Are you handling new and challenging issues at work? Are you making an attempt to both understand the new roles and responsibilities with a fresh viewpoint? Or is it that you are new to the profile and are looking for ways to significantly influence along with your more proficient teammates? If so, then critical thinking is the ability to study and effectively break down any task at hand to make a decision or find a solution. Critical thinking includes the capacity to devise profound, distinct, and effective questions.

Today, let us look at some of the ways to boost our skills to solve even the most difficult problems:

Do not stick strongly to your assumptions

You should always hold your initial assumptions lightly. If you hold them strong then you will not be able to find the solution no matter what the data has to indicate. Critical thinking might want us to reconsider the initial assumptions and we should be open to doing so without being defensive.

Talk less and listen more

Active listening is the key to critical thinking. Active listening is the process of understanding what another person has to say — both directly and indirectly. One also needs to show that you are involved and paying attention. Successful active listeners fully understand an argument, thus making it simpler to question its rationality.

Ask open-ended questions

Avoid asking Yes or No questions. Instead, ask questions that they have to answer in detail. Try to understand the conversation that emerges out of the interaction. Open-ended questions encourage critical thinking thus allowing individuals in the team to expand their viewpoint thus allowing teams to solve the problems

Challenge the group’s collective thinking

Do not fall into the trap and follow the group thinking, rather keep asking questions that challenge the group’s collective thinking. There might be some people in the group who want to move fast and do not like this interference that you create. But be bold enough to counter the thoughts of the team.

Follow up hard

It is similar to why kids keep asking why hundreds of times even after being given an answer. As parents, we start rethinking our own answers at the end of this chain of questions fired by our kids. This is the heart of critical thinking. We need to listen properly and keep asking hard follow-up questions and this is the only way we can dive deep and get a better understanding of the subject.

Critical thinking is the best way of solving complicated problems in new and thrilling ways. Building on critical thinking will help you to traverse new roles and responsibilities, prove yourself in your organization, or simply face a challenge.

So as Albert Einstein quotes – “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing”, let us keep asking the right questions.

Written by Faber Mayuri