Thinking about Thinking!

Hi Guys- This is my first real attempt at blogging. I’m not sure how much I have to say that’s actually interesting, but I do want to share some topics or thoughts with you from time-to-time.

From my business career and from my teaching career I’ve learned how valuable it is to be able to walk into a complex situation and make an assessment of what’s going on, what the potential causes might be and what to do about it. This skill set is incredibly valuable in start-up’s. Many of the VC’s in my personal network have commented on this ability and how important it is.

But what is it really all about?

I call it “Critical Thinking Skills” and I started doing some thinking about these skills hence the title “Thinking about Thinking”.

I found a reasonable summary of what Critical Thinking is all about from the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking. While this is somewhat old, I think its relevant.

“Critical thinking is 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.”

So you may be wondering the same thing I’m wondering…”What the heck does that mean? I know I was…

I think it comes down to this. In business especially (we’ll save non-business for another day), you have to develop a system and method to assess things.

I use a multi-step process to do this as follows:

• Step 1- Assess the various factors going on. Just think about all the different elements at bay. External things (think big picture like the economy, politics etc), internal issues, operational issues, people issue (Dave has a big ego) etc.
• Step 2- Figure out what the real big issue is. Out of all these factors, what is the real problem here?
• Step 3- Develop a set of criteria by which you could evaluate some potential solutions. Examples might include things like: cost, schedule and so on.
• Step 4- Develop a set of potential solutions and evaluate them against the criteria from Step 3.
• Step 5- Communicate your results.

So I realize this is a very brief overview, but it’s a start. If I see interest in this topic, in future posts I’ll explain all of these things in much more detail.

I think I’m done thinking about thinking for now. Now I’d love to hear what you all are thinking about my thinking on thinking…