Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking happens without actually acknowledging it. Any time you prompt a change in your life, or cognitively use your ability to naturally deduce a solution to anything you are faced with, you are employing critical thinking skills. Your natural thought process such as balancing unexpected expenses with the difficulty of paying your necessary bills when you are on a fixed income is one of life’s most common thought processes. This is a very familiar example, but you can also perfect your critical thinking skills by consciously applying specific steps to any decision, effectively “thinking” and micro-analyzing. Regardless of how fundamental or advanced your critical thinking skills, they are a tool that all people, regardless of education or social status utilize in everyday life.

Per Paul & Elder (2006), “workers are being paid precisely for the thinking they are able to do. Though most of our thinking is invisible, it represents one of the most important things about us. Its quality will determine whether we will become rich or poor, powerful or weak. Yet, we typically think without explicitly noticing how we are doing it.” The importance of critical thinking is undeniable. In the business world today, employees who are able to think out-of-the-box and come up with great ideas are held in high regard. To be able to analyze a situation, come up with several alternatives, and argue the pros and cons of each makes a person invaluable and shows their critical thinking skills. However, we don’t see “great critical thinking skills” on resumes as much as “great people skills.” As important as critical thinking is in business, it isn’t talked about as much as it is practiced and admired.

My company is a real estate investment organization. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, tourism and the hotel industry suffered hard losses. During an early planning session, upper management used collaborative critical thinking skills and realized they could buy some of the failing hotels for pennies on the dollar. Using in-depth analysis, they believed the tourism market would bounce back. People were afraid to travel and while hotel occupancy was continually decreasing, we started buying hotels all over the country. Most of our competitors thought they were crazy. Our critical thinking plan was right and the company made plenty of money in the process. After this early planning decision, buying real estate in out-of-favor markets became one of the company’s main goals and continues to be one of its foremost objectives today.

Most of us will use trial and error as our critical thinking process. When something works, we will use it again and when something fails, we will try a new way of doing it. This method of critical thinking is a slow one and happens without our active participation. The University of Phoenix has a nine-step process for decision-making and I dare say that following these steps inherently will force any person to think critically and to sharpen their critical thinking skills. These steps, which are beneficial and essential to decision-making, are identifying the problem, defining the criteria, goals, objectives for the decision, evaluating the effects of the problem, identifying the cause of the problem, framing alternative solutions, evaluating the impacts of these alternatives, making the decision, implementing the decision and measuring the impacts of this decision (University of Phoenix,