Podcast Script

Narrative script for a podcast episode forcusing on critical thinking skills in business leadership. The client was a professional development platform with a focus on podcast-style learning. This particular case was ghostwritten and the client details are obscured for sample viewing.

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Everybody hates a critic — when it comes to movies, books, art, and music. In a team envi- ronment, being a critic can be a highly valued soft skill; one that can help you lead your team through challenges, and guide them towards success. Critical Thinking is a skill you can learn and continue to develop throughout your career, and in today’s lesson we’ll go over why it is an important skill, and what you can do to practice and improve your critical thinking skills.

So, what defines “critical thinking”? It is much more than providing feedback on a problem; according to Drs. Linda Elder and Richard Paul, founders of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, the skill can be defined as the, “art of analysing and evaluating thinking with a view to im- proving it.” They break down the skill into three fundamental components: Analysis, Evalua- tion, and Improvement. Analysis emphasises the structures of thinking; Evaluation brings your attention to the quality of a thought; and Improvement takes your analysis and evalua- tion into account to improve your thoughts and actions. Together, these components result in the ability to have an objective view of a problem and come up with a creative solution for it. It is an important leadership skill for evaluating progress, making decisions and pro- ducing results. Critical thinking is the art of analysing and evaluating the way you think, with the aim of improvement.

Why is critical thinking so beneficial in leadership positions? Consider how often you come across the same problem twice. It’s quite rare, isn’t it, to be confronted with an identical problem you already have the perfect solution for? To progress successfully as a leader, you must be able to learn new information and pivot accordingly. Both problem-solving and learning are more easily achieved when you can think critically about your needs.

Critical thinking can also bolster the knowledge economy of your workplace, as it encour- ages self-reflection and self-reliance and improves decision-making at all levels. Also, accord- ing to Indeed.com, practiced critical thinkers are generally happier at work.

Now, let’s begin to learn what we can do to develop and improve critical thinking skills, and find ways to practice them on a day-to-day basis.

In a post on their Career Guide blog, a link to which can be found in the show notes, Indeed.- com breaks down five essential elements of critical thinking skills. These essential elements further break down the three fundamental components of critical thinking that you learned about earlier in this episode. The five essential elements of critical thinking are:

Observation.
Analysis.
Inference.
Communication.
Problem-Solving.

Observation and analysis correspond to, of course, Analysis;

Inference relates back to Evaluation; Communication and Problem-solving make up the final foundational component — Improvement.

Together, these five essential skills can see you through any problem, whether you are using the skills individually or in cooperation with each other. Breaking down umbrella concepts like “Critical Thinking” into these smaller ideas helps make them more approachable and easier to practice. Next, we’ll go through each of these essential elements one by one and break down what they mean, and what you can do to practice and develop the individual skills.

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Welcome back to our lesson on Critical Thinking. When we left off, we had just learned the five essential elements of critical thinking; observation, analysis, inference, communication, and problem-solving. These five essential elements correspond to the three foundational components of critical thinking — analysis, evaluation, and improvement. No matter how you break them down, the result is the same. Critical thinking is the ability to evaluate and observe a thought, with the intention of improving it. In a leadership position, critical think- ing is used to solve problems, accelerate growth, and provide actionable feedback for your team.

Critical thinking and its related skill set won’t emerge overnight. They need to be practiced just the same way you would practice a practical skill, like driving a car or cooking. It’s nec- essary to practice each of the essential skills on their own, so that using them together be- comes seamless — like learning how to chop an onion, so you can caramelize them, and make a French onion soup. The skills used in critical thinking are a little less tangible than learning how to properly chop an onion, which means the methods of practice are less tan- gible as well.

Observation

Observation is the ability to notice opportunities, problems, and solutions, and it is the cor- nerstone of critical thinking. A good observer can sniff out problems at their start, and can also zoom out to see the systemic issues that may have caused the problem in the first place. Good observers can also work proactively by finding opportunities and improvement areas, in order to develop those later.

Mindfulness and mindful meditation is one of the best exercises you can do to train your ob- servation skills. Mindfulness teaches you to quiet the noise around you and move through the world at a more intentional pace. Meditation teaches you to clear the noise in your mind and begin to observe yourself objectively. When you put those two techniques together, your brain learns how to pay attention to its surroundings in a meaningful way, and approach sit- uations without judgement.

Judgement can cloud your view of an opportunity or a problem. What is a “bad’ opportuni- ty anyway? It is only an opportunity that was passed over without proper consideration. Mindfulness and meditation teaches you to observe at face value, allowing you to consider a situation for what it is rather than for what your bias may say about it. Journaling, active listening, and reading are a few other techniques that you can practice training your observa- tion skills. As you start to train this skill, you’ll find paying close attention becomes easier. Taking that extra moment to look around becomes second nature.

