COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE VIA CRITICAL THINKING

When was the last time you heard that one of the best ways to get a competitive advantage in business was through critical thinking? Like “never.” And yet when this idea is presented, it is seems so obvious that it seems almost redundant to mention it. That was not the case in 1997 when Quinn Spitzer and Ron Evans wrote Heads, You Win! How the best companies think— and how you can use their examples to develop critical thinking within your own organization. Whew! What a long sub-title! Here’s some things they wrote in that book: “Organizations seeking to move from the competence gained from a flexible and well-supported skill-development program to a proficiency that can make critical thinking a source of competitive advantage will find the task nearly impossible without a forceful, committed, and ‘up-front’ leadership such as that demonstrated at Chryster, Seagate, and Corning.” (p. 221-222)

Now the mention of those three companies were just the tip of the iceberg to all of the companies that they quoted who introduced some form of critical thinking into their training programs. And why? Why would an organization invite training in critical thinking? Again, the answer is so simple and obvious that it almost seems unnecessary to articulate. And yet the answer is also most often overlooked: Critical thinking skills are needed in order to gather high quality information, to cut through all of the data and information and get to the needed critical knowledge. It is needed for high quality problem defining and solving, it is needed for intelligent decision making. It is needed for planning, executing plans, and for innovation.

Introducing these core thinking skills into a company wholesale in a revolutionary way means getting the training to lots of people.

“The revolutionary road to critical thinking skills has been taken recently by Chrysler, Corning, British Airways, Seagate Technology, and others with great success.” (p. 229)

The evolutionary approach is a slower approach and more covert as it introduces the training only to those whose jobs require critical thinking skills. This was the approach of Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Reuters, Honda and others which was more suitable for their needs (p. 230).

One of the fascinating facts that started Spitzer and Evans experimenting with critical thinking was the fact that Sam Walton build WalMart without an MBA, that David Packard made HP an industry leader without “business process re-engineering,” and that many other top leaders in the 1990 did not have business background. How could that be? How could they succeed so spectacularly without business education? The answer?

“These executives were not just people of action, but people of thought— critical thought. And

with the precision of hindsight, we can conclude that the critical thinking they brought to their businesses was fundamentally more effective than that of their colleagues and competitors at the time.” (p. 17)

Specifically, they were especially proficient at four core processes—

1) Effectively assessing complex economic environment— situation appraisal.

2) Accurately identified the cause and implemented corrective action— problem analysis.

3) Assessed benefits and risks of the choices for great decisions—decision analysis.

4) Implemented actions effectively as they seized opportunity—implementation analysis.

Then, with these core critical thinking processes they were able to do the following which is exactly what we aim to achieve in the Meta-Coach trainings. In fact, the language itself is strangely similar and could just as well describe Meta-Coaching.

“... effective managers excel in the art of questioning: they cut through the clutter to bring clarity and order to confusion. They go straight to the heart of the problem and uncover its underlying cause. When they take action, they have an uncanny ability to home in on the relevant data and choose the best alternative. And they reach beyond the fixed boundaries of the present to identify the threats and opportunities that lie ahead.” (p. 241)

The key to success in business, as it is in every other dimension, is the thinking behind the understanding and the actions. It is the quality and kind of thinking that governs how people respond. The thinking is what gives us the leverage point for change and transformation and the map that guides how we interact with the territory.

The book, Creative Solutions (2017) focuses on this and sorts out the core competencies in terms of the four areas that determine any goal and the translation of that goal into action and reality. When I wrote Creative Solutions I did not realize that it is actually a book on applied critical thinking and that it offers a disciplined, data-driven critical thinking process around those four competencies. I discovered that after as I was writing the next book which is on critical thinking. That surprised me.

1) Outcome — What do you want? What are your dreams and visions?

2) Problems — What’s in the way? What’s stopping you from achieving your goal?

3) Solutions — What will solve the problem and get you to your goal?

4) Innovation — What will you implement to execute your vision to make it real?

The next book (which will be available in May or June), Executive Thinking, focuses on the special of thinking that is most frequently referred to as critical thinking.