Leading Beyond Any Title – Critical Thinking

The conversations you have with your leader, peers, and your team determine the quality of your leadership. Are you having the right conversations today? 
 
Critical Thinking is about far more than spreadsheets and data. As a skill it improves our leadership of people, change, difficult decisions and execution of every project. It shows up quietly in every meeting, we hope! And if Critical thinking is lacking both leaders and their teams can fall prey to bias and costly shortcuts. Jennie and Craig will be joined by Evan Weselake to discuss the fundamental parts of Critical Thinking. Where it needs to show up more and some simple ways you can foster more Critical Thinking for your whole team!  

Leading Beyond Any Title brings you quick lessons and conversations about timely and topical leadership challenges. You'll leave the conversation with 1 BIG IDEA, 2 Applied Strategies, and 3 Questions to consider that can help enhance your leadership that very day. 

Follow SAIT Corporate Training on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/saitcorporatetraining/?viewAsMember=true

Connect directly with Jennie and Craig on LinkedIn:

• Jennie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniengilbert/
• Craig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craighess/

Have burning questions about leadership that you'd like us to address? Email them to leadership.questions@sait.ca and let your voice be heard.

Transcript

Craig: 0:00

This is the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast, your guide to transformative leadership. We're your hosts. Hi, I'm Craig Hess.

Jennie: 0:06

And I'm Jennie Gilbert. Each episode of Breakfast will bring you weekly quick lessons and conversations about topical leadership challenges. You're guaranteed to leave with one big idea, two applied strategies, and three questions to consider that can help enhance your leadership every day.

Craig: 0:22

We'll bring you insights on how to lead beyond any title and unlock your own leadership potential.

Jennie: 0:27

And we both hope you enjoy this episode.

Craig: 0:31

Yes, it is 8. 01, so nothing like kicking things off and leading into it with a chat of getting audited, but Jennie. Over to you to get us going today.

Jennie: 0:43

That has to be the most curious transition to us. Yeah, it was

Craig: 0:49

not my smoothest segue. I will say that.

Jennie: 0:52

Okay. Good morning, everybody. Apparently, I'm not ready for the good morning. There we go. So welcome and Welcome to everybody. The room is still filling just a little bit. If you are brand new to us, welcome to our last one before the summer. We've got news on that, of course. Uh, but do know that the chat, as you've seen, will get very, very busy and there is a Q and A if you look at your toolbar and if you would like your question answered. Then the Q and A is a great place to go because Craig will track as much as he can, the chat, but definitely the Q and A as well. For those of you who are regulars, welcome back. And you know full well that this is a very important part of our Friday morning at usually about 8. 01. For those of you who are looking at their screens as well, there's a picture of the very magnificent Heritage Hall in front of you, which is somewhat, I think it's about 100, 100 and something years old, well over 100 years old now, since the first cornerstone was laid and its name is apt Heritage Hall. There's a lot of stories within that building, but long, long before this building arrived. These were the hunting grounds, excuse me, of the traditional. the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Nation. Those include our indigenous people of the Siksika, the Pikane, the Gane, the Tsutina, and the Stony Nakoda. So for the sake of the frog in my throat, I'm going to thank you for pausing with us. To recognize where we are and the heritage that our land is situated, whether you're here in Calgary, like us, or somewhere else within the province, or possibly even somewhere else within the country, too. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: 2:37

Perfect. Thank you, Jennie. Um, and we have a special guest joining us this morning, folks. As I'm sure you can see on the screen, Evan Westlake is one of our fantastic guests. facilitators here at SAIT. We are so fortunate to have such an amazing crew of folks that, uh, get to work with our clients and get to work with our students. And Evan is one of those that, uh, among other things, speaks about critical thinking. And as we were prepping for today, um, I kind of had this thought of this, you know, this is a leadership podcast or leadership webinar. What the heck are we doing talking about critical thinking? So Evan, I'm just going to start there.

Evan: 3:17

How

Craig: 3:19

the heck does critical thinking fit into this?