Analysis

Practising critical observation skills is the foundational first step when it comes to nurturing critical thinking skills. Observation is key to critical thinking, but what do you do with all that information you’ve observed? Analysis is the skill of processing and interpreting the data you receive through observation. Let’s say a complicated data set is dropped onto your desk. Combing through and taking notes on that data is always the first step, but your work will never end there. You will always be expected to extrapolate meaning from that data — that is the essence of analysis.

Just as we did with our observation learning, we will be looking away from work to improve your analysis skills, and it is deceptively simple. The best way to flex your analytical muscles simply to step outside of your comfort zone. In practise, that means reading about unfamil- iar concepts, expanding your social circle, and committing to new hobbies in order to ex- plore your world view. Practising analysis can be difficult because it is a passive activity — your goal should be to create enough flexibility in your mind to be able to challenge your usual modes of thought. In an article for Harvard Business Review, Helen Lee Bouygues says:

”If everyone in our social circles thinks as we do, we become more rigid in our thinking, and less likely to change our beliefs on the basis of new information.”

A flexible mind can easily view a situation from multiple different angles, and therefore can draw creative conclusions from the same observation as someone else.

Inference

Practicing critical thinking skills is less work than it seems. It is more helpful to find small ways to incorporate the skills you are trying to improve than to drill yourself with case stud- ies and projects until you finally get that gold star of completion. The reason is that critical thinking is considered a “soft skill” — non-technical skills that describe how you interact with your work. They compliment hard skills because you need them in order to get better at those hard, technical skills. Soft skills are intangible, which makes them harder to define.

Inference is a difficult soft skill to define, as it is more conceptual than practical. It can be ex- plained the same way as logic — simply put, inference is the skill of drawing logical conclu- sions based on your observations and analysis. You can use anecdotal experience, fact, logic, or systems of elimination to help infer information from data and analysis. It seems that there is only one way to practice inference. You can create case studies and data sets to drill yourself on the supposedly correct answer over, and over, and over again; or, you can look to similar tactics that you used to practice other soft skills.

Strategy games such as Sudoku or crossword puzzles are a great way to incorporate practic- ing inference into your daily life. Both of these games train your brain to analyse the situation and data available to you, and make logical conclusions regarding the next step. Infer- ence is a difficult skill to practise on its own, in part because logic is a skill that is learned from community. It is deeply integrated into the next critical thinking skill, communication.

Communication

We’ve talked about communication a lot on this podcast. We’ve discussed how crucial it is in times of change and for encouraging innovative thinking. You won’t be surprised, then, to hear that communication is a crucial building block for critical thinking skills. You want to train yourself to drown out the distraction and communicate effectively with your team, so they can understand the ideas you’ve built up though observation, analysis, and inference.

You do not work in a vacuum, and you don’t develop ideas in a vacuum either. Communica- tion is the ability to listen to others and voice your own opinion, and knowing when either is appropriate. Contrary to what you may have been told, communication isn’t about talking louder and getting your point across. It is the balance of talking and listening, using your other critical thinking skills to navigate effectively through a problem. With clear communi- cation, you’ll land on a solution more efficiently than if you barrel through a discussion with your team. The same skills you practiced learning observation will aid the development of your communication, since active listening is an essential element of communicating effec- tively with your peers. In addition to mindfulness and meditation, journalling is a great way to practice communication, as it helps you to clearly lay out your thoughts.

Problem-Solving

We all want to work with someone who is solutions-oriented. How else will you ever progress as a team or individual without a solution mindset? Not only is problem-solving an indis- pensable skill on its own, without it the tower of critical thinking skills falls apart. The skillset is goal-oriented in that you are practicing observation, analysis, inference, and communica- tion in order to better support problem-solving. Critical thinking as a skillset is important to problem-solve for your team, and problem-solving is the essential marker of learning critical thinking skills. The two are entwined like a möbius strip, one ends as the other begins.

Problem-solving is the final piece of the critical thinking puzzle because it is where you put all the other skills into practice. Drs. Linda Elder and Richard Paul define it as the “im- provement of thinking.” You take all the observations you made, logical conclusions, and analyses and use them to inform the solution to your problem. Then, you communicate the solution and how you arrived there in order to move forward.

Thinking critically isn’t about critiquing other people’s ideas or critiquing your teammates. It is a complex system of skills all chained together to describe the ability to analyse and im- prove your thinking process. To turn an idea into a solution and not accept a problem at face value. You can practice critical thinking skills by training soft skills like observation and analysis, and engaging in activities that exercise logical inference. To practice these skills, look beyond the workplace by engaging in hobbies that are outside of your comfort zone, and exploring the worlds of mindfulness and meditation. Soon, you won’t be thinking about the skill set at all, you’ll have adopted these small habits and strategies to incorporate obser- vation, analysis, inference, communication and problem-solving into your daily routine.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Next week, we’ll continue by learning about con- structive criticism. What makes criticism constructive? And how can you, as a leader, deliver critiques that improve the performance of your team? Don’t forget to check today’s show notes for key points and resources to help you in your leadership journey.

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Marina Moreira

Writer, Hermit