Critical Thinking as the Cure of Three Symptoms of the “VUCA” Digital Normality ~ Future of CIO

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Critical Thinking as the Cure of Three Symptoms of the “VUCA” Digital Normality

11:06 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

When we jump into the digital future of “VUCA” new normal, Critical Thinking becomes a crucial tool to navigate through, diagnose, and cure a variety of problems.

Change is the new normal. In the digital era, any business can be at risk for survival at any minute due to continuous fast-paced changes and continuous digital disruptions. Digital leaders and professionals must leverage critical thinking as an effective tool to deal with “VUCA” digital new normal. Critical thinking can combine different thinking processes, to gather a mass of information, break it apart and reconstructed with a level of accuracy for projecting futuristic events, or numbers, etc. In reality, there is only a very small fraction of true critical thinkers. How to spot and cultivate more critical thinkers who can cure the following three symptoms of digital normality.

Information overloading: The business world is moving from a static, siloed, and mechanic industrial mood to the dynamic and information-overloaded digital normality. The upcoming challenges facing digital leaders and professionals today are how to deal with the mountain of information with both technical methodology and human know-how skillset, and then how to convert useful information into valuable knowledge into business insight. Critical Thinking is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion. We live in an era of information overloading. To be insightful, you have to be selective. It is a basic way humans cope with the thousands of bits of stimuli that we encounter - information being only one. Critical Thinking implies some systematic methodology, employing and applying the criteria deemed appropriate by the thinkers involved, to process information, arrive at the tangible and reproducible truth - the commonly accepted objective, testable or measurable, time-bound reality. The point of practicing critical thinking is to gather the knowledge or details around the subject under scrutiny and then and only then, can you be selective for getting the right information to make the right decisions timely. Over time, you develop an effective set of filters that help you find new information that interests you. You also learn what to ignore, abstract insight, and thrive in the digital new normal.

Uncertainty: To master the art and science of uncertainty management, business managers and professionals needs to leverage critical thinking to understand which factors contribute to uncertainty. Is it caused by “unknown” factor -not identified with the scope of the business planning; or is it caused by “unknowable” -beyond the knowledge and understanding of management; or is it caused by “stochastic events”- situations with random distributions as well as “unknown” distributions? To put it simply, there are both known unknown and unknown unknowns. While there is always some remaining uncertainty. The business leaders and their team cannot afford to be unprepared for the challenging task of facing uncertainty. The management should truly have a humble attitude to collect information and feedback, practice critical thinking for analyzing and synthesizing, doing enough homework for planning (not just make the plan) with necessary adjustments on the way to fit the emerging situation. Often, the problem is not uncertainty; rather, it is a lack of real critical thinking or unpreparedness towards the efficient handling of uncertainty. We can not predict anything beforehand but can imagine with many experiences involved in current or in the past. The approach to deal with uncertainty and unpredictability also include planning in a short time and take incremental effort, allowing the acquisition of new information along the way. We can leverage real critical thinking and make provision to meet any eventuality.

Cognitive bias: Consider a digital organization as a coherent, self-organized but interlaced, diversified, and hyper-connected ecosystem. To develop highly innovative and collaborative teams, it’s important to understand the cognitive difference and build a trustful relationship. We all have biases. Humans are not perfect, their cognizance is limited to their thinking capability and capacity, the social environment in which they grow and live; the culture they carry, the lifetime event they experience, the education they received, and the knowledge they absorbed. Understanding requires a person's ability to grasp or comprehend information. People may have different values and different judgments based on different information as well. Thus, it’s important to apply the real critical thinking to fill out cognitive blind spots, to see the big picture, and to make sound judgments. It is true that some people do this naturally. Critical thinking has been described as "the process of purposeful, self-regulatory judgment, which uses reasoned consideration to evidence, context, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria. The whole effort can make progress toward a deeper understanding. Start with a mentally neutral position; no biases or emotional quandary. Realize the objectives. Understand the outcomes based on the facts alone.

When we jump into the digital future of “VUCA” new normal –Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, Critical Thinking becomes a crucial tool to navigate through, diagnose and cure the variety of problems, help to drive improvement, create new ideas or solutions and make them stick. Critical thinking is not a panacea though. The point is that we need to choose to continue to think, learn, grow, and empower people to learn and grow too, with the ultimate goals for problem-solving and making collective progress.