What do you mean, 'critical thinking?'

In our last blog post, we started to look at critical thinking in the workplace. We made the case that employers want employees who are ‘critical thinkers.’ In this post we begin the discussion with the question, what is critical thinking?

Critical thinking. We’ve already made the case that we think critical thinking is a characteristic that more and more employers want to see in their employees. But in several of the articles we’ve cited, we have yet to see a universal definition of the term ‘critical thinking.’

At SYTE, we’re narrowing-in on a working definition of what we think critical thinking is and what employers mean when they say they want it. Let’s get to that working definition by way of a story that I would like to tell about a former employer.

Storytime

I used to work for a small distribution and manufacturing business in Eugene, Oregon, as a project manager during a three-year period of explosive growth. The business went from about 25 people to nearly 100 in the span of a few years, necessitating a move into a bigger facility. Picture an industrial warehouse with offices along one side. The facility mimicked the business as both were divided into three distinct areas or departments:

1. Downstairs offices where the managers and customer service agents were,
2. Upstairs offices where the marketing team was, and
3. The warehouse where the warehouse team picked, sent, and received products.

Three different areas where three very different kinds of work occurred, yet critical thinking was important in all three areas in different ways.

How?

In the downstairs offices when managers said they wanted critical thinkers, what they meant was employees that could problem solve. Customer orders, issues, and special requests required that employees access data from multiple sources, quickly analyze it, and create and execute a plan of action to fulfill customer requests.

In the upstairs offices, the marketing team engaged in creative thinking as a kind of critical thinking. Creating and executing marketing campaigns across multiple channels for different kinds of products required a supportive creative environment and an ability to synthesize business requirements, customer needs and behaviors, and compelling art design.

In the warehouse, critical thinking took place in the context of continuous improvement and quality assurance. Warehouse managers and staff were always examining employee performance, facility layout, and supply chain logistics to find ways to increase efficiency and improve what I called customer happiness through superior packing.**

Three very different departments have different problems and issues to deal with. Different kinds of work are being described above, but some common attributes emerge if you slow down to look more closely. The attributes, when taken together, form a definition of critical thinking that covers everything from problem-solving to creative thinking and everything in between.

Critical Thinking Defined

Critical thinking entails the following:

1. Collecting relevant data,
2. Analyzing that data,
3. Forming conclusions from the data, and
4. Transforming conclusions into actionable projects or processes.

Those four steps occurred in the marketing offices upstairs as often as they did in the warehouse and offices downstairs. But there is one more ingredient that must be added to the mix in order to achieve critical thinking, a fifth step that isn’t obvious and is easy to miss; it’s often referred to as meta-thinking. I see it as a layer of evaluation that covers not only the four steps listed above but the participants who are executing the four steps as well.

Imagine that a team is huddled together collecting and analyzing data and forming conclusions and actionable steps, and the team leader periodically stops the action to evaluate how each of the steps is going. That stopping of the action to evaluate the process, and the participants as well, is the fifth ingredient of critical thinking.

Layer of Evaluation

It’s easier to describe meta-thinking, the layer of evaluation, through example rather than explanation. Here are some examples of questions that team leaders should ask their team to ensure that critical thinking is taking place.

1. Collecting relevant data

What are our assumptions? What kinds of data are being collected—quantitative, qualitative, or both? Where did the data come from? Is this data current? How clean or reliable is this data? Are there other sources of data that we need to consider? Is the source of the data, or the method of data collection, biased?

2. Analyzing data

Are we using the right method(s) to analyze this data set? Do we have the knowledge and experience to do a thorough analysis? If so, what patterns and trends can be discovered, if any? If not, who do we go to for help? Do we have enough data to form significant conclusions?

3. Forming conclusions from the data

What correlations emerge from the data? Are we confusing correlation and causation? If we conducted a root-cause analysis, were we thorough enough before coming to a conclusion? Do our conclusions flow from the available data or from our assumptions? Were our assumptions confirmed or disconfirmed by the data?

4. Transforming conclusions into actionable projects or processes

Can we use our conclusions to complete if/then statements? What actions, if any, do our conclusions lead us to undertake? If our conclusions suggest a course of action, should we take it? If not now, do we defer action to a later date and why? Can we use our conclusions to create (or improve-upon) discrete projects or on-going processes? If so, how? What next-steps can we identify right now?

For now, our working definition of critical thinking includes data collection and analysis, forming data-driven conclusions, and transforming conclusions into actions. All of this occurs under an umbrella of intense, intentional self-evaluation of the people enacting the process and of the process itself.

Once we can agree that we have a serviceable definition of what critical thinking is and what it involves, the next question becomes, how do I get my people to do it? That’s the question we address in our next post. By way of a preview, the answer may be staring you in the mirror!

Need help getting your team to think critically? We can help! Contact us to schedule a free 20-minute get-to-know-you phone call with Erin.

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Photo by Sue Kamal on Unsplash

**The warehouse team was so skilled at nicely, securely, and logically packing customer orders that we got regular, repeated positive feedback.