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Critical Thinking Lab

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We recently held our first ‘open’ Critical Thinking Lab, attended by executives from industries including; banking and finance; energy; utilities; construction and telecommunications.

The executives who participated shared the need for improved decision making as some individuals and teams are:

  • “too quick to make decisions without considering the facts and/or impacts”
  • “too slow to make decisions and with poor judgement”
  • “making decisions with bias, limited structure or rigor”

 A broad range of skills underpin good decision-making including the ability to ‘cut through’ by analysing, verifying and clarifying.  Problem solving, imagining, perceiving and collaborating, synthesising, prioritising, planning and communicating are also essential elements of good decision making.

Many of these skills are considered ‘critical thinking’ skills and not surprisingly, it is usually the executive leaders within the organisation who have honed these skills through intuition and experience.

The opportunity is to build these skills across the organisation more broadly as “a company’s strategy is the sum of decisions it effectively makes and executes over time” and this needs to happen at all layers on a day-day basis, not just for the executive-led decisions.

To address the issue of building capability more broadly across the organisation participants were given insights and case study examples of how executive leaders are enabling team-base critical thinking within their organisation through:

  • more structure and rigor to the decision-making process particularly at ‘critial decision points’
  • using a framework that draws on a diverse group of expertise and deeper levels of thinking
  • greater collaboration in solving a complex problem

A real scenario facing an organisation in the banking and finance sector was shared by one of the lab particpants.  The participants were able to stress-test the current thinking on the problem and opportunity and provide a more objective and robust perspective.  Facts, assumptions and the ‘main issue’ was clarified and new ideas were generated, drawing upon the expertise in the room.

Feedback included:

“It was fascinating to experience a group of people from diverse organisational cultures using the framework to tackle the same problem”.

“In less than 90 mins we arrived at some of the same conclusions as many months of internal review”.

“A high calibre event with good diversity of sectors/verticals”

We are running a schedule of fortnightly virtual and open labs. If you’d like to attend or want more information on a customised critical thinking lab, please contact Jonathan.Durnall@Janellis.com.au or visit the events section.

Developing critical thinking within teams

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In my last article on using scenario planning to build an adaptive capacity I mentioned the research we undertook with executives on building resilience within critical infrastructure and the value of change management in executing strategy.

In uncovering the most current issues and thinking in these areas the research found that, for some organisations, there has been a convergence of issues raised as:

  • a resilient organisation has been described as one that has an adaptive capacity to deal with change and;
  • organisations looking to improve the change management aspects of executing strategy are seeking to build greater resilience in their people, specifically in leading and responding well to change.

Developing ‘critical thinking’ within teams

One of the main approaches Janellis take in helping organisations build their resilience and adaptive capacity is to enhance and develop critical thinking skills. The tool that we use to embed and enable team based critical thinking is our executive decision support tool.

The tool has been designed to enable critical thinking during times of high pressure and scrutiny to: ‘cut through’ conflicting or incomplete information; understand priorities; assess impacts across key areas; make decisions; allocate tasks and to communicate effectively to a full range of identified stakeholders.

The tool allows teams to be agile and adaptive and to demonstrate resilience in the face of rapid and disruptive change.

Teams who have been using the tool for many years have intuitively used this capability in other areas such as running major transformation projects, steering committee meetings and responding to significant regulatory changes.

Most successful leaders are already following this critical thinking process in an intuitive way, at a personal level. Using the tool enables critical thinking capability to be developed more broadly in a collective way, that draws upon the diverse views and experiences within the team or organisation.

The benefits in using an executive decision support tool are:

• Helping teams through critical decision points in establishing the strategic direction or within projects being planned or underway;

• Providing more rigor for steering committee members to help uncover issues, confirm priorities, guide decision making and enhance stakeholder engagement;

• Uncovering blind spots to respond effectively to all types of risks including those that are strategic or slow burn;

• Enabling a strong risk-­based culture by a more thorough evaluation process of key impacts.

The tool can be used at any level within the organisation to uplift critical thinking capability and to accelerate the development of emerging leaders.

Critical thinking enables leaders to understand the impact of their decisions and helps create alignment and accountability for results.

For more information on the tool, the research or our Critical Thinking Labs please email jonathan.durnall@janellis.com.au.