It happens frequently during your business career to not properly address a simple issue, sometimes because of the pressure other times because you don’t take enough time to address the issue.
What do you need in this case is to improve you critical thinking!
Critical thinking is a learned skill. Following the guidance of renoued business coach, from the Harvard Business Review, we’ve put together some simple tips to help you improve your critical thinking skills:
Question assumptions
It happens that sometimes companies presume its customers had far more disposable income than they really had. This erroneous belief causes a company to overprice its products. Here starts the first action ofquestioning assumptions: that is, figuring out when to do some question assumptions and be sure to ask basic questions about your beliefs: How do you know that your business will increase? What does the research say about your expectations about the future of the market?
Reason through logic
Pay close attention to the “chain” of logic constructed by a particular argument. Ask yourself: Is the argument supported at every point by evidence? Do all the pieces of evidence build on each other to produce a sound conclusion? Being aware of common fallacies can also allow you to think more logically.
Seek out diversity of thought and collaboration
Different gender, nationality and culture in a team help to see things differently from the people around you, this often plays like and advantage soliciting different points of view and giving a wider way of thinking.
It’s natural for people to group themselves together with people who think or act like them. This happens especially readily online, where it’s easy to find a specific cultural niche. This is a problem. If everyone in our social circles thinks as we do, we become more rigid in our thinking, and less likely to change our beliefs on the basis of new information. In fact, the more people listen to people who share their views, research shows the more polarized their views become.
It’s fundamental to get outside your personal bubble. You can start small. If you work in accounting, make friends with people in marketing. If you always go to lunch with senior staff, go to a ball game with your junior colleagues. Training yourself this way will help you escape your usual thinking and gain richer insights. In team settings, give people the chance to give their opinions independently without the influence of the group. This tactic helps prevent people from engaging in groupthink.
While these simple tactics may sound easy or even obvious, they’re rare in practice, particularly in the business world, and too many organizations don’t take the time to engage in robust forms of reasoning. But the important work of critical thinking pays off. While luck plays a role, in a company’s successes, the most important business victories are achieved through thinking smart.
