Build Your Critical Thinking Skills in 3 Weeks
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Improve your productivity and decision-making skills with empirically based methods
Critical thinking is one of the most sought-after skills in job applicants and is one of the keys to success in more advanced roles. But what exactly is critical thinking, and how can you build this important skill? Becoming better at critical thinking will make you better at connecting ideas, solving problems, and finding errors in your own work and the work of others.
Join expert Connie Missimer to explore why critical thinking is different from habitual thinking or gut-level decision-making, how it can equip you to find better answers and more effective solutions, and how you can use it to facilitate innovative thinking. You’ll learn how to apply critical thinking in your workplace and how mental models work in critical thinking so you can take your problem-solving and strategy skills to a higher level.
Week 1: Introduction to Critical Thinking—The Basics for Business
Critical thinking is the consideration of alternative arguments or theories in light of evidence. You’re already using critical thinking skills in some aspects of your life. In this session, you’ll learn why getting into the habit of critical thinking is crucial in the workplace. And you’ll learn that critical thinking is not difficult once you learn what it is and appreciate its value. You’ll leave equipped with examples of critical thinking that you can draw on immediately in your workplace to improve products and processes.
Week 2: Applied Critical Thinking—Five Workplace Scenarios
In Week 2, you’ll examine applied critical thinking in a set of five complex, nuanced case studies based on actual workplace situations. You'll learn a number of advanced critical thinking techniques, such as “engulf and devour" (a way to take others’ views into account while advancing the discussion), and discover how critical thinking relates to innovation and AI in the workplace. You'll leave with a clearer understanding of where and how to employ critical thinking strategies to solve work-related challenges, leading to happier employees and a better bottom line.
Week 3: Mental Models Fundamentals—Excelling at Your Business
Mental models are the lenses through which we see, learn about, and understand the world. In Week 3, you’ll learn how to identify and understand the mental models you use and how you can sharpen those lenses and compare alternative mental models—the essence of critical thinking. After grasping what a mental model is, you’ll discover how one of its premier exponents, the Nobelist Richard Feynman, used it to learn. And you’ll understand how mental models are key to recognizing your fundamental assumptions about unexamined notions such as simplicity and problem-solving.
NOTE: With today’s registration, you’ll be signed up for all three sessions. Although you can attend any of the sessions individually, we recommend participating in all three weeks.
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
By the end of this live, hands-on, three-part series, you’ll understand:
Week 1: Introduction to Critical Thinking—The Basics for Business
- The definition of critical thinking, and evidence for its importance
- Why critical thinking is crucial to solving problems and innovating
- How critical thinking applies to everyday business
Week 2: Applied Critical Thinking—Five Workplace Scenarios
- Critical thinking as it applies throughout your business
- The vocabulary of critical thinking and its uses
- Unexpected areas where you can apply critical thinking
Week 3: Mental Models Fundamentals—Excelling at Your Business
- What a mental model is
- Why mental model thinking is central to the growth of knowledge
- How comparing mental models is a crucial element in critical thinking
And you’ll be able to:
Week 1: Introduction to Critical Thinking—The Basics for Business
- Apply critical thinking skills to business needs
- Become more effective in your work
- Work with your team to solve problems and approach barriers to critical thinking
Week 2: Applied Critical Thinking—Five Workplace Scenarios
- Apply critical thinking at a deeper, more detailed level
- Take a leadership role at your company, using either existing data or pilot tests to help your company make or save money
Week 3: Mental Models Fundamentals—Excelling at Your Business
- Recognize mental models across fields
- Use mental models to learn and evaluate ideas across disciplines and in the workplace
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a manager in any area of your company and you need to help your team identify and solve problems.
- You’re an individual contributor in any area of your company and you want to become a thought leader in your area.
- You lead a growing company, and you need to know how to infuse critical thinking into your workforce.
Prerequisites
Recommended preparation:
- Watch Critical Thinking at Work (learning path)
Recommended follow-up:
- Watch Understanding Cognitive Biases (learning path)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Week 1: Introduction to Critical Thinking—The Basics for Business
Critical thinking in workplace scenarios (60 minutes)
- Presentation: The nature of attention as two things to remember; the definition of critical thinking; the field of critical thinking and alternative theories about it; an introduction of the Occam’s Razor heuristic
- Hands-on exercises: Think critically to solve problems in the workplace (long meetings, reports that have become habitual, a director who is constantly “putting out fires,” and an employee doing a lot of “extra work”)
- Group discussions: The differing views of critical thinking; your opinion of unnecessary processes
- Q&A
- Break
The nature of evidence and the evidence for critical thinking (50 minutes)
- Presentation: Evidence that critical thinking has driven progress across fields, businesses, and products; one way to innovate; a fictional company’s struggle to create a spin-off product; habit as the enemy of critical thinking; five barriers to critical thinking at your company and ways to lower them; how to think critically about the tolerance for critical thinking in your workplace (POUND versus FLEX structures)
- Hands-on exercises: Identify habits/attitudes in your workplace that might stifle new ways of thinking; the implications of barriers to critical thinking in the workplace; hypothetical companies that encourage or discourage critical thinking
- Group discussion: Your views of innovation; data about innovation as a subset of critical thinking; What are the barriers in your workplace?
Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)
Week 2: Applied Critical Thinking—Five Workplace Scenarios
Scenario 1: Strategic thinking (25 minutes)
- Presentation: Why the best high-level strategic thinking entails weighing alternatives; strategic thinking examples and counterexamples (e.g., just doing what the competition has started to do)
- Hands-on exercise: Identify the strategic thinking your company could do (or already does) and whether and how it entails alternatives
- Group discussion: Critical thinking terms
Scenario 2: Innovation (35 minutes)
- Presentation: Why innovation requires systemic critical thinking
- Hands-on exercise: Identify areas (processes or products) where your company could innovate
- Group discussion: Innovation opportunities at your company; critical thinking terms
- Break
Scenario 3: AI and critical thinking (15 minutes)
- Presentation: Why training in critical thinking is the best way to adapt to (and use) AI
- Hands-on exercise: Identify where AI could replace people at your company
- Group discussion: Implications of AI for the workplace and how critical thinking can help you address this challenge; critical thinking terms
Scenario 4: Loyal opposition (15 minutes)
- Presentation: How political constraints can hamper your company’s productivity in unexpected ways
- Group discussion: The implications of loyal opposition in the workplace; critical thinking terms
Scenario 5: Evaluating unusual organizations (15 minutes)
- Presentation: Four-hour workdays; rotating managers; how to get at these arrangements empirically
- Group discussion: Critical thinking terms
Wrap-up and Q&A (15 minutes)
Week 3: Mental Models Fundamentals—Excelling at Your Business
What is a mental model? (15 minutes)
- Presentation: Mental models—the brain’s way of grasping complicated ideas; mental models as descriptions of people’s thought processes about anything; examples of mental models; similarities to hypotheses, theories, arguments, and accounts
- Q&A
Why mental model thinking is important (10 minutes)
- Presentation: Changing your perspective to see alternatives to fixed mental models; examples of mental models large and small; examples of nested mental models
- Q&A
Business models in history (10 minutes)
- Presentation: How evolving workplace practices have changed our sense of ourselves; the value of mental models in uncovering erroneous assumptions
- Hands-on exercise: How would you view your job differently if you had “artisan” as part of your job title?
- Q&A
How mental models are like air (5 minutes)
- Presentation: Air as what we unthinkingly breathe until a shift in air purity spurs the mental model of air quality
- Hands-on exercise: Can you think of a mental model about work that has come to the fore in the past year or so?
- Q&A
Mental models within business (5 minutes)
- Presentation: The employee as customer versus not customer; the customer who leaves as important versus not important; the employee who spends more time at work as more valuable; bold CEOs as the ones making acquisitions; the use of productivity software to evaluate employee performance; weighing evidence to compare mental models; disinformation and mental model distortion
- Hands-on exercise: Consider what evidence would be needed to evaluate business mental models
- Q&A
Comparative mental models (20 minutes)
- Presentation: Personality as fixed versus fluid; agile versus waterfall; personal choices such as switching jobs or staying put (risk versus stability); letting conflict fester versus resolving it promptly; the atom as a miniscule, discrete thing versus the atom as probabilistic in space (quantum mechanics)
- Hands-on exercise: Think of additional examples of comparative mental models
- Q&A
- Break
Constructing a new mental model and sketching its evidentiary needs (15 minutes)
- Presentation: Fashioning a new model on perennial issues such as child-rearing, opiate addiction, fashion, decluttering, etc., and deciding what evidence is needed to support it
- Q&A
Mental models as tools to assess other mental models (10 minutes)
- Presentation: Some historical examples (the controlled experiment, correlations)
- Hands-on exercise: Is “the smell test” of an idea a mental model?
- Q&A
Charlie Munger’s business mental models (10 minutes)
- Presentation: The polymath billionaire who uses a “lattice” of mental models to evaluate alternative proposals; looking at five of his “tools”
- Group discussion: Munger’s tools
- Hands-on exercise: Think of a business issue that has alternative directions/answers and a mental model tool to use when evaluating the issue
- Q&A
The Feynman Technique (10 minutes)
- Presentation: Mental models as ideal learning tools (recall data better, grasp data more easily, accumulate data more readily); mental models as problem-solving tools; how Feynman caught on to a different tool for differentiating parameters under the integral sign; the Feynman Technique—forming a mental model, imagine teaching it to a five-year-old, and then refining it
- Hands-on exercise: Use the Feynman Technique
- Q&A
Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)
Your Instructor
Connie Missimer
Connie Missimer is a philosopher and expert in critical thinking. Her book Good Arguments: An Introduction to Critical Thinking, which offers the basics of analyzing theories and arguments, is now in its fourth edition. She’s been influential in the critical thinking community for articles on her empirically based theory and has conducted workshops both nationally and internationally. She worked at Microsoft and then at AT&T, where she advised Samsung, Microsoft, and Google on making their products more user-friendly, and she holds over a dozen patents. Connie is fascinated by empirical findings—especially the counterintuitive ones—relating to daily work and is the author of Critical Thinking at Work: Does Your Company Pound or Flex? She has enjoyed the privilege of giving workshops on the O’Reilly learning platform for the past four years.