Evan: 3:23

And sadly, like so many, so many of these questions, there's like three, five, seven answers. Uh, the quick answer is, is that this is a leadership skill that, that increasingly what we face at work is, um, is rational work. It used to be task based. That was decades ago. That is past. And, and more and more people are saying to me in workshops and one on one coaching that, that, well, isn't this common sense? No, common sense is learned. And, and it's a, and it's, it's part of your thinking. It's part of how you process information. And we've been saying to leaders for ages, that one of the ways, to build capacity in your people is to role model. Well, how do you role model thinking? That's, that's, that's, that's a deceptively simple question. And don't be surprised if we roll back to it over the course of our morning, because if role modeling is one of the ways to build people's ability, uh, the thinking, most of it happens back here. So how do you role model thinking? The second reason, and feel free to jump in slides, is, is this lovely quote from a guy named Colin Seal. I tripped over it when I was reading, I believe the book is called Thinking Like a Lawyer, Danger, but, um, the quote, of course, for those of you that can't see it, is, today's questions are more complex, requiring multiple steps, inferences, predictions, and a careful judgment about potential answers is best. And, and embedded in there is a pseudo definition of critical thinking. Multiple steps, inferences, predictions, and careful judgements. Sadly, if we miss even one or two of those, we're not in critical thinking anymore. We're going backwards to something else. A guy named Daniel Kahneman, I often get his name, pronounce his name wrong, people call him Danny. Uh, some of you might recognize the, the book Thinking Fast and Slow, Nod, Smile, Wave, and by the way, if you haven't read that book and you just want to take one significant bite out of Critical Thinking, brilliant book, it's about a decade old now, so you can get it in the library. Uh, Thinking Fast and Slow, he describes two different systems that we use to do our thinking. One of them being quick and intuitive and, and almost automatic, or unaware of it happening, and the other being slower and more deliberate. And as the workplace speeds up, and the pressure speeds up, and the change speeds up, and many of you who are on the chat have had that conversation with Jennie or I or others at SAIT, then we're pulled into this System 1, into fast thinking. Fast thinking has its place, and its place isn't everywhere. Critical thinking belongs too. We can play a game with it if you want, but

Jennie: 6:43

So I think, um, the thinking fast, thinking slow. And the way that we get pulled, this is really, really, really key because we are moving so fast, we're moving faster than we can even imagine. Comprehend we're moving faster than we can create policy for in some places and back to your role modeling to maybe that's even part of it for leaders is in order for this to happen, we have to press the pause button. You can't, you can't do it at a hundred miles an hour. Like if people sit and they say, yeah, I listened to everything at twice the speed and so we're doing everything so fast. And this is about, let's just pause for a minute. Um, so I think there's a key piece for leaders in there as to how, and maybe that's part of the role modeling is how do we execute that pause? And what does that look like?

Craig: 7:37

Yeah, I'm going to hit pause there in 1 second before you respond to that, Evan. And just remind folks, please do carry on your conversation in the chat. I will keep an eye on it. If you have specific questions, if something is said and you go, Oh, this makes me think of something, please try and pop it in the Q and A. You sound. Unpause, Evan, back to you.

Evan: 7:56

Yeah. Yeah. So how do we hit pause? There's a few answers to that. There's a few ideas related to that. And you and I both do some work on, on emotional intelligence, both at SAIT and other places. That's, that's classic emotional intelligence. Ironically, I mean, here we are five minutes into critical thinking. We're talking about emotional intelligence, um, your own impulse control, right? We know that if leaders don't have impulse control, that is a significant derailer. And I'm having this memory flash to a vice president I worked with who, on a regular basis, would, would, would quote, press pause, and he'd say it to the room. Okay, pause. And he had this thing he did with his hand that was this, this role modeling of now we're thinking differently, and he'd go like this, who owns this part? Okay, pause, which, what's critical here? And he didn't use the word critical. I'm substituting for the sake of this morning, but, but he would pull us back to a slower, more deliberate version of thinking. And it was lovely that he did that. The other piece of this, I think, and if you want to jump the next slide, is, is that critical thinking is deliberate. This is a consciously engaged mental effort. Unfortunately, the opposite, which is lazy thinking. Unfortunately, lazy thinking is tempting not only because it's lazy, but because it feels better to be lazy. in the moments that we're doing it. Critical thinking feels like work. It feels like exercise. It feels like squats and push ups and planks. And oh my word, I'm on a plank challenge right now. It's work.

