4 types of critical thinking for stronger decisions and actions
Written by Dan Parry • 12 March, 2025
Future Skills Article
Critical thinking is something of a secret weapon. ‘Secret’ is a bit of a stretch given that the Ancient Greeks described it more than 2,000 years ago. Even so, it’s still misunderstood, overlooked and not as common as it should be, like common sense. So, what is critical thinking? And how can you use it to build your personal brand, win a promotion, land a pay rise, and fight off dragons?
In the workplace, dragons come in many forms. But most of them are vulnerable to clarity of thought. Even the most forthright fire-breathers can be tamed by poise and rational argument.
There are two parts to problems: initial emotional responses, followed by carefully reasoned solutions. Problems can feel magnified by deadlines, worry, unfamiliarity, or a shortage of resources.
It’s important to manage emotions so that you can focus on finding solutions. Telling yourself not to worry can be counter-productive, like trying to ignore a song in your head. Better to focus on a process.
In a tight spot, there might be more than one possible solution. Sometimes there’s only one answer but it’s tucked away out of sight. Either way, a reliable problem solving process leads to decisions, enables actions, earns trust, and builds reputations – opening the way to promotions and pay rises.
Critical thinking is a label for a range of problem solving processes. Imagine it as a kind of mental agility where, instead of always falling back on safe ‘go-to’ options, you nimbly skip from one process to another until you find a helpful answer. At Working Voices, we prefer to call this agile thinking.
If nimbly skipping sounds like hard work, let’s start with something easier. Imagine you’re sitting in a creative ideas meeting where everyone’s offering thoughts. It’s tempting to blurt something out – just to be heard – but there’s a risk that your snap suggestion might miss something obvious.
When you’re on your own, you’re free to take a little more time to develop your suggestion. Away from pressure, you can assess your own idea with the eye of an objective critic and refine it until you’re happy. Critical thinking is the process of solving problems by finding and polishing a valid solution until you’re satisfied that it’s reasonable, reliable, and ready to be shared with other people.
Critical thinking means choosing to break through familiar routines, biases, and misassumptions – the kind of thing that sometimes lead people towards groupthink where prevailing opinions go unchallenged. Choosing to push through fear (or other emotions), in order to compare and contrast competing lines of thought, can be difficult. To explain why, let’s briefly open up your head and take a quick look at your brain.
The brain’s many parts include the frontal lobes that support reasoning. There is also a set of structures known as the limbic system which can throw up strong emotional reactions. A thought stemming from one part of the brain might trigger a response in another, giving us alternatives to choose from.
A job offer for example can lead to excitement or concern, or both. These competing interpretations can be confusing, leading to anxiety about how to respond. Confusion and anxiety can lead to fear. And, immobilising and corrosive, fear is always a threat.
Fear, confusion, and anxiety can be draining. To preserve the brain’s energy, an almond-sized part of the limbic system known as the hypothalamus tries to subconsciously maintain order and balance. For example, we might consider the pros and cons of changing jobs – a process that involves suppressing initial responses and assessing what’s best in the long-run, all of which takes focus, effort, and resolve.
The process of critical thinking manages sensible responses to situations that may feel confusing or fearful. There are various methods of doing this. Each starts from uncertainty and aims to reach solid ground.
Critical thinking cuts through sentiment and bias. It supports reliable conclusions and gives individuals the confidence to present their case. Four techniques in particular help strengthen problem solving skills:
For creative thinking, two criteria are necessary:
– A ‘let’s get it done’ atmosphere of functional process needs to be suspended.
– There needs to be psychological safety, empowering people to suggest ideas.
Excellence doesn’t run from a tap. It trickles out of unexpected thoughts, dead ends, and idle speculation – all of which must be permitted. Leaders can take divergent opinions (ie, early random thoughts) and later converge them into tangible proposals that meet deadlines and budgets.
Leaders who are open to creative thoughts, whether their own or other people’s, will have a valuable range of solutions and opportunities – one or more of which might just prove to be effective.
According to astrophysicist Dr Moiya McTier, the ability to analyse complexity relies on “some of the most commonly requested skills in job postings by tech, finance and consulting companies, yet most candidates don’t have formal training in any of them. Know who does? Scientists.”
Scientific thinking is not about doing science, it’s about finding solutions in the way that scientists do. Scientific method starts with an assumption – a hypothesis. This is tested against the evidence and if it stands up to scrutiny only then can the hypothesis be accepted. If it doesn’t measure up, it’s adjusted and the process repeated. A hypothesis that fits the evidence can be accepted as the correct explanation.
Effective teamwork requires a collaborative spirit, otherwise the team becomes a disparate group of individuals led by the loudest voice. As a group, everyone appears to be agreeing. But stuck in groupthink, people simply go along with what’s been said since dissent will likely be batted away.
By creating an atmosphere of psychological safety, all individuals will be in a better position to contribute rather than just a select few. This requires a spirit of empathy that validates a broad spectrum of opinions. Professor of management Dr Thomas Malone found that groups in which the members were more socially perceptive were more collectively intelligent.
Every time leaders use concepts like scientific method, economy of scale, margin of safety, or diminishing returns, they use a mental model. Mental models are simple but useful representations of the way the world works. Flexible thinking encourages agile ‘toggling’ between them.
Comfortable familiarity may fail when the context changes. To be agile and effective in any context, we have to assemble a ‘latticework’ of interconnected models drawn from a variety of disciplines, for example from psychology, physics, statistics, and history. To see a fully rounded picture of problems and solutions, it’s important to consider other perspectives and to understand the relationships between them.
Skills in critical thinking consistently lead to reliable decisions and actions, and support clarity of thought, resilience, and leadership. This is perhaps why the World Economic Forum found that organisations’ top three needs in skills training from 2023 to 2027 are:
Skills in critical thinking can be developed through training and practice. At Working Voices, our Team Engagement training programme focuses on future skills and includes four courses on agile thinking, covering the themes outlined above. And our new book exploring similar subjects, Engaging Teams, includes a chapter on critical thinking.
Those skilled in critical thinking find that certainty is an end-point reached with others in their team, not a starting-point that excludes people and possibilities. Above all, they discover that agility is a mindset as much as a methodology, an opportunity to put ego aside and focus on what, rather than who, is right.
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