Build Your Critical Thinking Skills

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Day 1: Introduction to Critical Thinking—The Basics for Business

Critical thinking in workplace scenarios (90 minutes)

• Presentation: The nature of attention as two things to remember; the definition of critical thinking; the field of critical thinking and alternative theories about it; an introduction of the Occam’s Razor heuristic
• The nature of attention and its crucial role in the ability to do critical thinking
• Hands-on exercises: Think critically to solve problems in the workplace (long meetings, reports that have become habitual, a director who is constantly “putting out fires,” and an employee doing a lot of “extra work”)
• Group discussions: The differing views of critical thinking; your opinion of unnecessary processes
• Ten-minute break at top of the hour

The nature of evidence and the evidence for critical thinking (80 minutes)

• Presentation: Evidence that critical thinking has driven progress across fields, businesses, and products; one way to innovate; a fictional company’s struggle to create a spin-off product; habit as the enemy of critical thinking; five barriers to critical thinking at your company and ways to lower them; how to think critically about the tolerance for critical thinking in your workplace (POUND versus FLEX structures)
• Ten-minute break at top of the hour
• Hands-on exercises: Identify habits/attitudes in your workplace that might stifle new ways of thinking; the implications of barriers to critical thinking in the workplace; hypothetical companies that encourage or discourage critical thinking
• Group discussion: Your views of innovation; data about innovation as a subset of critical thinking; What are the barriers in your workplace?
• Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)

Day 2: Applied Critical Thinking— Workplace Scenarios

Scenario 1: Strategic thinking (10 minutes)

• Presentation: Why the best high-level strategic thinking entails weighing alternatives; strategic thinking examples and counterexamples (e.g., just doing what the competition has started to do)
• Hands-on exercise: Identify the strategic thinking your company could do (or already does) and whether and how it entails alternatives
• Group discussion: Critical thinking terms

Scenario 2: Innovation (10 minutes)

• Presentation: Why innovation requires systemic critical thinking
• Hands-on exercise: Identify areas (processes or products) where your company could innovate
• Group discussion: Innovation opportunities at your company; critical thinking terms
• Break

Scenario 3: AI and critical thinking (10 minutes)

• Presentation: Why training in critical thinking is the best way to adapt to (and use) AI
• Hands-on exercise: Identify where AI could replace people at your company
• Group discussion: Implications of AI for the workplace and how critical thinking can help you address this challenge; critical thinking terms

Scenario 4: Loyal opposition (10 minutes)

• Presentation: How political constraints can hamper your company’s productivity in unexpected ways
• Group discussion: The implications of loyal opposition in the workplace; critical thinking terms

Scenario 5: Evaluating unusual organizations (10 minutes)

• Presentation: Four-hour workdays; rotating managers; how to get at these arrangements empirically
• Group discussion: Critical thinking terms
• Summary and critical thinking vocabulary (10 minutes)
• Ten-minute break

What is a mental model? (2 minutes)

• Presentation: Mental models—the brain’s way of grasping complicated ideas; mental models as descriptions of people’s thought processes about anything; examples of mental models; similarities to hypotheses, theories, arguments, and accounts

Why mental model thinking is important (2 minutes)

• Presentation: Changing your perspective to see alternatives to fixed mental models; examples of mental models large and small; examples of nested mental models

Business models in history (5 minutes)

• Presentation: How evolving workplace practices have changed our sense of ourselves; the value of mental models in uncovering erroneous assumptions
• Hands-on exercise: How would you view your job differently if you had “artisan” as part of your job title?

Mental models within business (5 minutes)

• Presentation: The employee as customer versus not customer; the customer who leaves as important versus not important; the employee who spends more time at work as more valuable; bold CEOs as the ones making acquisitions; the use of productivity software to evaluate employee performance; weighing evidence to compare mental models; disinformation and mental model distortion
• Hands-on exercise: Consider what evidence would be needed to evaluate business mental models

Comparative mental models (5 minutes)

• Presentation: Personality as fixed versus fluid; agile versus waterfall; personal choices such as switching jobs or staying put (risk versus stability); letting conflict fester versus resolving it promptly; the atom as a miniscule, discrete thing versus the atom as probabilistic in space (quantum mechanics)
• Hands-on exercise: Think of additional examples of comparative mental models
• Q&A
• Break

Mental models as tools to assess other mental models (5 minutes)

• Presentation: Some historical examples (the controlled experiment, correlations)
• Hands-on exercise: Is “the smell test” of an idea a mental model?

Charlie Munger’s business mental models (10 minutes)

• Presentation: The polymath billionaire who uses a “lattice” of mental models to evaluate alternative proposals; looking at five of his “tools”
• Group discussion: Munger’s tools
• Hands-on exercise: Think of a business issue that has alternative directions/answers and a mental model tool to use when evaluating the issue

The Feynman Technique (10 minutes)

• Presentation: Mental models as ideal learning tools (recall data better, grasp data more easily, accumulate data more readily); mental models as problem-solving tools; how Feynman caught on to a different tool for differentiating parameters under the integral sign; the Feynman Technique—forming a mental model, imagine teaching it to a five-year-old, and then refining it
• Hands-on exercise: Use the Feynman Technique

Wrap-up and Group Chat (6 minutes)