 Hi, my name is Angela Kegler and I'm going to be the instructor for the following course. You may be wondering to yourself, what does she know about this course? Well, allow me to share with you that I do have a PhD in organizational development and I have several years experience leading organizations. So that gives me the unique opportunity to share with you that I have both the academic experience having sat in your shoes in classes watching instruction on the content that you're about to learn. On the other hand, I've also led organizations which gives me the practice or the practical experience of seeing this firsthand in organizations. With that scholar practitioner experience, I'd like to deliver the content to you so that you can take this and turn it into something that you can use in your workplace. I hope you enjoy the class and you learn a tremendous amount. Happy learning. Let's begin with the critical thinking process. In this lesson, we'll look at critical thinking procedures, how to establish the problem, determining possible solutions, introducing your solutions, individually critically thinking, critical thinking as a collective effort, business trends in critical thinking, process improvements, internal empowerment, continuous overall improvement, and obtaining the right state of mind. Let's first begin with the critical thinking procedures. When we are critically thinking, we want to establish what the problem is. This is the first step in the process in which or the procedure in which we think critically. We have to understand what exactly is the problem. This isn't always easy. There may be multiple problems or it may be that there are multiple people involved in the process that have to help to identify what exactly the problem is. They may believe that the problem are different things. So establishing what the problem is is the first step to critical thinking procedures. Once you have identified and established the sure problem and have everybody on the same page, you can move forward with exploring what determined possible solutions exist. Determining possible solutions can be an exciting process because it allows you to open up your mind and explore various solutions that may or may not have been tried in the past or may or may not work. Being innovative, thinking through a variety of different solutions, even some that may not be great solutions, can open up possibilities for the organization to improve in ways that have never been done before. After determining some possible solutions, then you have to pare down the process into implementing the solution that is correct and right and best for the organization, the situation, and the individuals involved. Let's dig in to establishing the problem. As we've indicated, it's the first phase in which the problem is separated from the symptoms and it is defined. When you establish the problem, again, separating the problem from what the symptoms are is think about separating the problem from the people. Any time there is a problem, chances are there are people involved. And sometimes the people involved can cloud our perspective on what the real problem is. So if you can establish the problem by separating it away from the individuals who are involved in the problem, then you can focus on the problem and identify all the parts and processes and issues surrounding the problem. Creating a problem statement will help you to understand the problem so that you can move forward in developing a solution. In addition to creating that problem statement, you want to communicate that problem statement to the individuals who are involved and who are also facing this problem. This ensures that you can put all of the people who are involved on the same page and that everybody's focused on what the actual problem is as opposed to the symptoms or other individuals involved in the problem. The second phase is determining possible solutions. And this process, as I said, can be exciting. It involves six separate steps to determining what these possible solutions may be. The first one is to analyze the problem. As we said, we have to define and ensure that we know what that problem is. By analyzing it, it is breaking it down into understanding maybe the causal effect, looking at all of the parts and pieces of the problem. The problem may involve multiple sub-problems and ensuring that you analyze it and understand the problem to a depth and breadth that you can now address it. The second step is to gather information. When you gather information, imagine as if you are putting together a large puzzle. And you have to ensure that that 500-piece puzzle, which is indicated on the box, has 500 pieces in it. You want to gather all of your pieces, gather all of the information. And this can take time. If you do not gather information and spend time at this step, the problem or the solutions that you seek to put in place may not be effective. So taking time to gather your information, getting all of the pieces is very important. In the event that there's information that you cannot find, don't try to make something up. Think of that puzzle. If you only had 499 pieces, you can still see the picture. You don't have to abandon it just because one piece is missing. So gather what you can, and don't fill in the gaps just yet. The third step is to go ahead and interpret your information. From the facts that you have gathered, the pieces of the puzzle, start to present it in a way that it starts to form a picture. Interpreting the pieces and the information that you have gathered in such a fashion that you can understand exactly what the parts and problems are. As I said, the problem may have subproblems. So as you start to interpret your information, confirming understanding with individuals who are engaged in the problem and interpreting what their perspective may be, looking at this problem from a variety of different angles and different perspectives will help you in looking at possible solutions. The fourth step is to configure solutions. A best practice in configuring solutions is to look at getting various individuals involved so that you can get a breadth and depth of solutions and making an entire list of them. Exploring those solutions to understand which of the solutions will best suit the problem, will best suit the individuals involved, is ethical as well as practical, and can solve the problem. As you configure these solutions, it is incredibly important to get input from those individuals who are engaged in the process. Once you engage them, you can move on to that fifth step, which is agreeing on solutions. Agreement can sometimes be difficult. We'll talk a little bit more about how groups can come together to agree on solutions, but agreement on solutions can be challenging. When there are various people involved, they may have their own biased reasons or biases about what the solution should be. Remember that your responsibility in solving a problem and critically thinking is to explore from all angles and not just one. Part of agreeing on solutions involves conveying