I spent time on my flight back to Cape Town earlier today creating a critical thinking exercise for our team. Being able to make wise, evidence-based decisions is vital in fast agile teams. Yet we often mistake critical thinking for intelligence, when in reality it is a method for making sound decisions that can be taught.

Critical thinking is the discipline of questioning assumptions before acting. It’s a process of removing the dangers of assumption by ensuring we pause between observation and action.

Poor decision-making increases time pressure as we rush to act based on intuition, guesswork, or over-reliance on past experience. Disciplined thinking is a 5-step process to ensure that we separate fact from fiction, test our assumptions, don’t jump to immediate conclusions, but consider multiple explanations, and actively seek out disconfirming or contrary evidence so we can make wise, informed judgments.

These critical thinking tools help to slow down the rush, as speed is often the enemy of wise decision-making. The 5 tools are;

1. Ask better questions – (e.g. what evidence supports this assumption? What else could explain this? What could be missing? If the opposite were true, what could we see?)
2. Encourage challenge – (e.g. teams must feel safe to challenge the norm as critical thinking dies without psychological safety)
3. Separate data from opinion – (e.g. explicitly ask – What do we know? What do we think/assume?)
4. Use wise-decision tools – (e.g. invite outside opinion, assign someone to challenge your thinking)
5. Review the risk- conduct a risk assessment of your decision to double-check the impact of your decision, and what to do when things go wrong

When those with children ask me the question what should my child study, my answer is – it matters less what they study and more that they learn critical thinking. For when you ask the right questions, interrogate the answers and build data-driven solutions, you will be positioned to make a difference in the world!