THINKING CRITICALLY

While Systems Thinking establishes “what” we are looking at, Critical Thinking is “how” to think about the “what”.  It entails our actively scrutinizing information for Thinking Traps that we all are vulnerable to, and which can lead to flawed thinking and poor decision-making.  I place Thinking Traps into four categories:  cognitive biases, logical fallacies, data deception, and false abundance. 

 

A cognitive bias is subconscious mental error in how we are thinking, and everyone trips over them from time to time.  For example, we may mistakenly overweight information that we recently obtained at the detriment of information that is more dated. I have identified the ten most common from my experience, and the countermeasures for seeing them in others, and overcoming them ourselves.    

 

Logical fallacies are false, flawed, or misleading logical arguments.  They may seem logical, hence the trap, but they do not hold up to more rigorous scrutiny.  Even if you have the facts, and made valid premises about those facts, a logical fallacy makes the conclusion invalid. I will provide you with countermeasures to the five most common fallacies that can trip up objectivity. 

 

Data deception occurs when we lack a basic understanding of the statistics used to describe the data we are looking at.  Assessing complex systems always requires us to gather facts, often in the form of data.   But a misunderstanding or misapplication of statistical  concepts associated with the data can trip up objective thinking and decision making. Statistics can be a complicated field of study, but I have distilled it down to the six areas of biggest impact.

 

False abundance occurs when we fail to take scarcity of resources into account in our thought processes and decisions, which may result in a positive yet sub-optimal outcome.  Microeconomics is the study of human behavior in allocating scarce resources, be they in our personal lives, in the private sector, or the public sector, and I have synthesized the three key concepts to overcome a false abundancy error in judgement. 

 

Thinking Traps are the raw materials for bias, misinformation, and manipulation. The countermeasures I will provide you will help you quickly identify them in others, and hopefully in yourself as well.  When tightly integrated with Systems Thinking, you have what I call Critical Systems Thinking.