In 1960
John Kennedy was elected to the presidency. Things went very smoothly for the first several months, but in the spring of 1961, something known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion happened.
The Bay of Pigs Invasion was a failed attempt by a group of anti-Castro activists to overthrow the Castro regime. It was covertly financed and directed by the U.S. government under the direction of President Kennedy’s administration.
What’s less known about the Bay of Pigs Invasion is that it failed as a result of something called “groupthink.” Groupthink is when we surround ourselves with others that have very similar viewpoints. And, as a result, we don’t source alternatives to solve a challenge.
Groupthink can happen in the workplace when we don’t establish an organizational culture that challenges one another and listens to other perspectives. I’ll touch more on this later.
President Kennedy’s close group of advisors all believed the mission would succeed and they fell into several traps.
First, they didn’t create a culture that made it safe to challenge one other. Looking back, President Kennedy realized there was pressure on his team to conform around his viewpoint.
Second, they never identified all of the challenges, potential pitfalls and alternative solutions adequately.
The room was no doubt full of alpha personalities. Yet, none of them challenged the consensus and all conformed without deeply analyzing the risks.
To his credit, President Kennedy learned from his mistakes. After a complete debrief, he changed the way he made tough decisions from that point on.
Fast-forward to October 1962, and Kennedy is faced with the second huge challenge of his administration: The Cuban Missile Crisis. This time, the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles just 90 miles from U.S. shores.
This quickly escalated into another international crisis. Yet, President Kennedy and his team handled the Cuban missile crisis with complete competence by using critical thinking skills to negotiate and avoid a potentially catastrophic outcome.
It’s one of the greatest teachable examples of how a leader can learn from a major mistake and reform the decision-making process by applying critical thinking skills.
President Kennedy admitted later that the lessons from the Bay of Pigs Invasion helped him to avoid groupthink, and to analyze the situation with great care to reach a well-vetted and well-reasoned solution.
Why Critical Thinking Is Invaluable for Leaders and Their Teams
Even great leaders can fall into traps, but great leaders can also learn from their experiences. They can change their approach and the culture around them and thrive from competent decision-making. Let’s look closer at why critical thinking is key for leaders and their teams.
What Is Critical Thinking?
The Foundation for Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as: “ … the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”
In other words, critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to decide and what to believe. Critical thinking is a way of thinking.
How Do Leaders Benefit from Critical Thinking Skills?
According to The Nth Degree, an online publication by Newman University, the top five skills that are the most important in today’s workplace are as follows:
- Complex problem solving
- Critical thinking skills
- Creativity
- People management
- Coordinating with others
Leaders with critical thinking skills are able to:
- Understand the logical connections between ideas
- Identify, construct and evaluate arguments
- Detect inconsistencies in common mistakes and reasoning
- Reflect on the justification of one’s own belief systems and values
- Identify the relevance and importance of ideas
- Solve problems systematically
Let’s talk about critical thinking in more concrete terms in the insurance industry. Here are five scenarios where critical thinking skills can be applied to make the best decisions:
- Say a senior account manager needs to analyze her book of clients on Monday morning. Each has their own needs and requests, and she needs to prioritize her account tasks so that she creates maximum value for her clients.
- Maybe there’s a producer on the team who needs to evaluate the capabilities and services of his firm, and decide on which ones are best suited to present to win a new account.
- A claims consultant on any given day may receive pushback from a carrier, and needs to review all the evidence to devise a strategy in order to win a favorable ruling.
- Perhaps a hiring committee who has a slate of seemingly qualified candidates and needs to avoid biases to vet and select the perfect candidate.
- Finally, consider an executive team who’s offered an opportunity to acquire a firm, but needs to make the right decision or risk losing ground to their competitors.
Everyone on your team, including you, is being tasked with making complex decisions. Some are smaller and some are game-changers, but all require analytical skills to sift through the noise and make decisions based on facts and reasoning.
What Prevents Us from Using Critical Thinking?
There are reasons why we don’t easily apply critical thinking skills to every situation and many of those reasons fall into two buckets: 1) External factors and 2) Internal factors.
External pressures include speed, productivity, multitasking and the like. Oftentimes, leaders feel overwhelmed by the depth and the complexity of the decisions they need to make on a day-to-day basis. So trying to make decisions quickly in order to move forward is a natural response.