information that shares a solution for best for the organization that does solve the problem and best for all involved. You may not be able to make everybody happy, but doing the right thing and the best thing is what your responsibility will be. And finally, the sixth step of this phase is to do a cost-benefit analysis. This will help you in ensuring that the solution that you are about to choose will be the best benefit from both a cost and practical perspective. So doing a cost-benefit analysis will help you in that decision-making process as well as selling the solution after the decision has been made to those who are in power. The next step is to introduce your solution. This is where you want to propose your solutions to the appropriate decision-makers. Again, if you think about what we just talked about, exploring everything, interpreting your data, doing a cost-benefit analysis, all of those steps as you're exploring solutions will help you to present the solution in the best light. It prepares you for successful proposal of your solution to the decision-makers because you can give them all of the data that they could possibly need to support the solution that you are proposing by analyzing and interpreting your data, you can back up your solution proposal with all of the cost-benefit, all of the solutions that you explored, and why the one that you're proposing is the right one. When your decision-makers help you to make that decision and move forward with that decision, you can evaluate and revise accordingly. They may share information with you that changes your decision. They may be able to help support something in that decision or that solution that maybe need to be revised. All the information your decision-makers give you will help you in the evaluating and revising of the solution so that you are moving forward with the best solution possible for both the problem and the organization as a whole. Now let's talk a little bit about individual critically thinking. As an individual, being a critical thinker is going to be a huge skill because it will allow you to solve problems on your own. But there are appropriate times for individual critical thinking or individual problem solving. If the problem only has one answer that can be reached more quickly and effectively by one individual, that's when individual critical thinking should take place. Meaning, the problem exists, it needs to be solved immediately, and it really only has one answer. Then one person can make the decision quickly and move forward. There's no need for others to get involved or understand all of the details and be hugely committed to the decision or the solution. So individual critical thinking should only take place when it's appropriate and best for a single individual to solve the problem quickly and when there is one answer. Let's think about when critical thinking should take place in a collective effort. We would define this as group problem solving and it's a technique best employed when there's no straightforward or single answer. If you have a problem that doesn't have a single answer, there might be a variety of different answers, then it's good to get a group together to explore this. It's also best employed when the problem concerns multiple people. If the problem affects a multitude of people, then you definitely want to have that group together to share in ideas and discuss how it impacts them so that you're pulling together the best information and the best data that you can then interpret and evaluate to make the right decisions. It's also best employed whenever more than one person is committed to achieving the solution. Imagine that if there is a group of individuals who is faced with a problem and that problem impacts all of them and they all have different perspectives, but they all do want a solution. Then this is presenting the problem to a group, getting input from the group and it creates a win-win situation for everybody involved because of the fact that everyone wants the solution and by involving them and gaining their input and interpreting data with them, everyone will support it. It may be more heavy on the side of pulling everybody together, interpreting the data, gathering the data, but it can happen swifter on the solution side because everybody wants a win-win and everybody will support it and move it forward quickly. There are some business trends in critical thinking that support or encourage group problem solving. And here are the three examples of business trends. First there is process improvement. Whenever we look at process improvement, this is a process of an organization would look at their processes in-house and seek out ways to improve those processes. Well, that's something that encourages a group problem solving effort because a group is involved in the process, not just one person. And so getting a multitude of people together to explore the process and look for gaps or look for ways that it can be made more effective or more efficient together is a trend in businesses. Another business trend is internal empowerment. What we mean by internal empowerment is that many businesses will empower their employees to seek out problems and improve or fix those problems quickly. And so personal empowerment in an organization and being an internal employee who is empowered to fix problems can be very motivating. Businesses enjoy having individuals who know that they're empowered when they see a problem to gather the folks together who are faced with that problem and to work together to solve it quickly, effectively, and efficiently. And then there's continuous overall improvement, much like the process improvement. Continuous overall improvement is not a one-time process examination and improvement, but it's a continuous improvement where individuals are continuously seeking out opportunities to improve the overall organization and its processes. When we look at continuous overall improvement, everyone in the organization has the mindset that they are to work together to discover problems and continuously, completely fix them. In exploring process improvement, this is something that will regulate the flow of work that passes from internal suppliers to internal customers. So let's take a look at what we mean by that. It's going to require various departments from an organization to participate and work together to manage these processes effectively. Think about inside an organization, maybe a process of a order coming into the door and having to be processed from customer service, possibly to the logistics or to the service department, and then on to the invoicing and billing department. That process of paperwork and fulfillment and billing might be the process that is being examined for improvement. It would require individuals from the customer service side, potentially the sales side who interacts with the customers, also from individuals who are responsible for fulfilling the order and logistics, as well as your team who does the billing and finance as they receive the money in. Now, multiple