Jennie: 10:00

That's, um, Evan, can we double click on work? Like, just for the sake of everybody who's here, like, what is, what is the work? So for some, when we say critical thinking, you can, you can feel the energy change in the room because it's almost like there's a bar set. So you have to be critical. Like, And for some, it's scary and for others, it's like, ha, yes, let's go. And so what is, what does that work look like? What, what are we talking about here?

Evan: 10:26

Well, um, uh, as, as in what, what, what are the pieces of it?

Jennie: 10:32

Sure. Yeah. Like, let's just, let's just, Let's just get a bit more around what, what this is because we're talking and, and, you know, we have to press pause. This is going to take longer. And I love the bit that you just said about that VP. Okay, pause. Who owns this? And so there's, when, when we press pause, when we go slower, we do this a little bit, we open up, we, you know, I think we open up our mind or we're leaning in to think a bit more. Okay. And I wouldn't profess to know them off the top of my head, but is there a certain ingredients that makes up critical thinking? Or what does that look like? What are we trying to get to here?

Evan: 11:11

Well, if you want to go, I mean, we're, we're, we're building an entire workshop on this for SAIT. And yes, there are some key ingredients, not the least of which are analysis. People love that word. And sadly, a lot of places delegate that to. A person or a group, except we're all responsible for analysis. how much matters, what matters, why does it matter? Evaluation and analysis are different. Evaluation is saying that one's more important, that one's, and why something is more important. Explanation, your capacity to say this is, this happened because, or this will create. Self regulation, we've already touched that a little bit, but, but self regulation is part of critical thinking. And knowing that you're in interpretation, which is a very different mental Mode. Interpretation and analysis are different gears. And, um, I think, I think, uh, um, anyone who's done extended academic discipline. And I'm saying discipline on purpose because all of you who have been to grad school, uh, ever know how exhausting it is and how tedious it is to write in APA format, where you are compelled to split the hair between content and opinion, between finding and contending, right? And and, and to say, here's what I think, here's what I saw, and to split those two. This is one of the blatant strategies of critical thinking, because if they're mixed, you have dogma. Classic definition of dogma is opinion showing up sounding like information. and I give you a whole bunch of what I believe and I see and I think and I interpret and make it sound like it's objective fact. They are different. To quote Neil deGrasse Tyson, there are three types of truth. First type, personal truth. And I'm a little tired of that term, but there it is. And personal truth is opinion, interpretation, uh, belief. Second, objective truth. You can measure it. You can see it. It's outside you and me. It's not owned by a person. And third danger, political truth. Groups of people agree on it and believe it and value it. And the neat thing is this was a huge learning for me. This is like a change in my career was accepting that politics is not inherently bad. Um, and, and politics is essentially building coalition between people when you don't have authority. That's a sidetrack to a different topic, but it's another podcast, right? It is a type of truth and, and when organizations have political truth, purpose, alignment, clear values, decisions made on clear values, that's, that's an organization's having political truth and critical thinking requires at least two of these three are happening at any given time. If you only have one of them running, you're not in critical thinking.

Craig: 15:10

Okay. I'm gonna hit pause again because we, you, we've spurred a couple of questions that I think we need to, it, that we need to get to. So I think then, I think they're gonna be somewhat related a little bit, but could you repeat what is caused by leaders who don't have impulse control? And I'm gonna interpret this as in being reaction to a situation, a question, et cetera. Uh, we, somebody So lack of impulse control by

Evan: 15:34

Jennie jump in, uh, short version of leaders who don't have impulse control is they get derailed. By going into lazy thinking, a lack of impulse control means that you are doing more lazy thinking. You're doing more of Daniel Kahneman's system one thinking.

Jennie: 15:57

And I think the danger in there too, um, let's, let's put all the D names into the, into the conversation we can. So David Markway talks about two choices are execute or innovate. Execute is the doing. And when you're not pressing pause, you're constantly doing and we can get really, really busy doing, but if all we're doing is doing too many D's or if all we're doing is doing, then we're never pausing. We're never stopping to look up and we're definitely not joining the dots. And so that pause it, you know, the pause is the pause is a meeting time. We make time for meetings all the time. Well, let's make them more effective. And do something different with that.

