To Celebrate #4300th Blog Posting: Practice Three Things Which Cannot be Taught Completely

Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking, innovating, and brainstorming.

The digital era has the “VUCA” characteristics: Velocity, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. We are living in a complex world where inventions, developments, and conflicts are continuously changing and that makes it impossible to have a complete knowledge and understanding of any issue individually. Therefore, today’s contemporary digital leaders and professionals must keep learning, adapting, innovating, and practicing on the daily basis for developing differentiated competency. Here are three things which cannot be taught completely, it is both nature and nurtured, and it takes the practice, practice, and practice more to be fluent.

Critical thinking: Critical Thinking is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach a conclusion. Critical thinking cannot be defined as genetically inherited only or, can absolutely be taught. Critical Thinking is contextual, both reality oriented and evidence-oriented. Critical Thinking is a foundational skill that wraps behind many other thinking processes, such as analytics, synthesis, systems thinking, creative thinking, etc. Critical thinking as a thinking capability is a balanced mix of genetics and learning. Hence, critical thinking is situation based and individual driven. The effective critical thinking scenario includes knowing by observing: What is said or done, how, when, where, why it's said or done, and who said this or did that. Rather than "good" or "bad,” critical thinking is ever-improving. Critical Thinking is not automatic thinking, it takes extra effort to thinking critically, it takes what is known and which needs to be understood to come up with right solutions. It takes practices and practices more to be fluent in critical thinking.

Creativity: Creativity happens in both unconscious and conscious level. Creativity is the heritage of all individuals, even some present more creative traits than others. Creativity is like a muscle, you must exercise it daily or it atrophies. Creativity is applied in many spheres of human activity. An essential aspect of creativity is the ability to challenge assumptions, beliefs, conclusions, and to be able to contemplate multiple, even conflicting views of situations. A person must find ways to stimulate creativity, break down the convention thinking, be original and be yourself. It must be practiced, it's very personal, it requires internal motivation and self-awareness. Either you're writing, beautify your science, or rationalize your art, creativity requires a certain degree of independence and mental balance, the proper psychological level of inner security and genuine autonomy. Therefore, it is important to create conditions so that the creative potential can manifest and it's important to develop creativity via continue practicing.

True Understanding: True understanding can only be acquired via various complex cognitive activities: Critical Thinking brings insight into the situation. Insight is a deep inspection or view or introspection; perception is conscious understanding of something. Perception is the way one's eyes see the surroundings and one's mind interpret it. It is a full awareness of the situation and applying it right. All these mental activities are very personal and intend to gain the true understanding of things or situations.  More often, learning knowledge is focused on one track, knowing more and more about less and less; but true understanding is multidimensional, open and circular. Having an open mind and learning attitude allows you gaining the different perceptions of the world and come up with the true understanding of surroundings, and having gratitude allows you being more positive and gives you the energy to overcome bias or other perception-based obstacles. The true understanding is the amalgamation of thought, analysis, planning, prediction of consequences, and so on. It is necessary to educate people to become aware of the many dimensions of any particular initiative. True understanding is definitely related to experience, directly or indirectly via learning. But only if you have learned something from those experiences, and make it part of your inner-self, will your knowledge turn into the true understanding. We become wise when we are humble enough to be aware of and admit what we don't know and share what we know, and understanding that, compared to what we don't know, what we know is just the tip of an iceberg. It takes contemplation, questioning, and discovery to gain true understanding.

Knowledge can be taught, but critical thinking, creativity, and true understanding cannot be taught completely, they are crucial skills need to be continually developed and practiced. Digital leaders and professionals can build their professional competence and expert power based on those thinking blocks and update their problem-solving skills via diligent practices.

Posted in: Education,Food for Thought,Mindshift,Thinkingaire