HBR Guide to Critical Thinking by Harvard Business Review. The ‘HBR Guide’ series offers articles addressed in multiple sections. This is not a single author’s interpretation.
This offers a fresh restart to critical thinking. I welcome opportunities to make a re-start with new ideas and approaches in our pandemic world. This indeed provides a good starting point in developing skillsets. The ultimate goal of critical thinking by Helen Lee Bouygues is to think reflectively, objectively, and analytically about situations and problems.
I found Section One: Get in the Right Mindset – Article 3: Act Like a Scientist very engaging. We basically are testing assumptions. How can organizations address employees or customers who suggest underlying practices are out of date, costly or even obsolete? By investing in data analytics.
Like a scientist, you must become a knowledge skeptic. As we continue to confront the impact of the pandemic, remote work and large changes in business operations over the last three years, perhaps ‘the established way’ is no longer relevant. Add upon legacy practices are the new realities of regulatory and compliance mandates faced by organizations. this becomes challenging to confront the ‘why we believe this’ or searching to confirm if the evidence supports or challenges commonly held ideas and practices within your organization.
Be a scientist
In fact, the scientist will also investigate the anomalies to understand questionable assumptions. Again this helps organizations to adopt the scientific thinking strategy to remain not only relevant, but to exceed further the aspirations and goals of your organization prior to the pandemic. A case study with Bank of America tasked to improve their branch customer experience was quite revealing.
However the Guide is able to convey that any organization’s end result is not simply producing the hard evidence like a scientist, but to probe causality in multiple ways. I found overlap to Noise by Daniel Kahneman within this article and also his amazing book Thinking Fast and Slow.
This is written by Stefan Thomke, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is the author of Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. Gary W. Loveman is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the CEO of the health technology company Well.
Sidestep cognitive biases
Section Four: Seek Differing Perspectives – Article 2: Disrupt Your Thinking by Involving Other People by Cheryl Strauss Einhorn is certainly addressing bias. In fact, her insights into cognitive bias are outlined as Problem-Solver Profiles (PSFs): Adventurer, Detective, Listener, Thinker and Visionary. Cheryl is the founder of Decisive, a decision science company that trains people and teams in complex problem-solving and decision-making skills us- ing the AREA Method. She teaches at Cornell University and is the author of three books including Problem Solver: Maximizing Your Strengths to Make Better Decisions.
In conclusion, this guide easily delivers very smart advice. It is a refreshing analysts of critical thinking and is a must read regardless of your life’s journey..