Craig: 16:41

It's interesting for me, and I think we've touched on this a little bit too. You talk about the System 1 thinking, and then Jennie, the doing, the doing. We're in an environment now where, you know, you're trying to get to inbox zero, or you're trying to get this done. And every time you check something off your list, it feels like you've accomplished something. So, you know, for lazy thinking to be the default isn't surprising whatsoever, right? It's like, how are we just, how are we, you know, we scroll through social media, how do we scroll through our decisions every day to, you know, keep the feed refreshed? It's kind of what I'm thinking. I don't know if that triggers anything for you, Evan, but.

Evan: 17:17

Well, it speaks to how the environment around us pulls us to, to, to system one thinking and the tools, many of the tools are, are intended to speed us up, make us more efficient, but, uh, efficient only works with what you have efficient, doesn't discover new things and create new things and, and, and put together new puzzles.

Craig: 17:45

Yeah, well, and then there's efficiency and then there's efficaciousness. Yeah. Or effectiveness, right?

Evan: 17:50

Right.

Craig: 17:51

And what are you, what are you striving for? Yeah, sure. There's times efficiency matters, but how much, how much more could we get done if we were focusing on effectiveness versus efficiency? That being said, a couple more questions I'm going to come back to. Um, where was it? Can, Oh, give me an actual problem and then show examples of critical thinking versus a quick thinking solution.

Evan: 18:18

Oh, an actual problem and examples of critical thinking. Okay, the one that I'm in love with lately is hiring and how we try to design in critical thinking and some organizations are great at this, but intuition isn't critical thinking. Intuition is system one. Intuition is how do I instinctually feel about this person when they first come in, when they first sit down, when they first start talking? How do I feel about this person based on the top of their resume? And sadly, this is so common that many of us are learning to design our resumes and our LinkedIn and our interview and our video for first impression. If we wanted to jump two steps deep into critical thinking, we would have a nice, tight structure for learning about this person, learning the criteria of what we're looking for, and criteria is an important part of critical thinking, and then apply intuition at the end. But, putting off intuition is really difficult. Intuition that is served by data. It's really difficult and, and throwback to Kahneman, uh, thinking fast and slow, he, he designed this and did an experiment on this and tried to compare people who are hired based on tuition versus people who are hired based solely on the, the critical elements of what you want from the role, the problem is it solves the type of person that fits in and, and, and the two were doing this to each other until they reordered them and said, do the data first, do the analysis first, do the interpretation first, then apply some intuition at the end and you get the best possible result.

Jennie: 20:32

So we have to talk about data because there's somebody who quite openly and happily says, I'm allergic to numbers, 100 percent allergic to numbers. Um, and so when you say that big D word. Um, but when you say data, I can literally feel myself go, and, and not because I think data, like I appreciate data, but I think with all the data, you can find data for anything, like, so, so when we're talking about critical thinking, I think I have two questions. One, like, how do you ensure. Maybe this is not the right question for in here, but maybe it's the critical thinking that the data is the right data and to your point, often we pass that off to somebody. If you're someone like me, you have to pass that off to somebody. Um, and then the other part is what I'm getting the picture is here is critical thinking involves more than just you, because with that personal truth, especially, we're drowning. In BIOS and, and we know what like almost everybody now is very aware you're going to carry BIOS, BIOS, so how does that

Evan: 21:43

play and green apples on BIOS. We're going to circle BIOS before the next 8 minutes. Yeah, as you have, as you have hives about data, I'm having a little another memory flash. A dear friend of mine is a Data scientist. Love her dearly, going coffee with, going for coffee with her is always, um, eye opening and, and she said to me about a year ago, she said, well, you know, Evan, no number by itself has any use until it's relative to another number. And I thought I'd just been slapped with obvious, you know, cause, cause, well, yeah. And, and, and I'm driving down the highway going a hundred, well, a hundred what? A hundred miles per hour or kilometers per hour? They're different. They're relative. A hundred kilometers an hour. I mean, yesterday I drove from Calgary to, uh, the Invermere Windermere Valley. And when you're going 115 on Highway 1, you're going too slow. And when you're going 115 on Highway 93, you're going too fast. Well, I'm in the same wagon. With the same dogs, in the same weather, on the same smooth concrete road, what changed? Like, what's it relative to that made that data, that objective 115, better or worse? Information is relative to something, and what it's relative to is what makes it meaningful. So yeah, data. It's all out there. And Don Henley, there's no such thing as truth, only data to be manipulated. Wouldn't be a workshop if Evan didn't make it out there. A song quote. Um, um,

