What Is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is a big part of many jobs today. It’s a high value trait that the smartest people practice and the best companies look for.

But what the hell is it!?

Well, heading to Google, the definition that pops up is…. vague:

“the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment.”

What is ‘objective analysis’ and what kind of judgments are we looking to form here? Let’s try to figure this out.

An unclear, abstract concept wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that critical thinking seems to crop up everywhere. It’s encouraged by teachers from kindergarten onward. It shows up on marking schemes everywhere. It’s a required asset listed for a majority of job postings and shows up on pretty much all of the success oriented list articles (34.765 Tips on How to Become the Best Person You Wish you Were but AREN’T but SHOULD BE).

Why should we look for traits in people when we don’t have a clear picture of what that trait is?

I think the best way to understand what critical thinking is is not to try define the term directly, but to break it down into habits that critical thinkers tend to exhibit.

Think about Thinking

This practice is also known as meta-cognition, which you may notice sounds awesome (it is). It’s the act of spending mental energy focusing on how your mind works in order to understand it. When you practice meta-cognition, you ask yourself questions like “When do I actually focus on a single task?” or “What mood am I in whenever I come up with great ideas?” to try and discover how your own brain functions. It can get confusing at times and if you’re not careful you can end up thinking yourself in circles (thinking about meta-cognition is a surefire way to get stuck in a loop) but sitting down and thinking about your own thinking is a valuable practice.

When you dedicate time to understanding your own mind, you can learn over time exactly what external factors contribute to your various mental states. Once you recognize some factors, you can start to manipulate your environment to maximize your brain’s mental capacities for whatever you want to do. For example, if you know that you are creative at a fairly consistent time of day, you can try to schedule tasks that require creative solutions around those times. If you think about your mind and how it becomes distracted, you can set up your work space to minimize your distractions.

Meta-cognition is also very helpful when trying to use advice. The human brain is a wonderful machine, but not everyone’s works in exactly the same way. This means that advice and tips that you hear from other people will be valuable only if you take it and modify it to fit your own mind’s patterns. Thinking about your thinking reveals how you can more effectively implement advice and tips from others into your own life.

Follow a Method for Thinking

Thinking is a tool. It’s a very complex tool, but a tool nonetheless and tools have specific methods that must be followed in order for them to properly do their job. Think of a hammer: in order to hit a nail into wood, you have to grip the handle and swing the head down onto the nail; holding the head and hitting the nail with the handle is… less effective, to say the least.

In order for thinking to be useful, it must be directed and methodical. People who exercise critical thinking have spent time discovering for themselves a method that they can follow that will consistently yield solutions. The method doesn’t have to be complicated either; I often spend time thinking by setting a short timer and writing down my thoughts or doodling. During this time, I typically go through several thinking stages:

• state the problem or goal for this thinking
• figure out why the problem I’m thinking about is important
• What is my gut reaction?
• What is a key aspect to this issue that I can start considering in more detail?

Less directed thinking occurs throughout the day as well, but that more likely falls into the category of daydreaming rather than critical thinking.

The point is not what the method is, just that a method works for the thinker and is consistently followed.

Ask Lots of Questions

In order to think effectively, source material is necessary because a large portion of thinking involves an understanding and reworking of information. Since information is required for critical thinking, it is imperative that many questions be asked in order to increase the amount of information available. Questions can be posed to:

• other people who may have more insight into the issue
• the ‘database’ that is comprised of past personal notes, books, and the internet
• oneself (meta-cognition again!)

Critical thinkers ask a lot of questions, but they also ensure that the questions have value. When asking a question, it is important to already have an assumption of what the answer might be. This way, you can check the assumption against facts and train your ability to quickly assess situations.

When you make an assumption, ask a question, and prove or disprove that assumption, you gain knowledge and over time can convert those bits of knowledge into a powerful intuition. It takes a lot of time, patience, and care to make assumptions and be comfortable with accepting when you are wrong, but the effort is well worth the ability to assess quickly, discern details, and understand the larger picture in almost any situation.

Provide Many Different Possible Explanations

For a majority of problems, there are at least a few different solutions. Situations arise for many different reasons, and it is always important to remember that there is usually more than one plausible explanation for any given situation. It is impossible to know the variables of the future, and not all information from the past is available, so it becomes necessary to work with past experience and current inputs to make educated guesses as to what may occur. The best way to provide viable solutions despite uncertainty is to provide multiple possible solutions based on as many different explanations as possible.

Being able to come up with several possibilities while thinking about problems and solutions is immensely valuable because it maximizes the control you will have in the future. As time presses on, some ideas will be proven false while others will show more and more promise. But if only one understanding was built early on, the ability to change course later becomes much more difficult, if not impossible.

Look at Past Cases

New problems have solutions that are often a combination of old ideas with new external information; the solutions to common problems are essentially the same, just some of the parameters are changing. Past cases provide valuable context to decisions that other people have made and allow you to assess how well those old solutions will fit with the current situation.

What is even more valuable is the ability to take past cases that seem to be only slightly connected to your current situation and try to adapt them to your situation by extracting relevant information only. This is not easy to do, but with careful consideration of multiple past cases, it might become more apparent.

Studying past cases that relate to your tasks can reveal patterns. If two cases implemented the same solution and achieved the same result, it may be time to consider using that solution in your context. If a decision was made that resulted in failure, you have someone else’s past experience to guide you away from some ideas that didn’t work. Additionally, since hindsight is 20/20, you may be able to see exactly why something failed and change the solution just enough so that it works for your situation.

Once again, this isn’t easy, but the effort is well worth the return.

Abandoning the Term ‘Critical Thinking’

So, after breaking down critical thinking into several components to try and understand its definition better, I think the term is less valuable than people think. Maybe we shouldn’t make a distinction between critical thinking and thinking in general.

The confusion around critical thinking is prohibitive to people actually building the skills necessary to excel at what they do. Really, all thinking is critical. Consider a violinist playing at a concert. If she performs well, people provide an appropriate response (applause, probably). This performance may have been outstanding, but it is not critical playing, it’s just playing. She’s been playing before to practice, and she’ll play again after to continue improving her ability. The fact that she’s performing doesn’t change the actions she’s taking to produce the notes. Thinking occurs in a similar fashion. It’s a skill to develop constantly, not one that shows up only when you need to perform or come up with solutions.

Think to improve your ability to think, it’s always critical.