problem with Problem Solving

Problem-Solving Strategies

Group Decision Making

Nominal Group Technique

Appendix A: Information Isn’t Knowledge

Appendix B: Characteristics of Competent Managers

Acknowledgements

A Critical Thinking Guide for Employees

Reviews

“Your life and business IQ will increase as you examine and implement the ideas that flow from the distinctions provided in Think Well & Prosper.”

— Dr. R.D. Clarke, DDS, Professional Development Coordinator

"...innovative approach to critical thinking training...guides readers towards a much improved understanding of the thinking process...indispensable tool for administrators, educators, managers, and business people..."

— Vi Kalesnikoff, Vice President (retired) Selkirk College

“…has helped me in my professional life and in my personal life, forcing me to think and process beyond basic levels that I used to think constituted ‘normal thinking.’”

— Jennifer Horsnell, Director of Sales, Tourism Kelowna

“...has provoked students to think in new ways and adopt important meta-cognitive skills that impact positively on their academic and career performance…”

— Bob Falle, Chair, School of Hospitality & Tourism, Selkirk College

The Author

teve Bareham worked in management capacities in journalism, public

relations, and marketing for 25 years before joining the teaching staff of a

management school at Selkirk College in Canada. Steve has published 13

books, including The Last Resort, Harper Collins, Don’t Get Caught in Risky

Business, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Meta-Marketing, EduServ, and the recent Think

Well & Prosper I, HR in a Nutshell and PROGENETER I & II, through Summa

Publishing.

He received a National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) award for teaching and leadership excellence in institutions of higher education based largely on his research and teaching in the area of critical thinking as it applies in the business world.

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Upfront: The Quest for Better Thinking

ny problem can be overcome, and every challenge can be met, IF you bring the right thinking skills to bear in the right sequence and

then apply them rigorously. When you break it down, there are four key reasons that we all want to

think better in our lives and in our careers:

1. to make consistently good decisions

2. to solve problems

3. to create and implement effective plans

4. to anticipate outcomes of decisions and plans mentally, positives and

negatives, to avoid costly real-world trial and error

Though the reasons for wanting to think better appear simple enough,

we all know that doing each of them well is anything but. In fact, not thinking optimally is what plagues many of us throughout our lives.

To think well means to think critically, and that translates pretty much automatically into better performance in life and at work. If you’re a manager looking for an enormous competitive advantage, there’s no surer way to get it than to create a dynamic learning and thinking environment for your staff. Doing that isn’t as easy as buying a new software suite, but the modest complexity involved in shaping a high-performance workplace will also become a major, enduring strategic strength. If it was easy, everyone would do it.

The good news is that learning critical thinking fundamentals and processes isn’t that complicated. Any literate person of average intelligence who is willing to put in a bit of time is easily able to understand the sequences and processes. It follows, of course, that they then have to make a habit of

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using them. Tools do no good if they never leave the toolbox. The problem is, most people don’t know there are specific sequences

and processes to put into the toolbox, so they keep doing what they’ve always done, reminiscent of the well-known observation credited to Abraham Maslow:

“If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” Let’s face it, there are a lot of people out there armed with only

hammers, people who don’t make good decisions, who struggle to solve problems, who seem incapable of assembling workable plans and who are constantly blind-sided by negative consequences to actions that were obviously ill considered.

That’s what this book attempts to change. It seeks to build a case that higher order thinking skills can provide the competitive edge needed to improve organizational performance. It also posits that a general improvement in the human resource brain trust also boosts the morale of all those involved. A workforce trained to think critically is a huge win-win-win on three fronts: people, profits, and productivity. Most importantly, if we can shape, change, and improve the way people think, we change more than organizational performance — we change people's lives.

In subsequent chapters, we’ll examine where and why thinking often goes awry. It’s not because people don’t want to think better, they just don’t know the steps, what’s involved, and they’ve never developed thinking habits that follow a structure designed to comprehensive and well reasoned. Improvements can occur quickly with focus, and when the change comes, results are remarkably better.

In the pages that follow you will gain access to dozens of proven decision-making and problem-solving processes that can be readily adapted to suit any situation; there is no need to reinvent the wheel. The goal can be to improve on what’s already known.

Many of the ideas and approaches you’ll read about flow from my research and classroom experiences, but the book is also full of supportive arguments and quotes from others who have thought a lot about thinking. Plus, there are dozens of live Internet links to transport you instantly to a wealth of additional value-added information in videos and articles. There is no shortage of high quality training material available to boost critical thinking knowledge.

