Critical Thinking for Better Judgment and Decision-Making

As a project manager, on average, I take at least 5 decisions in a day..🙂  It could be a decision to onboard a resource or Add/ remove tasks from my WBS and a decision to change the schedule, various risks based decisions, project budget-based decisions, and so on.. That means it’s naturally important for me to learn and improve my critical thinking and decision-making ability. While I was looking for some pointers around this, I came across this training in LinkedIn Learning.

So let me summarize this training from Becki Saltzman and you can tell me what you think about this.

Why Critical thinking is Important:

1. Separate fact from fiction.
2. Transfer knowledge
3. Ask quality questions.
4. Challenge assumptions

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Avoid five critical thinking killers:

1. Overreliance on authority. – Should be able to question the boss. Values thinking over authority.
2. Black and white thinking. – This ignores the complexity and nuance of the situation.. Should be able to change our perception according to the problem at hand.
3. Hasty Moral judgments – It’s OK to have moral beliefs, but hast can impact Critical Thinking.
4. Labels – He is a PM, He is an architect, he is a millennial, can cause damage..  Challenge labels..
5. Resistance to change – Ability to change your mind when shown evidence is very important to learn and adapt critical thinking.

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The critical thinking differences:

“Critical thinking is the language of strategy” – Stanford business school.

Critical thinking is the tool for assessing information quality and relevance. Making rational decisions on what to do and what to believe. (looking for biases, busting myths etc is critical thinking)

Creative thinking is looking at challenges from fresh perspectives to produce new ideas and solutions.

Strategic thinking: Generating and applying insights and opportunities to overcome barriers and solve problems. (How or why do we do that ?)

Seven ways to think about thinking:

• MVQ – Most valuable question to be asking while thinking.
  1. Purpose:   Why are we doing this?
  2. Questions:  What are the best questions to ask.
  3. Assumptions: What can we safely assume?
  4. Perspective: Are we using insights from the wisest points of view?
  5. Information: How strongly is our reasoning supported by relevant information?
  6. Concepts: Are we all agreeing on the meaning of this idea or concept?
  7. Conclusions: Whats’s the best way to interpret this information?

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Critical thinking conditions:

The ability to change your Mind – being ready for a  change in thought/assumption is the key. Also, you can engage in a healthy debate with the team and switch sides for part 2 of the debate to see the other side of the argument. 

• Reflective Skepticism: – Go through these questions and after each question reflect on them and analyze.
  1. Is this a fact? or value claim
  2. How relevant is this information?
  3. Is this statement factually correct?
  4. Is this source credible?
  5. Are these claims/arguments ambiguous?
  6. Are we uncovering assumptions?
  7. Are we detecting bias?
  8. Are we spotting logical fallacies?
  9. Are there inconsistencies in this line of reasoning?
  10. How strong is this argument or claim?

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Minimizing Bad Judgement:

• 2 ways of thinking: Different situation needs different thinking..

System 1	System 2
Fast	Slow, effortful
Automatic
Efficient
Unconscious (Intuition, Bias )

System 2 thinking pitfalls to avoid:

1. Stop Multitasking
2. Turn off notification during meetings …
3. Sleep. (don’t take decision when you are sleepy)
4. Eat. (serious decisions cannot be taken when you are hungry)
5. Avoid complex situations (after a long meeting, when you are out from a complex meeting)

Improving Decision Quality:

The REF method:

• People trust their intuition a lot and sometimes even when they shouldn’t.
• For Intuition to be reliable below are the 3 conditions that should be met.
  • Regularity: The decision should be as part of regular practice and not a One-Off decision.
  • Exposure: You should have exposure to taking such a decision in the past and not a new leader doing things for the first time.
  • Feedback: This takes a long time. there should be a gap between Intuition and feedback.
• Confidence – This is not a reliable condition to take a decision based on it.

Counterfactual Thinking:

Uncovering possible alternatives to outcomes from past events.

• Upward counterfactuals are better alternative outcomes : ex: If we had launched before our competitors then we would have 80% of the market share.
• Downward counterfactuals are worse alternative outcomes. ex: If I hadn’t taken that training, then I wouldn’t have gotten the promotion.

