Creating a Thinking Organisation
Successfully navigating volatile market conditions is highly dependent on exceptional thinking capabilities.
Turbulent market conditions and the rapid pace of change requires individuals and teams to have exceptional thinking capabilities.
The World Economic Forum’s ‘Future of Jobs Report’ ranked Critical Thinking second in its Top 10 Skills for jobs for 2022i and a recent McKinsey global survey of business leaders revealed Critical Thinking and Problem Solving were the top two skills leaders most wanted from their employees.ii
In a McKinsey survey of more than 1,200 managers across a range of global companies it was revealed that there was growing levels of frustration with:
- Broken decision-making processes.
- The slow pace of decision-making deliberations, and;
- The uneven quality of decision-making outcomes.
Fewer than half of the survey respondents said that decisions are timely, and 61 percent said that at least half the time spent making them is ineffective.iii
And yet, a Bain & Company survey of executives worldwide from 760 companies revealed:
- A company’s past decision effectiveness is 95 percent correlated with financial performance one year in the future.
- Companies that were most effective at decision-making and execution generated average total shareholder returns nearly six percentage points higher than those of other firms.
- Many companies have enormous scope to improve their performance. Top-quintile companies score an average of 71 out of 100 in decision effectiveness. Companies in the other four quintiles score, on average, 30 and below.
While Executives acknowledge the link between decisions and results, few companies have an enterprise-wide decision-making framework that is used to consistently enable exceptional thinking.
During times of turbulence, it’s essential that teams can successfully navigate complexity, and ambiguity and generate new ideas and activities that are aligned to strategy.
The value of becoming a ‘Thinking Organisation’?
The value of a ‘thinking organisation’ is consistently having high quality decision-making and activities aligned with purpose, values and strategy.
In a Thinking Organisation, individuals and teams have the skills to successfully navigate and adapt to new environments; deduce facts and evaluate information without bias; demonstrate both agile and robust decision-making; gain new insights on risks and opportunities; challenge assumptions and uncover blind spots; develop realistic solutions for complex problems and drive outcomes that provide immediate and enduring value.
The skills required to build a Thinking Organisation
Good decision-making is underpinned by critical thinking capabilities which include:
- Analysing: understanding the facts, assumptions, and gaps in information.
- Verifying: searching and validating information from multiple sources.
- Clarifying: to identify the ‘main issue or opportunity’ and exclude unimportant information.
- Actioning: identifying immediate actions with incomplete or conflicting information.
- Forecasting: planning for a range of potential scenarios and solutions.
- Problem-solving: developing creative solutions and strategies to problems.
- Perceiving: awareness of the broader impacts across the enterprise.
- Collaborating: ‘active’ listening and building a ‘shared’ view.
- Synthesising: ‘cutting through’ to develop a common operating picture.
- Prioritising: agreeing on most important and longer-term issues and reaching consensus on key ‘critical’ decisions.
- Planning: developing plans to action key items.
- Communicating: identifying and communicating effectively with all key stakeholders.
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The vast number of skills required to be an exceptional thinker highlights the need for a framework and team-based approach which enables all team members to contribute their skills, experience and perspectives.
Embedding agile and robust decision-making as an organisation-wide capability requires strong leadership, clarity of purpose, and a willingness to work well together; while developing critical thinking skills requires proven frameworks, access to tools, training and social learning opportunities.
The roadmap to creating a Thinking Organisation
Today, it’s imperative that high quality decision making is occurring consistently across every level of the organisation every day; not just intermittently within the executive level team.
The roadmap to creating a Thinking Organisation involves embedding a common language and framework across the enterprise that enables teams to develop exceptional thinking skills to successfully navigate uncertainty. When teams acquire the skills to think critically using a best practice framework, they can assess both risk and opportunity simultaneously, in an agile, distributed decision-making environment.
To help teams develop their critical thinking and decision-making skills, Janellis uses the Critical Thinking Framework.
It is a 7-Step Process that draws upon a combination of strategic and critical thinking skills from teams and facilitates diverse perspectives in problem-solving, particularly for cross-functional teams. The framework is a rigorous process that allows teams to methodically work through a series of steps and find a ‘common language’ to assess both risk and opportunity and consider impacts in a distributed decision-making environment.
The 7-Step Process can be used at all levels of an organisation as it’s simple, intuitive, structured, and orientated toward action. Embedding this framework within all teams makes it possible to create a thinking organisation that is both agile and resilient.
Organisations with critical thinking capabilities can achieve competitive advantage as they have the skills to:
- Successfully navigate and adapt to new environments.