Craig: 23:34

um, So we've, we've hit Neil deGrasse Tyson and a member of the Eagles within 15 minutes. I'm quite impressed by this.

Jennie: 23:42

Um, the

Craig: 23:43

other, the other comment I would make is that BC just likes to collect more revenue from speeding tickets, but I'll leave that there. Maybe. So

Evan: 23:52

maybe, I mean, that's what it's relative to, or is it relative to wildlife or is it relative to twisty tourney? I don't know.

Craig: 23:58

Yeah. No, it's fair. It's a fair point. So let's, let's jump on bias since you talked about it. I know we're going to talk about it as one of the two applied strategies, but the question that has come up here is bias, the enemy of critical thinking. Yes. Okay. Next question.

Jennie: 24:16

Yes,

Evan: 24:17

it is.

Jennie: 24:18

I

Evan: 24:19

mean, there's a few enemies, but bias is absolutely an enemy.

Craig: 24:28

Do you want to Double click on that at all?

Evan: 24:30

Well, for the sake of this conversation, and if you want, we can jump to that slide, um, let's just, For now, say, bias and fallacy and heuristic are essentially the same thing. Three layers in, they're subtly different, but that's like saying a retrieve a lab and a retriever are different. They're both really more or less the same dog. And, and, and the top of this slide, hashtag full bias alert is a phrase that I accidentally spoke in a, in a coaching conversation two years ago. And now I love it. Um, you want to get better at bias. Start naming yours out loud when you feel it, smell it, think it, tingle it, name it out loud and you will, you will be disempowering it both for yourself and the people around you. Um, if you have a strong value set, it is probably nudging you into a bias, maybe. Um, it could also be your personal truth showing up and interacting with the data. Okay, be aware that those two are interacting and be aware of which one you're using at any given time. It's a lot of self awareness involved in critical thinking. Here are three that I am running into both as a coach and in workshops with SAIT regularly. I know people are very aware of confirmation bias. Pop culture has made confirmation bias very, very well understood these days. Here's three more that I see a lot and hear a lot. And, and they aren't as well understood. The first fallacy of composition is basically saying, uh, you're in the fallacy of composition when you assume something that's true of the part is also true of the whole. So, stupid example, obvious example, Wow, the wheels are made out of rubber, therefore the car is made out of rubber. No, that's absurd. But we do it every time we go grocery shopping. This store has the same price of milk, therefore the rest of the groceries are basically the same price. No, they're not. You just fell into the fallacy of composition. You thought something true about the part is also true about the whole. And that requires pulling back, looking at the whole differently than we look at the parts. Or when we think we know something about the whole, a general truth, we dig down in. And, and ask, is that also true of the part? This person is really nice. Therefore, are they kind with each of their individual staff members? Mmm, I don't know. Fallacy of composition. I trust this person with one thing. Therefore, do I trust them with another thing? Trust falls prey to fallacy of composition regularly. I trust my daughter with the boat. I don't trust her with my bike. Explain that. Second one, availability heuristic is basically saying what you easily remember or imagine, and memory and imagination are really closely tied in the back of your brain. What you easily remember or imagine, you give more credit, more weight to that when you're making decisions or solving problems. Sadly, easy to remember doesn't necessarily mean easy to remember. It's more valuable. It's more useful. It's more important. And that's where I trip. I actually just tripped into an underlying piece of critical thinking that is understanding logic and then some of the basic forms of logic. And we'll drop, uh, at least an hour's worth of basic logic into a workshop on critical thinking, but necessary truths, uh, knowing what a necessary truth is. If anyone wants to go do some research after this, go Google necessary truth and start watching for necessary truths and when people apply them or don't. Um, I, I, there was a little quiz I ran into recently. Um, the, the question was asked. Where in Canada do we record the most aggressive animal encounters? And, and when people think of Canada, they typically think of bears, uh, out there in the, in the wild, in the world. And so, and so if you're asked this question, where in Canada do we have the most aggressive animal encounters? Uh, 8 people will point at either Ontario or B. C. Because of population and bears, except Canada. That's availability heuristic. You can easily imagine it. You can easily remember it. The fact is Alberta has the most aggressive animal encounters, more than Alberta, Ontario, and BC combined. And it isn't bears, and it isn't population. It's big deer. And tourists.

