John Henderson, co-founder and director of training and development specialist Sara Penrose, continues his series of articles. This time, he looks at the benefits that skilled critical thinking can bring to a business.
…………
FAKE news is nothing new. Ever since the beginnings of a mass media it has been possible to carefully craft a story or narrative to suit a particular objective or reproduce and spread through sheer ignorance.
As the 15th-century Italian diplomat and author Machiavelli put it, “Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.’’
Fake news seemed to reach a public crescendo in 2016 when the Brexit vote and the presidential election in the USA sparked debate. There were queries on the validity and source of some stories. This was discussed at great length by the public and led to questioning many of the things we thought were accurate.
To some extent we still retain a habit of trusting the mass media as part of our culture. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that both these events have simply shone a light on an age-old practice.
Napoleon Bonaparte was 5ft 6in tall, which for the time (18th and early 19th century) was a perfectly acceptable height. But the UK press portrayed him as short in stature to poke fun and undermine his authority; ‘Little Boney,’they referred to him as.
The American writer Mark Twain wrote a letter which appeared in the New York Journal of June 2, 1897: ‘’The report of my death was an exaggeration.’’ The correction was occasioned by newspaper accounts of Twain’s being ill or dead. At the time, in fact, it was Twain’s cousin was seriously ill in London and later recovered.
‘Without fact, we are in danger of making decisions based upon emotion,
on what we’ve heard or on somebody’s opinion.’
The arrival of social media has simply made the spread of this type of story much easier. In 2017 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the worldwide web, claimed that fake news was one of the most significant new disturbing internettrends that must first be resolved if the internet is to be capable of truly “serving humanity”.
So why does it matter? Without fact, we are in danger of making decisions based upon emotion, on what we’ve heard or on somebody’s opinion. In the world of business, this can be very costly. If we can’t spot the truth from the false, how are we supposed to make reasoned assumptions and decisions based upon the best-case scenario?
“But this is obvious”, I hear you cry. We all know this. Critical thinking is just some fancy way of talking about common sense. Why waste time on talking about it? If that were so why do so many business fail? Why do politicians get voted in then out again? Why do we have public enquiries to get to the truth and then make the same mistakes again?
Too often we assume something is taking place. How often do you hear people saying ‘I assumed our insurance covered it.’ Or ‘Oh, I guessed that cost was included’? Just to assume something does not mean it is obvious. Whydo so many fatal accidents relate back to something that was obvious just not taking place?
The underlying challenge is the quality of the skills needed to gather these facts and assess their value. Especially when what is presented to us is not complete or simply biased. This is the foundation of critical thinking. It involves three key actions:
Questioning The ability to drill down and gather the information by asking questions.
Analysing The ability to break down something into its component parts, to evaluate, identify the value and then make appropriate decisions.
Reviewing The ability to assess performance and measure output against expectations, learning how to be better in the future.
Back to our examples. We can cut through what we see at face value and understand if it is accurate or not. If we consider the question:
‘Was Napoleon Bonaparte short?’
We can check from multiple sources to see what ‘actual height’ is. For example, medical records, museum information etc would give us an actual figure. This may be in contrast to contemporary press coverage of the time, which may talk about his height but does not actually mention what it is.
The same applies to a business data set. We can start to ask questions as to what we see.
- How is it presented?
- What are the sources?
- What time period does it cover?
- What does column D mean?
- What are the notes referring to?
We can then
- Evaluate;
- Assess;
- Quantity;
- Clarify;
- Decide.
Finally considering whether we questioned and assessed the data set to the required standard. This prevents the ‘computer says no’ problem, where we can take data as read or not look too closely. If we can’t discover where the challenges and opportunities are with a data set, we can’t add value, which makes you question the time spent analysing in the first instance.
Sara Penrose Ltd is among the exhibitors at Your Business Expo, powered by Business Times, on February 8 at Sywell Aerodrome. Register for your free visitor pass here
There is a degree of bias in everything so one suggestion is always to be sceptical. Now a warning: Sceptical has got a bad name. It actually means, according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Inclined to question thetruth or soundness of accepted ideas, facts, etc’ (1)
By incorporating the action of questioning, analysing and reviewing all information you are presented with, you aremore likely to find the true value and reject the content which is purely opinion or bias. These actions form criticalthinking skills and can be developed, learned and practised to better.
In a time of data overload and the speed of change that exists in business, having a better skill set in this area is essential. According to Data Literacy Project research only 25% of employees felt fully prepared to use data effectively.
It is why the World Economic Forum and IBM rate critical thinking consistently in their top five required skills. It iswhy business are increasingly asking academic institutions to develop them in university and colleges.
In terms of value, think of all the poor decisions made in a business due to lack of solid and reasoned facts. From Bunnings’ epic fail when it came to acquiring Homebase to the debacle of New Coke in the 1980s. At their heart, critical thinking skills could have been improved and this would have trickled down a better performance on the bottom line.
John Henderson is co-founder and director of Sara Penrose Ltd.
Developing people with the skills needed to optimise your business performance