From the course: Critical Thinking

Apply critical thinking every day

From the course: Critical Thinking

Apply critical thinking every day

- As you go to apply these critical thinking skills to your daily work, let me offer some suggestions on how you can get started. First, identify a specific problem that you're working on. Then break that big problem down into smaller, more solvable ones. Once you've done that, document all those findings into a clear and compelling problem statement. You should then look for new solutions. Once you have some solutions, focus on the meaningful. Then go and do your analysis, but think critically about the results. You should also build these approaches into your and your team's daily life. Don't just take an issue and run with it. Understand that everybody on the team should stop at that moment when we've defined a problem and really think through what are the implications of how we're defining it. Remove constraints to your thinking. If you find yourself saying, "Well, that's the way we've always done it," or "We can't do this because," those should be flags that you're locked in to your current thought processes. That's when you should step back and challenge that thinking. If you'd like some more information about these critical thinking skills, I encourage you to take a look at a couple of my other courses. One is Solving Business Problems, where I get into more of the tools related to the problem solving approach. Also, Decision-Making Fundamentals, helping you think through how you make decisions and what the implications of those decisions might be. Other resources that are available are my work on critical thinking. I encourage you to take a look at our website, where I've got plenty of blog posts and articles on some of these tools and how you can apply them, as well as information about classroom courses that I teach on these methods. I'd like to thank you for your time and I wish you the best of luck as you apply these critical thinking skills.

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