Here’s what I want you to remember, though: Speed and critical thinking skills do not have to be seen as mutually exclusive. After reflecting on a decision made in the past, nobody’s ever said, “It took me a little while longer, but I got to the right decision. And yet I still feel regret or remorse.” That just doesn’t happen.
But, people regret the wrong decisions. And yet we make them at times because we haven’t followed the right process.
Another big external issue is the overabundance of information. There certainly isn’t a shortage of information or opinions on what to do about any given situation. But there isn’t a shortage of disinformation, either. Critical thinking skills can help surface truth from the noise.
And that leads me to the second bucket of factors that impact the ability to apply critical thinking: Internal factors–human nature itself. Two internal factors hurt our chances of making the right decision: Heuristics and biases.
“Heuristic” is simply a fancy word for the shortcuts that human beings learn to implement without even thinking. Heuristics are actually helpful much of the time in everyday life.Heuristics are helpful when we’re under stress like an urgent deadline, but don’t lead to the most accurate outcome.
Biases are a bit more conscious and there are at least a dozen well-known biases in psychology, but let’s take one in particular to illustrate an example. One common bias is conformity and it was proven in a wellknown research experience.
The research suggests that if an individual feels the majority of a group is leaning towards or away from a certain choice, they will tend to go along with the group rather than voice their own opinion.
So here’s the takeaway: Make sure you and your team are aware of biases and heuristics. And that you have a strategy to deal with them. That is the value of implementing critical thinking skills. Next, I’ll explain how to do it.
How to Implement Critical Thinking Skills in the Workplace
If you want to implement critical thinking skills into the workplace, know that there are four levels of adoption:
- Awareness
- Discipline
- Habits
- Culture
Awareness
The key here is to have a discussion with your team about the influences that are working against you. Talk with them about both the external and internal things that push us away from critical thinking skills. Once people are aware of what’s going on, they can intervene with strategies as they feel it happening to them.
Explain to them as the leader, your culture is about making smart decisions, that they will be rewarded for using discipline and rigor, and give your teams the ability to speak up. If they have a counterpoint, reward diversity of thought. The key here is communication.
Discipline
Once you’ve created awareness, you need to incorporate discipline into decision-making. Discipline implies that you have to bring up a certain degree of willpower to overcome previous habits
One of the keys to implementing discipline is to give people tools and resources, rather than just asking them to use willpower. There are many tools available to implement discipline. And I have several of them, including a checklist that I’ll share at the end of this article.
The important thing is to make sure that people are referring to the tool or resource as they make key decisions. Initially, make sure they are incorporating all of the key steps. Don’t let them use shortcuts.
In addition to using checklists or process changes, you can require your teams use a peer review for certain key decisions. Now we want to balance bureaucracy and time commitments and getting things done. I get that. But the point is that challenging ourselves and gaining other perspectives is key.
Habits
The third level is creating the habits inside the organization to use critical thinking skills in all decision-making processes. Building habits is when the organization shifts from conscious effort (such as relying on tools) to implementing habits that just take over.
These habits begin to run on autopilot after a period of time, which leads to people internalizing this decision-making process.
This is a cultural shift. In the insurance industry, our producers and service teams are moving a million miles per hour. Many organizations take a few months after stage two to get to this point, but with your leadership and encouragement, your organization will get there.
Culture
The last stage is creating a true culture of using critical thinking skills. This is when critical thinking skills are just part of your corporate culture. Once your team is consistent with their habits for a period of time, these habits will turn into cultural identity.
I challenge you to adopt this into your corporate DNA. To make sure your people know that critical thinking skills are a better way to come to decisions versus using anecdotal information, biases and heuristics.
And make them aware of things like conformity bias and the other biases I linked to earlier. Tell them you value sourcing alternatives, listening to others’ perspectives and challenging the information.
Final Thoughts
So in conclusion, here are a few key takeaways …
First, critical thinking skills are a way of thinking, using an approach that utilizes analysis and reasoning skills. And the good news is these skills can be enhanced with the proper willingness and practice.
While heuristics can be valuable at times, they need to be acknowledged as something that can cause errors. Critical thinking skills replace biases with a more analytical approach to decision-making.
Next, try the four organizational stages of adoption to get started: Awareness, discipline, habits and culture. Using resources or tools like checklists to force a new way of making decisions are valuable initially.
And to help you get started in your adoption journey, here is a checklist that you and your team can use as part of your critical thinking process when making decisions.