Critical-Thinking

All of us are comfortable with factors we have faced before, the known issues we address on a regular basis. Very few people search for, uncover and challenge themselves with new problems. Not least because very few are prepared to create the chance for failure, exploring those dark corners where, if a torch was directed, you would be horrified by what you saw.

Having said this, we need to stimulate critical-thinking by our leaders, otherwise we are just not prepared for what we know to be a rapidly changing world. But at the same time, we need to be attentive to our expectations; will a recently promoted supervisor be capable of the same levels of critical-thinking as a senior leader? When looking for critical-thinking amongst our key people it is vital to identify what it is we expect so we should be clear about our definition. Critical-thinking is the ability to break down a situation into small pieces to aid identification of key or underlying issues. It includes not only systematically organising the parts of a problem.

Critical-thinking demands comparing all the aspects of problems, and planning future actions to holistically tackle challenges and problems. Through this process, figuring out cause-and-effect relationships (if-then) and taking those actions which will help solve these issues. We need to measure to what extent does the person understand cause-and-effect relationships, establish constants, gather items into coherent groupings, and find new ways to look at things. And we need to be clear about levels of expectation at different tiers within an enterprise. In a recent consulting programme we devised a four tier approach to critical-thinking, outlining what was expected of people at different levels in the enterprise.

Tier-One was defined as the recently promoted to a supervisory role. Those who had been in their first supervisory role for at least a year were deemed to be Tier-Two, having gained knowledge, experience and, hopefully, some skills in critical-thinking. Tier-Three were senior management, but not at the director or C-Suite level whereas Tier-Four outlined what was expected for those at the top of the hierarchy. At Tier-One we were looking for individuals to be able to establish basic relationships to what was going-on.

Could they analyse a few parts of a problem or situation and make basic causal links (A causes B). Were they capable of creating pro and con lists to be reported up the line and to also advise on making decisions, as the eyes and ears of the management teams, being aware of employee, customer, supplier and competitive issues. Tier-Two expectations were based om establishing multiple relationships, analysing among several parts of a problem or situation, often on the strength of theoretical knowledge or extensive experience, breaking down relatively complex tasks into more manageable parts and recognising more subtle causal links.

At Tier-Three, the more senior management team, our hopes were these individuals could make complex plans and analyses, generally anticipating obstacles and think about the next steps - advising on alternatives. A capable critical-thinker at this level would be able to break down very complex, multidimensional problems or processes into key parts; making use of analytical techniques and strategic planning tools.

We would expect flow charts to explore situations, identify problems, define challenges and outline improvements from Tier-Three. Creating new constructs, thinking of totally new concepts to rework how things are done and experiment with several multi-faceted concepts or theories were explicitly put in to the lap of the board and C-Suite, Tier Four in this model. Sharing these expectations with the management-tiers ensured an emphasis on longer-range scanning, combatted fear of making-mistakes and aided in creating an agile-culture.