[Neurons] 2018 Neurons #16 COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE VIA CRITICAL THINKING

Mon Apr 9 08:30:41 EDT 2018

From: L. Michael Hall

2018 Neurons #16

April 9, 2018

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 othes 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 wihtout an
MBA, that David Packard made HP an industry leader without "business process
reengineering," 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.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D., Executive Director 

Neuro-Semantics 

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

                    Dr. Hall's email:
<mailto:meta at acsol.net\hich\af31506\dbch\af31505\loch\f31506> meta at acsol.net

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Dr. L. Michael Hall writes a post on "Neurons" each Monday.  For a free
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click on Meta-Coaching for detailed information and training schedule.   To
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Products, there is also a catalog of books that you can download.   

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