From the monthly archives:

June 2012

A Gut Feeling About Critical Thinking

June 20, 2012

Words: 571

(This originally appeared at Globis.jp, as the first in a series on critical thinking.)

Students don’t think. That’s easy for me to say, being a professor.

Neither do professors. That’s hard for me to say, being a professor.

More accurately, I should say, we don’t think enough. We might ponder a problem — even worry about it through an entire night.  It may haunt our day, making us edgy and preoccupied, but often we’re not really thinking about the problem in a useful way.  We don’t run through a complete process of defining the situation; finding the cause and which factors are most influential.  Even if we do apply critical thinking tools, we often stop once we’ve run through the process, without considering the alternatives or ramifications of our decisions.

We may think we are doing something like that, but usually we’re focusing on two or three key points based on our experience and our emotional preferences.  We rely on a handful of unstated assumptions that prejudice our interpretation of data, arriving at a decision based on what we want to do rather than what we should do. If our action is successful, it becomes a reference point for future decisions – a good luck charm that we refer to when making other decisions. (I got that right, so maybe I know what I’m doing.)   If we are not successful, we curse our luck and try something else because we know that eventually we’ll be able to solve the problem. (This is try-and-try-again thinking, taken to its extreme means that even a monkey on a typewriter will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare – if given enough chances.)

Even after taking a course in critical thinking – or in my case teaching it many times — we still shoot from the hip; go with our gut. We can tell just by looking at someone whether they have what it takes to be a good hire, a good investment, a good friend.

We are all like Harvard’s most famous MBA, George W. Bush, deciders-in-chief, who go with our gut feelings. This makes us not very good at it being deciders, though it’s what we do so often. (As every marketer knows, we buy on emotion and justify with logic.) Despite being endowed with a large collection of grey matter encased in a hard bucket between our ears, we don’t use it much. We are capable of brilliant insight and reasoning, but too often we fake it because, well, thinking is hard work and too often results in answers that are inconvenient at best and unwelcome at worst.

So a course in critical thinking can be empowering, providing us with tools that can be applied to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant, and define alternative solutions, while thinking broadly enough to ensure that nothing is overlooked.  The logic tree is but one of these tools and it can be useful when practiced often.  But a tool is only as good as the person wielding it.  A golf club in the hands of Tiger Woods is an extraordinarily precise, yet powerful instrument.  In my hands it is a metal stick weighted on one end.  The same goes for the tools of critical thinking. Practice them often; develop the skills for using them, and we have powerful tools. Use them once in a while and they are obtuse exercises that waste time.

So there you have it, deciders.  We need to think better more often.  That’s my gut feeling.

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Mentor Who Made a Corporation Less Crazy

June 8, 2012

Words: 584

My mentor, Bill Blankenship, died last week.  When I first heard, I knew that I couldn’t let it ruin my day – it would have bothered him to know that someone had a bad day because of him.

BillB.  That was his email handle at IBM, where he long worked the oars in the slave galley of corporate communications.  He was a good trooper as far as work went.  Wore a suit.  Showed up on time.  Made deadline on countless corporate reports, speeches and announcements.  But a lot of people do that.  What I really liked about him was that he tried to be good to everyone he encountered, including the first floor receptionist, whom he greeted every time he walked by, and the cleaning woman whom he met almost as often working late at night.  Another person could have easily excused themselves from being polite every time to these people, but not Bill.  I also admired that even though he worked at IBM for decades, he somehow retained a subversive sense of humor about the world and his place in it.  I wonder if he’d come across “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in early adolescence and decided that this stuff about growing up had gone far enough and he wanted no more of it.

He was a bestselling author, too.  I liked his mystery novel,  “Time of the Wolf,” in particular, but his best stories were the ones he told in person.  On a cold day, he might recall his time in the U.S. Army in Kansas, where he was often told to go “sweep the spade,” the 1st Infantry Division’s insignia laid out in stones on a high, wind-blown hill; or the frequent “free beer nights” on the base, when the hung-over casualties were collected on large trucks, taken to a gymnasium, and put in dozens of rows….

When he was young, his family moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, stopping temporarily at various places — the semi-nomadic life of the working poor – until they came to a Santa Monica motel near a pier.  He could hear a jazz band playing in the distance, mixing with the sounds of the ocean, and thought he had come to a wonderful place.

In time, Los Angeles did seem like a place where wonderful things could happen.  He worked his way through USC, had a job all lined up after graduation, and then was drafted, giving him two years worth of stories.

After the Army,  he joined IBM and near the end of his career was sent to Tokyo, where he mentored me in executive communications.  After he retired to the U.S., he continued to advise me in weekly calls.  Often our conversations concerned his youngest grandson who seemed to have inherited his sense of misbehavior.

One of the first things he told me when I came to IBM was, “This corporation is crazy.  Well, actually, all corporations are crazy.  This one is just crazier than others.”  He made it his duty to instill some sanity into the corporation.  Speechwriting, he felt, was one way of doing this, “It’s your job to show that the executive is intelligent, that he knows what he’s doing.  You also try to make him likable – even if he isn’t.  A lot of them aren’t.”  He always tried to help the corporation become a little better, a little less crazy, a little more likable, for the sake of its employees and customers.  And for me, he did just that.

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