Please God...

Please God, would you make business schools include psychology in their curricula!

Critical Thinking: Just what the heck is it and how do you get better at it?

Fisher & Scriven define critical thinking as "Skilled, active, interpretation and evaluation of observations, communications, information, and argumentation." -- huh? In simpler terms, critical thinking generally requires the ability to recognize problems and to find workable means for meeting those problems.  To be a good critical thinker you need to:

• marshal pertinent information 
• recognize assumptions and logical fallacies
• appraise evidence and evaluate arguments
• draw warranted conclusions and generalizations
• test conclusions and generalizations 

and ultimately to render accurate judgments about specific things and qualities in everyday life. Bottom-line: critical thinking is about being both willing AND able to evaluate your own thinking and the thinking of others.

Experience is Good, Right?

It sounds outrageous but, often, veteran project managers do not produce high caliber results BECAUSE of their experience.  A recent article by Kishore Sengupta, et. al. in the Harvard Business Review shows there is something wrong with the way managers learn from their experience, especially in complex, dynamic environments.  The authors conclude, “Despite their experiences with complex projects, veteran managers do not meaningfully improve the mental models they have formed in simpler contexts.”  Mental models are hypothesis about how things work and assumptions about cause and effect that we develop over time and then use to guide our decisions and actions.  Experience creates problems for performance when our mental models are wrong.