- Deduce facts and evaluate information without bias.
- Demonstrate both agile and robust decision-making.
- Gain new insights into risks and opportunities.
- Challenge assumptions and uncover blind spots.
- Develop realistic solutions for complex problems.
- Drive outcomes that provide immediate and enduring value.
Embedding exceptional Critical Thinking skills
There are a number of ways to upskill and embed exceptional critical thinking skills:
- There are six key steps to embedding high-quality decision-making across the enterprise which are detailed below:
- Business Critical. Elevate ‘high-quality decision-making’ to business critical and commit at the executive and board level to embedding a standardised, best practice approach to decision-making across the organisation. Ensure there is clarity on organisational purpose, values, and risk appetite in using the framework.
- Decision-Making Framework. Identify a Decision-Making Framework from within your business or externally that enables critical thinking that can be used at all levels of the organisation to build capability. The framework needs to be used individually for rapid decision-making as well as by teams at all levels, for more complex problem solving and decision-making. The framework should be a unified, simple, intuitive way to make decisions that balances both risk and opportunity, considers impacts and drives outcomes.
- Capability Assessment. Identify key personnel within the business who exhibit high-quality decision-making who can role model and champion the desired skills and behaviours. Ensure their intuitive skills are applied against the framework to provide transparency and visibility of how the decision-making thinking is occurring and to create social learning opportunities for others. Identify the high priority teams who are managing the greatest number of complex decisions where their skills are still developing and include them in a pilot program.
- Deliver a High Priority Pilot. Deliver a pilot program for priority teams to target efforts into the highest value areas. Use Master Facilitators and scenario-based activities, based on current challenges and emerging threats, to resolve immediate issues and accelerate the capability uplift.
- Enterprise Program. Undertake a broader capability assessment and design an enterprise uplift program that draws upon the key learnings from the pilot program. Include social learning opportunities, scenario-based planning, and access to experts who have critical thinking skills to deliver an uplift program for all levels of the organisation.
- Embed Capability. Embed the capability through an Accreditation Program that includes access to tools, templates, eLearning and aide memoires to consolidate and maintain high quality decision-making.
Summary
Studies show organisations that create a Thinking Organisation in the current turbulent business environment can boost their performance across multiple dimensions by upskilling teams to make and execute key decisions. This in turn, enables them to deliver customer value better and faster than competitors.
The vast number of skills required to be an exceptional thinker highlights the need for a framework and team-based approach which enables all team members at all levels to contribute their skills, experience and perspectives to achieve company objectives through effective decision-making every day.
For more information on how to build your team’s critical thinking skills visit:
Critical Thinking Professional Accreditation
Critical Thinking Framework
Embedding High-Quality Decision-Making across the Enterprise Roadmap
Register to participate in our upcoming research:
Research on Critical Thinking and Decision-Making within Agile Environments
About Janellis
Janellis is a Management Consulting firm specialising in helping organisations execute their strategy and build resilience. This is done through three key practice areas of Project Delivery, Capability Uplift and Organisational Resilience.
Janellis helps organisations build resilience and deliver complex programs by uplifting capabilities in areas such as team-based critical thinking. Uplifting critical thinking skills relies on experiential and ‘learning by doing’ activities using scenarios. In response to COVID, Janellis combined online learning and experiential learning through our Digital War Rooms and Virtual Labs. Our Master Facilitators enable experiential learning both in real-time and online using virtual tools where teams put into practice our tools and frameworks.
Why is it important?
“Team-based critical thinking allows us to be both agile and robust in our decision making, drawing upon the brains trust of the organisation”
CEO
Energy Company
“Critical thinking skills are essential skills for our organisation when responding to the rapid onset of change”
Managing Director
Critical Infrastructure
“By developing our critical thinking capabilities our teams can manage difficult situations well and also see the opportunities to execute strategy more efficiently”
Executive Leader
Insurance
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References
[i] World Economic Forum. 2020. The Future of Jobs Report 2020. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020 [Accessed 8 September 2022].
[ii] McKinsey & Company. Soft Skills for a Hard World | McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work/five-fifty-soft-skills-for-a-hard-world [Accessed 7 September 2022].
[iii] McKinsey & Company. 2022. Effective decision making in the age of urgency | McKinsey. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/decision-making-in-the-age-of-urgency. [Accessed 18 June 2022].
[iv] Blenko, M., Mankins, M. and Rogers, P., 2010. The Decision-Driven Organization. Harvard Business Review [Online]. The Magazine (June 2010), 1. Available at: https://hbr.org/2010/06/the-decision-driven-organization [Accessed 18 June 2022].
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