It was Eeyore, the gloomy old donkey and friend of Winnie the Pooh, who came out with the sublimely simple phrase, “Brains first, and then hard work”.
Most managers will be aware of the concepts of the learning organisation and knowledge management but critical element of how organisations learn – that of how staff think – has so far received little attention.
In world where we are, to borrow thought-leading scientist Edward Wilson’s description, “drowning in information and starving for wisdom”, improving thinking skills among staff seems to be logical next step for organisations serious about learning.
The history of management theory can be thought of in very simple terms as tension between the emphasis on how business ‘processes’ are structured and an emphasis on how ‘people’ in an organisation are managed. Over the hundred or so years that people have been writing about industrial organisations, orthodox thinking has shifted back and forth between these two approaches.
From the 1990s onwards, however, and in response to broader debates about the shift to knowledge economy and/or knowledge society, management thinking has tended to emphasise the role that people – and the way they are managed – play in organisational success. This has been reflected in vast body of work about management styles, the nature of teamwork and the role of human resource management in general.
One important part of this debate has focused on what staff in these economies need to do their jobs more effectively. Initially, this debate centred on the need to manage information more effectively. Then, from the mid-1990s onwards, theorists and writers highlighted the role that unlocking knowledge played in improving organisational performance.
However, it is apparent that most approaches to knowledge management do not go far enough in delivering the organisational performance improvements promised. One reason for this is because simply delivering knowledge to staff – in the traditional knowledge management sense of discovering, mobilising and activating that knowledge – overlooks the way that people use knowledge to change their behaviours. That is, how staff process knowledge to unlock its value.
In short, critical factor missing in current debates about improving organisational performance in the knowledge economy is ensuring staff have the skills required to process the knowledge they deal with on daily basis. Charles Handy said it best in his book The Age of Unreason when he noted that learning was about “solving our own problems for our own purposes, by questioning, thinking and testing until the solution is new part of our life”.
The good news is that thinking is skill that can be learned. Often this is as simple as helping staff learn to see patterns. For instance, if we tell you that the jumble of letters ‘ALLworld’ represents the phrase ‘it’s small world after all’ (because the word ‘world’ is in lower case after the word ‘all’), the following word puzzles probably become easier to decipher:
• knowITno
• getgetITgetget
The first of these is ‘no two ways about it’ and the second is ‘forget about it’ (four gets about ‘it’). And if you’ve cracked that code, you might want to try one that’s little harder:
• owher (answer at the end of the article).
The bad news about teaching thinking skills is that it also involves unlearning bad habits. This is the bad news because, as economist John Maynard Keynes put it, “the real difficulty in changing any enterprise lies not in developing new ideas but escaping from the old ones”. Escaping the old ways of thinking first requires that we recognise how they were shaped. There are at least three key influencers here.
Mental shortcuts
The first is that our brains are hard-wired to take short cuts. Rather than explain how these work, consider this image:
The two tables here are the same size (it’s perhaps easier to believe this if you take moment to check them with ruler). Because of the way they are drawn on the page, your brain perceives them to be different sizes and shapes. That’s problem of perception over which you have very little control. But, similarly, there are problems with thinking (cognition) that you are unlikely to be aware of too.
One example is what is known as confirmation bias, which is the tendency to look for evidence that supports our point of view while dismissing evidence that contradicts it. This bias occurs at least partially because it is inherently more difficult to mentally process contradictory evidence than it is to process confirming evidence. In other words, playing favourites may have good deal to do with the way your brain is wired. And there are many of these mental shortcuts, each trying to make us less deliberate thinkers.
Disciplinary blinders
In addition, our disciplinary backgrounds privilege certain ways of looking at the world, and certain kinds of evidence above others. That is, the way we view the world is shaped by the frameworks we are taught to use to interpret the world. In order to make sense of reality, we first have to presuppose certain facts about it. Without those presuppositions, it would be impossible to even know what we were looking for.
As James Burke put it in his landmark television series, The Day The Universe Changed, “the unknown can only be examined by first being defined in terms of the structure”.
Of course, different disciplines often make very different assumptions about that structure. For example, are the people in your market the rational optimisers economists say they are, or are they driven by deep-seated psychological forces they neither understand nor are aware of (as the fine folk in marketing would have it)?
Organisational styles
Finally, organisations privilege certain ways of thinking and certain ways of learning. Think about the popularity in the business world of PowerPoint presentations, of flow chart diagrams, or meetings mixed with whiteboards and flip charts. Within the confines of the business world, different organisations have different rules about what passes for acceptable know-ledge and ideas, and what does not. One way they police these is with killer phrases that shape how staff think (see box story “Killer phrases” for some examples).
In sum, your brain, your disciplinary background and the organisation you work for all shape the way you think. The key to learning new ways of thinking is to become aware of how those forces have limited your thinking, and then to stretch your thinking in new directions. These directions commonly include improved critical thinking and creative thinking.
Critical thinking
Critical thinking is skill that we hear much about but often see very little of. It has been described as “thinking about thinking”, but that definition does it little justice. The reason critical thinking is useful to organisations is that it involves going beyond the passive acceptance of information to challenge that information based on where it came from; how it was gathered and put together; and how it was presented.
Consider this simple, and frivolous, example:
• Six of your marketing staff meet near the coffee machine. After while, three decide to go back to their desks. How many are left by the coffee machine?
The correct answer is six, because three have only ‘decided’ to go back to their desks (and there is big difference between deciding to do something and actually doing it). The same logic works in this kind of question:
• How many times can you subtract 5 from 25?
The correct answer is only once (because after that you would be subtracting 5 from 20, then 5 from 15, etc). These examples may seem to rest on pedantic points, but they illustrate something much more important: That the way information is presented has significant impact on how it is interpreted.
An important aspect of critical thinking is focusing on what is said, not on how well it is said or who said it. It is im
