Making Better Decisions
We’re having a lot of fun putting together The Balancing Act Podcast. To date, we’ve explored numerous topics with a focus on human skills, reskilling, and work readiness.
Earlier this spring I was having tea with a fellow author/consultant and we were discussing my then-upcoming miniseries on the current challenges in the global market for talent and shifting attitudes toward our relationship with work. I was explaining that the title for the series stemmed from observations I’d made during the pandemic that very complex workforce frictions related to the lack of affordable childcare, toxic cultures, and misalignment between personal purpose and workplace purpose were being generalized by some with the unhelpful phrase: “Nobody Wants to Work Anymore!”
Our conversation wandered into the fraught fields of increased polarization and blind followership we’re seeing in the political arena and I lamented about the dangers of this behavior finding its way into business. We talked about the importance of critical thinking as a key future-facing skill and its role in preventing the extreme “us v. them” mindset we see in politics from taking over corporate cultures. My friend paused for a moment and said, “Why don’t you call your next series “Nobody Wants to Think Anymore” and explore critical thinking from multiple angles.
Well, here we are. This past Thursday, we launched our six part series, “Nobody Wants to Think Anymore” with a kickoff episode featuring my co-host, Dan Strafford. In this series, we’ll be interviewing business leaders from various industries for practical advice on what critical thinking means to them, how critical thinking is applied within their sphere of influence, and what it takes to build critical thinking skills.
In our kickoff episode, Dan interviews me on the subject and we focus on the following threads:
Leadership v. followership and the importance to understand what these concepts are, what they’re not, and how to strike the appropriate balance between the two. Critical thinking is essential to getting this balancing act right.
Critical thinking as a higher order skill and how it relies on numerous sub-skills such as observation, analysis, inference, communication, active listening, problem solving, mental agility, creativity, and curiosity. As a result, the development of critical thinking skills is complex and the journey to build them must begin early in one’s life. Our family units, educational institutions, and community organizations have a big role to play in ensuring future generations are equipped with the human skills necessary to maintain workplace relevance.
The five whys as a tool to jumpstart your personal critical thinking journey. The five whys comes to us from continuous improvement and is a line of inquiry aimed at the discovery of the root cause of a challenge or business failure. While there are times when you can literally ask “why” over and over again to determine root cause, the more likely scenario is deeper and deeper exploration of a challenge through well-crafted questions that probe an issue from multiple perspectives to “peel back the layers of the onion.”
The importance of collecting data and information from multiple sources, building commercial acumen, and embracing a lifelong learning mindset. Even within a business, it’s easy to put the blinders on that tell a narrative solely from the perspective of a single department or even a single individual. Not understanding how a business functions holistically, how one team’s work impacts that of another, and resisting change are sure-fire ways to inhibit the growth of organizational trust and destroy economic value. Diversity and inclusion matter.
The bottom line is that good decisions rely on strong critical thinking skills. Weakness in this area leads to all manner of unconscious biases, blind followership, and polarization. Businesses and institutions that ignore critical thinking skills in their organizations do so at their own peril.
Thank you in advance for listening in and supporting the show. Have a great weekend.
Andy
