How to Learn Critical Thinking

The essence of critical thinking is careful deliberation, examination, and testing of assumptions, and consideration of opposing views. 

Critical thinking is more critical than ever because the business and world become over-complex, uncertain, and ambiguous. 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. Critical Thinking becomes more critical than ever in this dynamic world for making sound judgement and effective decision making.

Practice multidimensional thinking: Critical thinking is a thought process similar to the perceptions, all from the human brain. Critical Thinking is the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion. Critical thinking includes both rational thinking (compare and contrast, define the frame of reference, etc.) and creative thinking (a result of holding the contrasting factors in the mind until something new appears). Critical Thinking is contextual, both reality-oriented and evidence-oriented. It involves induction and deduction continuum. Critical thinking drives clear thinking and clarified reasoning. Critical Thinking is also commonly understood to involve the willingness to integrate new or revised perspectives into better ways of thinking and acting,

Ask the right questions: Critical thinking is analyzing, looking beyond the surface, not just accepting things at face value but asking questions and being active in your thought processes. Enforce critical thinking and understanding through asking the right questions, and open for varying answers. How to ask the right questions becomes the critical skills need to be sharpened and focused on, to frame and co-solve complex problems. Asking the right questions requires leveraging Critical Thinking ability to absorb information forecast potential; analyze risks/benefits, compare and contrast options, facts, ideas against logic and creativity. To keep informative and inquisitive, always challenge and ensure that the question itself is corrected before answering. Critical thinkers grow a larger perspective, they see or understand the situation from different angles, get input from a broad range of personalities and cognitive difference of people on a particular matter, think both in macro and micro way, apply critical thinking to slow down the analysis and decision-making processes sufficiently to acquire all the necessary information to improve decision effectiveness and maturity.

Engaging is the door to critical thinking: It's that any critical thinking will be able to help drive improvement, create new ideas or build solutions and make them stick successfully. From a management perspective, the best way to learn critical thinking is simply to listen, engage, and ensure that everyone in the company feels valued. Encourage people to raise any issues. If people feel confident to discuss matters within the company, then any problems can be dealt with before they become serious. Critical thinking is essential for making decisions based on careful and comprehensive analysis. 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. Critical thinking skills further impacts leadership effectiveness or professional quality and problem-solving capability.

Critical thinking could be as natural as taking a breath; or as complex as a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces. The essence of critical thinking is careful deliberation, examination, and testing of assumptions, and consideration of opposing views. Critical Thinking needs to be developed based on the individual's own cognition, thinking habit, innate strength, and life experience.

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