Developing Critical Thinking

Critical thinking, in the most simple terms, is the development of a robust answer to a question. A good critical thinker is very good at answering questions, and someone you would trust to answer your questions. 

Developing critical thinking skills is one of the best ways to set yourself up for ongoing professional and life success. What follows is a roadmap that provides measurable milestones so you can determine where you or team members are in the journey of developing critical thinking skills. 

Learn to Execute

Translating instructions into action and doing what is asked. Majority of employees are never given opportunities to go beyond this skill. This is partially due to counterproductive corporate cultures and partially because it is more difficult than some might assume. Sub-skills in this level include remembering, analytical thinking, interpreting, applying.

Learn to Synthesize

Identify what’s important and combine information to create new insights. Before determining what’s important, you need to understand how different pieces of information relate to each other. Sub-skills in this level include recognizing patterns, categorizing, identifying relevance, decoding significance.

Learn to Recommend

Determine a sensible path forward, taking into consideration alternatives. Many in the literature refer to this as inference: the ability to reach a conclusion based on reasoning and evidence. Sub-skills in this level include logistical reasoning, probabilistic thinking, evaluating, decision-making.

Learn to Generate

While it may seem similar to the previous one, the difference is that recommending is primarily about the selection of available options, while generation is the skill of creating new options that didn’t previously exist. Sub-skills in this level include creative thinking, strategic thinking, problem-solving, hypothesis testing.

To develop critical thinking, determine where you fall on the roadmap. If you find yourself in the beginning of the synthesize phase for example, start with one of the first two level two synthesize skills – recognizing patterns or categorizing.

This article is based on Zarvana’s Critical Thinking Program. Learn more about it here.