departments would be involved in this process improvement. And what process improvement does is explore every step of the way and understand if there are any hiccups or stops or problems. If it's faced by one department, chances are other departments may be affected, and they may have to change their processes to ensure that that problem is eliminated. If one department solves the problem, it could cause a problem for one of the other departments. So this process improvement, a one time, one problem fix, requires individuals from various departments to participate in managing the process and exploring the process so that it is managed effectively and efficiently and improved for all departments, not just one. When we explore further into internal empowerment, now we have internal employees who are active and skilled in involving all employees for improvement activities. What this basically means is that employees are encouraged to be self-managed, that as they're performing their tasks and they run across a problem or run across something that may not be as efficient as it should be, they don't have to stop the process and gather everybody. They're encouraged to self-manage and actively seek out the solution to the problem. They're also recognized as skilled enough to recognize that other departments may be affected. And so they are to individually go and seek out participation from other departments that may be affected to fix the problem. Or they are to solve the problem and communicate that to the other departments. This is very effective in organizations where the tasks that are performed by skilled individuals are not across the board or interdepartmental. So maybe it might be an individual within one department sees a policy that only affects one department, that there may be a problem, they fix it, and they communicate it to their team. Internal empowerment, as I mentioned, as a business trend is incredibly inspiring and motivating. Individuals who are highly skilled and active in their work and in their teams enjoy being empowered to fix problems as they see them and communicate with their teams to solving the problems because it allows them to not have to wait or stop and they can be more productive. A very large business trend is continuous overall improvement. It blends the first two that we talked about, the process improvement and the internal empowerment. The reason this has become such a huge trend is because business today, as it forces folks to do more with less, is working towards continuous improvement as a necessity because our products have become more sophisticated. So organizations who are producing products are not, they're not in a position to stop producing their products to do a process improvement. If we practice continuous overall improvement, those products can continue to be produced and individuals are empowered to find challenges or problems and continuously seek out ways to improve it along the way. Customers expect that their products and their services will be received on time and faster than ever. So the expectation from customers have risen to the point where continuous improvement overall is necessity so that customer expectations are not dropped while an organization is seeking out to improve their processes. It's also a very big trend and a necessity in business because of the evolution of competition. If an organization wants to stay one step ahead of the competition, then it's important that they're continuously seeking out challenges and problems along the way and that their employees are empowered to not just discover them but to completely fix them right on the fly with their teams along the way so that they can stay one step ahead of the competition. And it also impacts the company's success. If an organization is not implementing continuous overall improvement and employees are not seeking out ways to improve an overall process, that company can see a decline in their success and they're not staying ahead of the competition. So it's a necessity, especially when a company's success declines and if they don't practice it, it surely will. Critical thinking requires us to obtain the right state of mind. Let's take a moment to think about what this means. When we are trying to solve a problem or we're thinking about critically solving or strategies around critically solving problems, there's a few things that we have to set our minds to. The first thing is we have to focus on the main goal. As I stated earlier, when we discover a challenge or a problem, the problem also involves people. And so we have to focus on the main goal. The main goal is to solve the problem. That often requires us to separate the people from the problem and not abandon the people, but to certainly focus on the main goal of solving the problem. It also requires us to consider that the main goal of solving a problem involves what is best for the organization and as a whole will support the organizational goals. That can often mean that we're not going to make everybody happy, but focusing on the main goal of solving the problem in the best manner for the organization is one of the states of mind that we must have whenever we are putting forth a critical thinking strategy. Another state of mind that we have to adopt is to avoid assumptions. We can't assume anything about the problem until we have done our investigation and gathered all of the facts and interpreted the data and explored everything as a whole. One of the big challenges of solving problems is to jump to conclusions or make a hasty decision without all of the facts being explored. And so avoiding any assumptions, in that state of mind, you will resist any initial thoughts of how to solve this problem until you can gather all of the facts. Another state of mind that is very important whenever you're employing a strategy for critical thinking is to refrain from blaming. Shifting or sending blame or pointing blame at somebody is not going to get you to the end result of solving the problem. It's often important to find out the causal effect, but blaming somebody is not gonna work. It's not going to help you to fix it. If you identify that an individual is the source of a problem, blaming them is not educating them. Taking time to share with them the opportunity to fix the problem and allowing them to provide input is a much more effective way to move forward in a critical thinking strategy than blaming them for the problem. Another state of mind that you will wanna employ whenever you're thinking critically is to aim for win-win solutions. This goes hand in hand with the refraining from blaming. When you strive for a win-win solution, you will find that others are involved and want to be involved because you are seeking out the opportunity to make this a solution that is a win for the organization and a win for the individuals involved. Sometimes this requires some savviness because an individual may not see it as self-serving, but if they can see it as a solution that is the best solution for the organization as a whole, typically, they will buy in.