We are often asked to reflect on ‘what we think’. But, rarely, on how we think.
Many of us are charged with making improvements, with innovation, with important planning and decision-making. How we think – and how well we think – is therefore important.
Yet most of us don’t know. We think how we think – how we have always thought. We haven’t had thinking lessons. We developed our thinking processes based on our education – but, even there, there were no lessons on thinking.
So, we may think illogically, with bias, with pre-conceived (perhaps out-of-date) notions and on the basis of insufficient or imperfect information. If we have the occasional ‘flash of brilliance’, we congratulate ourselves – forgetting that the rest – the majority – of our thinking is far less than perfect.
So, perhaps it is time to do some basic research (reading) about critical and creative thinking – and start to think about how you think, why you think like you do – which leads to why you behave like you do. It might change what you do (because you’ve changed why you do it).