Jennie: 30:03

That makes sense.

Craig: 30:04

I can't remember the last time I was attacked by a tourist, but I'm sorry, you're saying I see where I see where you're going there. Okay. I'm going to pop to another question that we had come in here because I think it works well in terms of the intuition piece and your last, you know, when you talk about fallacy of composition and the availability heuristic, it speaks a lot to why people rely on intuition, right? Really feeds that. Yeah. Part of that is intuition is you want to, you're quick with your response and to your point earlier, the boss or the individual that you worked with the said that let's pause. The question here is how do you balance? I'm sorry. Everyone's balance of doing and pausing is different, right? So how do you balance these differences as part of a team, knowing that some maybe need longer pauses than others, how to help others work on their own balance of doing and pausing? So there's, there's a couple of layers to this one, right? I think one is in speech patterns, et cetera. I know for myself, I'm adjusting here this morning. Your speech patterns much different than Jennie's. So I'm controlling some intuition and urges to jump in when, when you're pausing, because I know there's something coming. So there's that. But then I think there's the bigger piece of, as a team and how you operate together, how do you find it? Anyway, there's your question.

Evan: 31:30

Yeah, well, and there's a couple in there. Jennie, you and I have both done a lot of work, and you more than me, on making meetings more effective. There's a laundry list of skills and tactics that make meetings more effective, make gatherings of people more effective, and pull them into critical thinking a little more, a little more, a little more, not the least of which are clear objectives. Giving people some of the information before they arrive.

Jennie: 32:07

Yeah. Um,

Evan: 32:11

delineating what stage of problem solving or decision making we are at. And having a person who circles everyone around to say, All right, let's do some mindstorming. Now let's do some brainstorming. Yes, Craig, I agree. And we're not at that stage yet. Hold on a minute. Now we're going to, and moving and delineating, what stage of problem solving are we at? Because mixing up the steps creates the opening to slide into system one.

Jennie: 32:48

And

Evan: 32:53

think from, well, and somebody other than me has watched Friends enough to remember Phoebe and Joey trying to make a decision north route or south route. Who remembers this? Anyone? Phoebe's game. And so Phoebe, and Joey's like, ah, I don't know what to do. I can't decide which one. This one's got this options, and this one's got this attributes, and this, he didn't use the word attributes, and this one's got these. And Phoebe says, okay, here's the game. Red or blue. Tea or coffee. Uh, pirate or ninja. North road or south road. And he goes, south road. Oh! Awesome! And basically she pulled him out of critical thinking into system one to get him to make a decision.

Jennie: 33:41

I think why we're here and we're talking about meetings and you just, you hit a point. In fact, we're talking about it yesterday too, in that our meetings are created for extroverted people nine times out of 10, if we're running them regularly. So there's an immediate thought is, you know, Yeah. Actually, the first thought, and this is where I think we need to go, Evan, is who are you pulling in? Because we've talked a lot about that personal truth, trying to get to objective truth, trying to put these together to go through the steps that we have. And yet most meetings, we're inviting people who agree with us or see the world like we do. And I don't think that's going to help. And a lot of our organizations aren't set up to, I call it river jumping, it's basically silos. And so. Nine times out of ten, the problem that we're trying to solve, somebody else has solved it. And yet we stay in this little clump. And so I think there's a, there's a vehicle in our meetings and it's as simple as who are you inviting? Um, what's, what's the value, the contribution that they're going to bring to your conversation?

