Critical Thinking Application \"Every Job, and Every

Critical Thinking Application

"Every job, and every company, can benefit from critical thinking" (Pauker, 2010). Pauker makes this assertion with good reason. In considering this argument, Pauker suggests taking a second to think about any job, and the daily responsibilities and decisions that people need to make. She argues that if one considers the margin of error that could ultimately cost a company a project, a client, profits or even its reputation, it is clear how dependent every company is on its employees' ability to execute critical thinking in every position. Pauker concludes that, after several days of pondering, she could not come up with any job that would not benefit from critical thinking. She supports this conclusion by quoting a survey of 400 senior HR professionals who, when asked what skills their employees will need in the next five years, put critical thinking skills at the top of the list (Pauker, 2010).

Examining the literature on critical thinking reveals just how critical is this workplace and life skill. Critical thinking traces its intellectual roots back to the Socratic method of questioning. Socrates established the importance of asking deep questions that probe profoundly into thinking before one accepts ideas as worthy of belief. He demonstrated the importance of seeking evidence, closely examining reasoning and assumptions, analyzing basic concepts, and working through implications not only of what is said but also of what is done as well. In his questioning, Socrates highlighted the need for clarity and logical consistency in thinking (Paul, Elder and Bartell, 1997). By rigorously applying the Socratic method to the process of thinking, he created a framework for a process that enhances every intellectual effort to which it is applied.

Over the centuries, critical thinking has been applied across disciplines, resulting in profound expansion of the applications of critical thinking by such practitioners as Aquinas, Descartes, Bacon, Moore, Machiavelli, Voltaire, and others. In the twentieth century, Sumner published his Folkways (1906), in which he recognized the deep need for critical thinking in life and in education: "Criticism is the examination and test of propositions of any kind which are offered for acceptance, in order to find out whether they correspond to reality or not…Education in the critical faculty is the only education of which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens" (Sumner, 1940, p. 632-633).

As Paul and Elder note (1997), critical thinking requires the systematic monitoring of thought; it is also necessary that thinking, to be critical must not be accepted at face value, but must be analyzed and assessed for its clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth, and logicalness. The result of the collective contribution of the history of critical thought is that questioning that focuses on fundamentals of thought and reasoning are baseline in critical thinking.

Critical thinking is especially important in the workplace, where business decisions need to be good ones, and there may be no time to recover from bad decisions. As Chartrand, Ishikawa, and Flander (2009) observe, good decisions require focusing on the most relevant information, asking the right questions, and separating reliable facts from false assumptions, all of which behaviors involve elements of critical thinking. They note that the U.S. Department of Labor has identified critical thinking as "the raw material of a number of key workplace skills, such as problem solving, decision making, organizational planning and risk management." They assert that critical thinking is particularly important when circumstances call for sophisticated decision-making and judgment (Chartrand et al., 2009).

As a management consultant, I have routinely seen the need for critical thinking in the process of business decision-making. I frequently work with automotive dealerships, which are typically looking for ways to increase their profit and sales margins. However, one client posed a different challenge, one where critical thinking played a visibly significant role. The dealer had to make a decision about whether to shut down his dealership.

Like so many dealers in urban areas in recent years, my client had watched his business decline, as sales had fallen by about two-thirds from their pre-recession levels. After three years of losses in a saturated market with stiff competition, my client was seriously considering shutting down the family business that he had hoped to pass on to his son. Though the math was straightforward -- his dealership lost money for the last three years - my client wrestled with the intangible, non-quantifiable considerations of closing his dealership. He knew that the city in which his dealership was located would lose a valued component of its tax base, where his dealership had also been one of the biggest local advertisers and boosters of community activities. Because this was such an emotional decision for him, my client did not trust himself to make the correct decision on his own. He intuitively understood critical thought well enough to know that he lacked the necessary detachment to examine his own thinking about closing, and he asked for my help in arriving at a decision.

In retrospect, I realize that our efforts to review his options called for a classic exercise in critical thinking. First we systematically examined his sales data for the past three years to determine if he might have missed some opportunity to turn things around. Given the state of the economy, and the knowledge that he was facing the same environment as hundreds, maybe thousands of other dealers across the country, it was clear that there were factors beyond his control. The economic and financial data clearly indicated that shutting down the dealership would be the right decision.

However, examining the arguments against his closing down demanded the more challenging, rigorous attempt at critical thinking because of all the emotional issues involved. In the end, the arguments in favor of closing were just unassailable, and I advised my client to accept Ford's buyout offer to close down his dealership, and he concurred.