If I succeed in persuading you that critical thinking is something every manager should build into staff training programs, you may want to investigate the book’s predecessor, Think Well & Prosper: A Critical Thinking Guide, that targets individuals (not managers) and that offers a myriad of how-to’s which are appropriate for your staff to read about, to absorb, and to use.

Productive vs. Reproductive Thinking

"Most people's reasoning consists of finding reasons for going on

believing as they already do." — James Henry Robinson

ealizing that people think differently is hugely important for managers. It’s even more important to act on those differences. I suspect you’re thinking that I just stated the obvious. Of course

you know that people think differently! My point, though, is “how” they think differently.

Michael Michalko, writing in The Creativity Post. correctly observes that most people think reproductively, i.e. they try to make today’s decisions and to solve current problems based on their knowledge and experiences from the past. “When confronted with problems, we fixate on something in our past that has worked before. …excluding all other approaches, and … we become arrogantly certain of the correctness of our conclusion.”

I’ve seen this in the classroom for 20 years. People have very strong proclivities to repeat past actions and behaviors rather than exploring new ones that may work better. It’s okay to use past actions and behaviors if they produced consistently superior results, but too many people cling to approaches that didn’t and don’t work well.

In part, our reproductive thinking tendencies have roots far back in time when primitive people, often coping with life and death dangers and scarce resources, had to think, decide and act quickly. In an animalistic world where our reptilian brain ruled, survival required mental shortcuts, or heuristics, because there was literally no time for the luxury of detailed analysis and sober second thought about consequences and impacts.

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In such act-and-react situations, heuristics can keep you alive and,

indeed, some military training seeks to instill precisely that kind of thinking to reduce the negative effects of fear so that actions become automatic.

Of course, bad heuristics can also get you killed. This may explain the demise of sub-branches of homo-sapien such as the Neanderthals. The theory goes that failure to adapt doomed them as the more intellectually advanced Cro-Magnon man dominated. Hominids evolved from an opportunistic lifestyle where survival meant capitalizing instantly on whatever resources came their way, to a more planned existence where agriculture and animal husbandry flourished, involvements dependent entirely on action and anticipation.

Within a very few millennia, thinking critically allowed our species to move from caves to spaceships, but it doesn’t mean we’ve left our more base thinking habits entirely behind. They are deeply seated in our psychology, and it takes focus and will to control them.

Christophe Morin, in Springer Science, writes: “The reptilian brain has developed over millions of years. It is pre-verbal, does not understand complex messages, and seeks pain avoidance over thrills. It is the part of the brain that makes us extremely selfish and drives our strong preference for mental shortcuts over long deliberations. The most powerful aspect of the reptilian brain is the fact that it is able to process visual stimuli without the use of the visual cortex. This is why we prefer images over words and experiences over explanations.”

Sound familiar? Shortcuts over long deliberations…images over words…experiences over explanations.

In the work world, bad short-cut heuristics can be made worse by time pressures and lack of knowledge about how to access and use mountains of information. Faced with too many options and unknowns, our desire to be rational can fall victim to a subconscious urge to simplify and get quickly to the end – to answers and decisions.

We hate indecision, and we value speed. From early ages we are rewarded for fast answers, i.e. in elementary

school snap quizzes, even in job interviews. Whenever we’re asked a question, we try to answer it instantly. It’s the

rare person who responds: “Gee, I don’t know, let me think about that, do some research, and get back to you tomorrow.”

Few people understand that they would be more successful if they approached thinking as an algorithmic process. Instead, energy is directed in a rush toward outcomes — to decisions, plans, conclusions, and judgments. Quick results preoccupy the North American psyche.

Herein lays the problem. When people hurry thinking because they don’t know what they don’t know, the fixation on decisions, plans, conclusions, and judgments means they move directly to the latter stages of thinking; they force answers without asking all the right questions. This is backwards thinking and responsible, in large part, for results that are rarely optimal.

Thinking weaknesses are also attributable to the fact that critical thinking processes are not taught in 99 per cent of our schools – they should be, but they aren’t. If you can find a school that teaches critical thinking, send your child there so he/she learns about thinking explicitly.

Schools in North America teach every academic subject explicitly, most often through rote learning. We all love to hate rote learning, but it explains why we remember multiplication tables, the alphabet, dates in history, etc. Even physical education is taught explicitly, i.e. how to run a play on the basketball court. Explicit means to do something deliberately so there is no doubt as to intent:

Explicit: “...fully revealed or expressed; without vagueness,

implication, or ambiguity; no question as to intent.” For some inexplicable reason, though, thinking processes and skills are

expected to be picked up implicitly as though they’ll magically leap into our brains.