Evan: 34:50

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I had one person I worked with who every meeting request, would have each person's name in bold and will you please, I'd like you to and, and, and generally aim each person before they arrived at the meeting at an area of responsibility. And I thought, yes, Bob, I love you. I will come considering the timeline to roll out the training. It was brilliant. Now, this, this actually gets us to our second of the applied strategies in a roundabout way. And the second is, um, I'm, I'm, I'm reaching back into, into the history of what we all do. Stephen Covey, I love him. Habit two is critical thinking. It sets you up for and opens the door for critical thinking. Habit two, if you can't remember it, begin with the end in mind. What is the objective? We've said that already. Second, what are the signs of success? And, anJennieny, you know this from, from both of us having some mental performance background and, and, um, signs of success is a way to establish criteria without those criteria being numbers. What would happen in this conversation? What would happen in this problem solving? What would happen in this decision making that indicates we're on the right track? And then to revisit the objective and the signs of success as you go, you don't wait till the end to visit it. You, you, you drop in on it regularly, and this is a strategy to slow us down, make us more deliberate, engage system two, Daniel Kahneman, pull ourselves into some critical thinking.

Jennie: 36:49

Yeah. And I, and I think the key there too, with the, uh, begin with the end in mind, uh, begin with the end in mind, are we agreed on what the end is? Mm hmm. And so before we even start, let's ensure that we're all heading in the right direction and not off on different tracks.

Evan: 37:07

Hey, and 35 minute callback, if the five of us are agreed on the end in mind, we're filling in political truth.

Jennie: 37:18

Yeah,

Craig: 37:24

I have a question. Oh, sorry. I have a question for you, Evan. And I think it, I think it plays into this, uh, or it should play into this a fair bit. Where does the importance of learning from mistakes? Or embracing failure or fail. I,

Jennie: 37:42

I,

Craig: 37:42

I'm so tired of the fail fast piece, but there, there is. And, and the reason this triggered for me is I was, as I was getting ready for this, I, I, I came across a really interesting comment, uh, that, you know, if you really want to be a great critical thinker, you have to be a mistake connoisseur. Hmm. I'm stealing that. I'm writing that down. I'll throw the, I'll throw the link to the quote in the chat for everybody. But so before we, before we get to start wrapping up, I just want to, there's a piece in critical thinking that obviously speaks to learning from mistakes and being able to stop your intuition because, you know, just because it looks like this before and I made this decision before. Right. So, mistakes.

Evan: 38:28

Um, mistakes. Yes. Okay, I have a mini rant about mistakes. I have a couple, and failure. Pick one. Here's the one that blatantly applies to critical thinking, and it is the question. How good is the mistake?

Jennie: 38:45

Hmm. Mm hmm.

Evan: 38:46

Which mistake would you rather Make. And this is a thing we would do in a workshop on Critical Thinking. We had a lot of time. We'd put up examples of two different mistakes. Three different mistakes. Sit at your table and compare these two. And which one would you rather be? And so there's a math problem. I'm gonna make it up. 2x plus 10 divided by 8 or something. I don't know. I made that up. And here's two versions of getting it wrong. And in one of the versions of getting it wrong, The person clearly doesn't understand the operations. And in the other version of getting it wrong, the person made a simple calculation error at one of the steps. There's a version of this I would rather be. There are good mistakes. Mistakes that are, you understand, and oops, which are very different. Mistakes that are, I, I have an opportunity to learn from this. Mistakes that are, I'm clearly doing the thinking. Different than mistakes that are, I'm rushing. I'm, I'm. Uh, I don't get it. I'm faking it. Um, uh, mistakes that are, I'm completely unwilling to ask for help when I know I need it. And, yeah. Craig, mistake, connoisseur. Brilliant term. There are good mistakes. Go make them. And as a leader with your people, do the debriefing that recognizes a good mistake from a bad mistake, an opportunity mistake from a, we genuinely went backwards. Mistake.