Steps for Counterfactual thinking:

1. Identify a prior event with an unexpected outcome.
   • Events like a release that was successful, or failure.
2. Find factors leading to the outcome.
   • Include factors that you did control and external factors that you couldn’t control.
3. Select a factor to modify
   • Find 1 factor that you could have modified as part of the release that might have made the difference
4. Assess consequences of modification.
   • Assess what that factor would have done if the modification was done on time. 
5. Generate a counterfactual
   • Decide if the change in the decision would have actually been upward or downward counterfactual thinking.

Overcoming dangers of loss aversion:

Questions to answer and award 1 point for each question where you have answered Yes .

1. Did we use our preexisting decision framework?
2. Did we gather relevant information?
3. Did we gather irrelevant information?
4. Did we list assumptions to challenge?
5. Did we make sure our sources are credible?
6. Did we eliminate biases?
7. Did we include the right people?
8. Did we identify at least two alternatives?
9. Did we weigh evidence supporting the decision?
10. Did we weigh evidence rejecting the decision?
11. Did we choose between alternatives?

Score the decision process and refer to the table below:

Points	Score	Action
11 – 10	Great decision Process	Consider the outcome
9 – 7	Good decision Process	Almost there
4 -6	Okay decision process	Add to your process
0-3	Poor decision process	Improve your process

Critical Thinking Fallacies:

• Most common logical fallacies:
  • Logical fallacies – are flaws in reasoning. (includes mistakes that are non-intentional )
    • Benefits of Identifying logical fallacies:
      • Separate fact from fiction.
      • Make better arguments
      • Set aside illogical arguments.

• 4 common ones:

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc: Latin for “after this, therefore because of this ” – When 2 event happens consecutively and the reason is the former cause the latter event.  watch out for confusing correlation with causation.

Ad Hominem: Ignoring the logic of an argument and instead, attacking the person making it. Watch out before dismissing valid arguments from people you don’t agree with…

Straw Man: Substituting argument with a misrepresented view of it. Sneaky argument substitutions can impact the decisions.

Hasty Generalization:  Drawing conclusions from limited evidence.  ex: (Judgements like , Mark Z, Oprah and bill gates dropped out of college and did not impact their career could be a hasty decision.)

Avoiding Planning fallacy:

As a Project Manager, Underestimating the time it would take to complete the project is the most common planning fallacy.

1. Planning fallacy reasons:
   1. Being Overly optimistic (about people involved, SLAs, external environments, etc) may be , because success is easier to imagine
   2. Failing to consider data from similar situations. We strongly believe that our situations are unique.

Inside View	Outside View
Gathering information	Finding references
Determining the length of contributions	Using data
Adding intelligence	Adjusting projections
Projecting out

Applying the outside view:

• Reference class. ( Examples: software upgrade, past upgrades, Other orgs that that have done this in the past, focus on what’s the same)
• Look for statistics from outside experience.
• Predictions or adjustments based on data and lessons learned.

Using framing to advantage:

• Choose a negative or positive framing.
• Take either as a loss or win. Gain frame with a clear outcome message has more chances of accepting vs the other.
• Match emotions to meet your objective. Ex: of 2 cars that met with a minor accidents, Use the statement to make the impact of the statement.
  • Contacted each other
  • hit each other
  • smashed each other
• Look out for others using framing to influence your decisions🙂

Creating the Critical Thinking Culture:

• A culture that companies should foster:
  • Questions that can’t be answered  Vs answers that can’t be questioned.
• 2 Types of questions that fuels curiosity
  • Bucket Questions: Help you not ask the same questions over and over again.
    • Knowledge Question?
    • Opinion Question?
    • Judgment Question?
  • Interrogation question: Help you ask quality questions.
    • Is it Well – stated?
    • Is the Question Biased?
    • Is the question in Consideration with the complexity of the situation?
    • Is the question relevant to the situation?
  • Better questions lead to Intellectual curiosity and vice versa.

In conclusion, I will do my best to remain mindful and follow the above steps whenever I need to take Decision and identify any biases and ask the right question based on the circumstance.

Hope you liked my notes from training. Do check out my other popular posts as well…