I want you to poke the bear and challenge, with respect, your colleagues, instructors, with evidence-based positions, not rhetoric. In most cases there are no wrong or right answers. However, it is only through Socratic dialogue that you’ll obtain sufficient data and information to feel comfortable and enable you to defend your position.
I want you to peel the onion, to look for the second level of meaning in statements. For example, if you read the American newspapers, it seems clear on the surface why America is in Iraq: democracy? Is that true?
I want you to use the words ‘critical’ and ‘criticize’ in the sense that they were used by the Greeks: kritikos, experts who were considered qualified to comment, question, analyze or make sense of something. Critical thinking is not negative thinking. It is the process of attempting to understand, at the very core, the foundations of the argument, and forming some conclusions as to the validity of those foundations.
Undertake the following five steps when you’re asked to critically think about an issue, a problem or a reading.
Step 1. What is the issue, the question to be examined? You will find it helpful to use one of the doodling tools in our little red toolbox.
Step 2. What data and information is provided by the author to support answers to the questions or issues you are examining?
Step 3. Evaluate the robustness, the quality of the evidence provided by the author about the question or the issue compared to the robustness of the evidence from your own research. Satisfy your acceptance or rejection of the evidence by the author. Look for biases in the presentation of information about the question or issue. What basic assumptions are made? Are the assumptions and the materials fair and balanced? Finally, examine and understand the spin provided by the author to frame the provided information about the question or issue.
Step 4. Analyze the data by asking the “so what” questions. Dig below the surface of the facts by asking a series of so-what questions. For example: surface level fact: our competitor is opening a factory in China. Second-level meaning: so what? Well, labour in China is less expensive than our labour. So what? Our competitor’s cost base will go down. So what? Our competitor will be able to make a product for less than we can. You keep on going. As a strategist you must peel the onion to uncover deeper, second-level meanings of the facts.
The final step, step 5. Having reflected and undertaken critical thought about the issue, you are now in a position to set out your findings.