Jennie: 40:28

There's some, um, there's some help out there. Um, Amy Edmondson's new book, The Right Kind of Wrong, her continuum of failure. is fantastic. And at one end is blameworthy, at the other end is praiseworthy. And when we look at it, blameworthy, yeah, you're only on the hook for sabotage. That's it. And the rest will move towards this continuum of praiseworthy. So there's some useful language in there. And then the other part. Um, that I think is key in there. And that's pulling on all our previous psychological safety conversations. But as a leader, what is your productive response? Because if my mistake is because I don't understand, where does that start from? But if we shut down. Those mistakes straight away, and we're unproductive in our response. And even remember your body language matters. So an eye roll, a sigh, a shudder. There you go. Thanks, Evan. Um, but it's all talking all the time. And if we want to build critical thinking. We might have to help people here and this might have to become a process because in some cases, in some places we've pulled that away because we've been so busy trying to do, trying to execute, here's the right way to do it. We've taken away the responsibility of thinking. Now we're bringing it back again. So I think there's a kindness in there as well. Yeah.

Evan: 41:49

The other sliver I would add to that is that the pull away from critical thinking is in part, we said this earlier, pace, pace, pace, deliver, deliver,

Jennie: 41:56

deliver.

Evan: 41:57

Um, because. We don't have a lot of practice time in our common workplace. Athletes get to spend 85 percent of their time practicing. Of course they make a whole bunch of mistakes and learn from them. They're practicing.

Craig: 42:13

Yeah. Yeah. And speaking of time and pulling away from a conversation, uh, it's much better segue than CRA into whatever that was to start this morning, Craig. Uh, it is time for us to wrap up and kind of, I know we've touched on a few of these things already with your big idea and your, uh, uh, two applied strategies, but Jennie, if we can just. Uh, bring that up again and perhaps we'll do a quick recap of the, the first two and then pop into the questions to leave folks

Jennie: 42:45

with. Where do you want to start, Evan? Do you want to start on the two applied strategies like here or do you want me to go backwards?

Evan: 42:50

You can jump right to three questions. Uh, they, they link through the, the applied strategies. That's great. Um, so. I know that we like to end with three questions, so I'm going to give you three questions pre and three questions post and during. Three questions pre, what are the criteria? We have to know these before we go in. And asking people beside us and around us what are the criteria is pulling us into critical thinking. How willing are you to be edited or shifted or wrong? If you're not willing to be wrong, then you're in system one. And how do you share or model your thinking? How willing are you to think out loud ties together with. willing to be wrong. Jump to the next one. Um, once a decision or conclusion is made, is it understandable? This is a remarkable idea that overlaps with our communication clarity. Whatever decision you've made, whatever problem you think you've put together, does it make sense? Does it follow? And has every source been honest? Do you have the truth quote unquote from each of your sources? And is it possible that a different person could replicate what you have created or done? And if not, then you're heavily influenced by bias and personal truth. And then, of course, my three favorite quotes on critical thinking. Mark Twain there. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. That's what gets you in trouble. Barb Mills is a mentor of mine. Uh, love her dearly. Rest in peace, Barb. Uh, she said to me years ago, if the pieces don't fit together, it's because either you're missing pieces, or you don't totally understand the ones you have. And whenever I would give her a confused look, she would say, So, do you need more pieces, or do you need to re evaluate the pieces you have? And I'd work for that. And then my own, I have a mini ramp about assumptions. I think assumptions are good if you catch them and test them. In fact, I believe people learn fastest when they make an assumption and catch it and test it and that's critical thinking.

Craig: 45:03

Thank you, Evan. Really appreciate you joining us this morning. Folks, we'll be back, uh, in September of all times, which sadly is only 8 weeks away. Uh, uh, but, uh, keep your eye on your email over the summer. We will, uh, be releasing a couple of podcast episodes. We're going to do some recording. Those will be coming out. And if you've got any questions over the summer with respect to leadership. Please pop them into that, uh, email address there and we will do our best to, uh, get back to you as quickly as we can. Uh, with that, Evan, thank you so much for joining us. Jennie, as always, I appreciate you. Thank you for what you bring. And, uh, everybody have a fantastic summer.

Jennie: 45:47

Have a wonderful summer, everyone.

Craig: 45:50

Take

Jennie: 45:50

care. Take care.

Craig: 45:52

Thank you once again for joining us on the Leading Beyond Any Title podcast. If you'd like to stay connected and receive more updates from us, please follow SAIT corporate training on LinkedIn. Stay in the loop with the latest insights and valuable content through the link in the show notes.

Jennie: 46:05

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