Implicit means: “...capable of being understood from something

else, though unexpressed; implied, vague...” Thinking skills are rarely picked up implicitly. Our heuristic approach is to filter, sift, sort, and prioritize information that

fits with past experiences. We discard anything that doesn’t fit because contemplating uncertainties would slow us down, and we shun deep analysis because that takes time and, god forbid, could lead to “analysis paralysis!”

So, in many instances, when confronted by complexity, we fall back on base emotions and the desire to simplify so we can act. Marketers depend on this when they use brand recognition to tip us into buying “it,” rather than engaging in an analysis of, let’s say, a different and perhaps better hardware or

software supplier. Once we’ve made decisions and judgments, they become cognitive anchors that provide comfort, and we’re loath to rethink them.

Productive Thinking is Better

deally, you want a management team and staff that welcome change and that enjoy the discovery of something new and better. What you do not want are people cemented to old ways of thinking and to

preconceptions that are often suboptimal. Unfreeze the old and tired, create a new mold, and then refreeze the

improved version. In contrast to reproductive thinker, critical thinkers routinely and

habitually think productively. When faced with complex decisions or problems, good thinkers reframe,

expending the time and energy to examine issues from all angles in search for optimal solutions based on “now,” not the past. Critical thinkers always conduct exhaustive research when it’s warranted so they benefit from others’ knowledge and then they adapt and evolve what they find to the unique situation.

This is productive thinking and it generates superior results almost always compared to reproductive which is too often quick and dirty and only as innovative as one brain sans research can be.

Thinking Well and Intelligence Are Different It’s also important to note that thinking effectively has less to do with

intelligence or IQ, than with deliberate intent and preparation. People with high IQs

often score high in problem-solving ability in specific areas, i.e. math, language. People

with higher IQs, however, are not necessarily better than other people at comprehending

or solving challenges with which they are not familiar, say, musical problems … or

social problems … or emotional problems.

Some people are blessed with unusually super convoluted (lots of creases and crevices) brains, ala Albert Einstein, that seem particularly well suited to science studies. Einstein’s brain, it was recently revealed, had parietal lobes that are extraordinarily asymmetrical and his somatosensory and motor cortices were greatly expanded in the left hemisphere. It is theorized, not proven, that these brain anomalies may account for Einstein’s ability to pose questions and to then pursue answers entirely cognitively — almost computer like — until he found resolutions.

Being born with a brain like that is out of our control, but the process of thinking effectively is a skill that can be learned and improved upon through practice.

Research reveals that intellectual performance improves, and, as a result, so does

workplace performance if you address or change:

cognitive skills

prerequisite skills

social background and environment, and

motivation and other affect variables (self-efficacy, self-esteem, perceptions of

competence, and willingness to set high goals for achievement)

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Formal training can make a company a lot of money, eliminate mistakes

and avoid costly trial and error. So, the sooner we get over this fascination with the fallacy that everything can be made simple, the better. And, accepting, indeed embracing, complexity, is a must for anyone who really wants to develop the habit of routinely applying critical thinking skills.

“For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and

wrong.” —H. L. Mencken

Now, just in case I’m freaking anyone out, just because things are

complicated does not mean they cannot be comprehended by any literate person. You do not have to be a genius to be an excellent thinker.

This means mere mortals, like me, can boost performance just by rigorously applying proven tools and processes. Indeed, there are many people with genius IQs who are not effective critical thinkers. Better to drive a metaphoric Volkswagen beetle brain proficiently than possess Porsche grey matter but manage it so badly that one smashes into things through life.

Online Article of Interest

Following is a link to an interesting article about the role that intuition (really past experiences that we mistakenly label as “gut instincts”) plays in our thinking and how we often invoke what we’ve done before instead of engaging in research when we have no substantive past knowledge on which to base actions.

The psychological aspects of how we think are very important for managers to understand so staff can be prompted to go deep when they’re on the edge of their knowledge and skill levels.

ANALYZE THIS: should you go with your head of your heart? http://www.elle.com/life-love/society-career/analyze-this-2

“Yet the mind is not by nature adaptable to changes of the breadth and depth that we are facing. Rather, the mind is … designed for habit, associating ‘peace of mind’ with routine. The mind’s natural inclination is to reduce the new to the old, the complex to the simple, and everything as much as possible, to familiar, well-grooved patterns and habits. It is not natural for the human mind to continuously rethink its systems, its routines, its habits — in fact, it is downright threatening."

— Dr. Richard Paul

Critical Thinking: How To Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World

Carlos Castaneda: "I was under the impression that my great flaw was to seek

explanations."

Don Juan: "No, your flaw is to seek conventional explanations, explanations

that fit you and your world... You're after a reflection of your ideas." —The Teachings of Don Juan