Thinking Critically

As a manager, I was occasionally asked by my organization to help in its recruitment efforts. The HR Team made arrangements for me and my peers to interview the shortlisted candidates and we were given their CVs a short time before the interviews started. I often found that the CVs were not very reliable records of what the candidates had actually done or what skills they possessed. The reasons ranged from mendacity to sloppiness. In some cases, to our great amusement, the candidates had falsely claimed to have had more years of experience in a cutting-edge technology than it had existed! More often, I found that the candidates did not know how to present their accomplishments in their CV effectively. The ability to discern fact from fiction and to unearth real strengths from a sub-par résumé was key to making smart hiring decisions.

A senior manager mentored us on being careful about our own cognitive biases – these are tricks our mind plays on us as we make decisions with the information we have been given. A common trap I was susceptible to, and started to guard against, was when I liked the candidate within the first ten minutes and spent the remaining 50 minutes of my interview looking for reasons to hire the person. This type of bias is called “confirmation bias” and what makes this bias particularly pernicious is that we are frequently not conscious of it. We may ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the candidate based on their first few responses, where they’d studied or where they’d worked until then, and if we are not careful, our interview will be skewed too heavily in one direction and thus lead us to bad decisions.

This ability to carefully assess information objectively, decide if it is reliable and adequate, ask pertinent questions to learn more, detect inconsistencies and contradictions, validate major assumptions and know (and guard against) one’s own biases when making decisions is called ‘critical thinking’. Leaders and managers need this skill in literally everything they do: deciding to hire someone, building a response to an RFP, managing their team’s performance, devising a strategy, solving a problem, resolving a conflict, and more recently, responding to a crisis.

The next time you face an important decision, trying to find answers to the below questions will help you avoid expensive mistakes:

• Is this a decision that needs to be made now? What will happen if I do nothing?
• Is what I am seeing a pattern or merely a one-off occurrence?
• Do I know enough? Or should I ask for more information? What am I missing?
• What am I afraid of, in this context? Is this a valid fear?
• Was my information gathered without bias? Is it accurate? Recent? Relevant?
• Is my source credible? Do they have a vested interest?
• Who can help me? Have I spoken to people who have faced this situation before?
• Who will my decision benefit? How will it benefit them? Can I enlist their support?
• Who will my decision hurt? How will it hurt them? What can I do to mitigate this?
• Is my decision aligned with the values and goals of my organization?
• What do I want my end-state to look like? What am I trying to finally achieve?

Critical Thinking is not easy but like any skill, it can be learned with deliberate, conscious effort. With repeated practice, it can become a habit. And if you want to become really adept at it, mentor your team on this most valuable skill – after all, you learn best when you teach.