By Felix Concepcion Veroya
Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally, recognizing the logical relationship between concepts. It is one of the essential skills that is required at every workplace. Based on a report published of the World Economic Forum, critical thinking and analysis is one of the Top 10 Skills of 2025. This only means that one should start honing this skill for his or her future. Just like any other skill, not all are born with a gift of being a critical thinker.
Yes, some people have an easier time acquiring them than others, but they can be nurtured in anyone. This indicates that if you want to be a good critical thinker, you must remember that it takes a lot of practice to become a good critical thinker. I would attest to the words of Stephen Covey and Malcolm Gladwell on their books 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Outliers, respectively, that one should sharpen the saw for 10,000 hours for a skill to be developed.
In this article, I will be sharing some tips on how you can start building the skill if you are a beginner and continue sharpening it if you are already a practitioner.
1. Ask basic question. Being an inquisitive person helps you to become a critical thinker. If you have a clear head, you can ask better questions and will better understand things that are happening around you. Say, you encounter a problem at home or at work. Here are some basic questions that you can ask to have a clearer picture before taking any action.
– What information do you currently have?
– How these pieces of information help you better understand the situation?
– What are the things that need to be discovered, proved, disproved, supported or criticized?
– What are the things that you might be overlooking?
– What are the factors that could lead why this event happened?
Just to avoid making the situation or scenario complex. Always bring it to the simplest form as possible by asking the fundamental questions to help you out. You can add more questions that will help you get the context of what you are trying to understand in every situation.
For my case, I have developed my “questioning” skills because of my exposure and practice of root cause analysis. We have tools like Why – Why Analysis that is used to expose potential root causes by asking the question “Why” repeatedly. This is of course, accompanied by asking fundamental questions to put context in the problem solving or process improvement projects that we are doing.
2. Be conscious of your thought process. You must reflect on how you process information about things and how you used them in making decisions moving forward. Our brain uses certain heuristics or algorithms to take inferences from our environment and use them to produce insights. There are times that there will be biases as we try to process these pieces of information through our mental frames. You must be cautious not to lean on your biases and always be objective and follow your defined thought process.
As you may know, I am a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and I often use the DMAIC (Define – Measure – Analyze – Improve – Control) as one of my thought processes. I have adapted the use of this approach not only for work but for personal use as well. There are so many approaches that you can use, and you can adapt one of those to start building your thought process and modify it to your needs moving forward. You can look for the Plan – Do – Check – Act (PDCA), the Kepner – Tregoe problem solving framework, Design Thinking, TRIZ, etc.
3. Have a flexible perspective. We are guided by our own perspectives. Being a critical thinker requires having a flexible perspective so you can adapt to what is happening. As mentioned in the previous paragraphs, we have biases that we have to overcome to become more objective and critical. Removing our biases is one way to develop that flexible perspective in us. We must adapt to all the factors and constraints that are operating in the space we are trying to understand.
I have experience being torn between my biases and being a flexible, critical thinker. When you are in a job like mine – problem solving and process improvement, most of the times, you have this hypothesis that this could be root cause of this problem, yet you must prove it first before you decide or take any action. You must remove that bias you have and lean to what is the right perspective based on your fundamental questions and your thought process.
4. Develop your eyes for pattern. In developing critical thinking, one should see the pattern so he or she can start connecting the dots that will lead to a better understanding of the situation. This involves asking questions and using data to pull off some insights and possible patterns that will be useful in your decision-making process.
When I am doing problem solving projects, I always ask my team to collect data about the process and run some graphical analysis to check for possible patterns that will help us out in isolating potential causes. From this point, things will start to be easier rather than shooting bullets to any direction. If you notice, the first three (3) points I mentioned will be covered before you can have a successful attempt doing this fourth one.
These tips may not be new to most of you, but I believe will be at least helpful to those who are just starting their journey to becoming #significantlybetter critical thinkers of the future.
For questions, concerns, advises and speaking engagements, please send an email to fcveroya@asklexph.com or visit asklexph.com/courses for free e-learning courses for professional development.
