The Basic Art of Critical Thinking

I am sure at some point in your career you have met some really smart and thought to yourself “Dang it! Why did I not think of that?”

Practice what we have written for you in this article and I can promise you others are going to feel the same way about you. People are going to say “Wow! She can really think out of the box” or “It is amazing how he can so quickly understand and ramp up on new subjects”.

Introduction

The process is simple.

1. Don’t jump in to do the work. Ask questions why, what, when, who to yourself and then start the work.
2. Practice Active Listening at the end of your requirement gathering session   
3. Repeat the steps as you start working and ask the question how you would evoke the right emotion to invoke the right action in the customer  of the work that you are doing.
4. Provide proactive updates and communicate closure

Understanding the problem (What, Why, Who, When)

Critical thinking

A Learning:

On my first day I was at American Airlines I was shown my cube by the HR team. The HR lady told me that my manager would show up soon and assign work to me. My manger did walk in a couple of minutes later and told me that I was to port a project built for a customer to work for a new customer. He got distracted with his manager calling him and left. I never saw him for the rest of the week.

I was young and enthusiastic and walked up to my cube neighbor and asked where I can find the source code for the project. Then I went to the IT department to set me up to access this project. I also worked with another team to assign me a machine for the project. Once that was done I worked from 6:00AM in the morning to 9:00PM in the evening much to the disgust of my new wife and got the project ported over to the new machine. I tested the module out but it seemed to be calling other modules that I did not know. I went and claimed to my manager on by the end of the week that I was DONE with the porting. He took me to his manager and made me a hero for getting this done as quickly.

A week passed and my manager walked in and told me that I was a liar! He told me that I am going to be kicked out of work if this happened again. He just went ballistic on me and was screaming at me at the top of his voice. Needless to say I had no idea of what was happening. Then I got to understand that there were other people trying to integrate their modules to the work that I had done and were having problems as there were issues with the integration. Because I was new they had asked my manager and he was surprised that I had not tested all this and had claimed that the port was complete.

This was my first wake-up call. I went back and thought what I had done wrong. I realized that I had done everything wrong. Here is what I had got wrong:

1. I had not understood what my manager meant when he said port.
2. I had not understood who the end customer was?
3. I had not checked with them when the product was to be delivered.
4. I had not found out who would be using the system within the organization and how they would be invoking the work that I had done.
5. I had not bothered to check if the work was useful after I had submitted. I had not even bothered to see who was using the work done within the company.

Needless to say I was not happy with myself. I knew I had failed but did not know how to fix it proactively for the next time. I had just told myself that I should be a little through and do a better job at testing my work. With this mindset I was better and NEVER mentioned the word “It is done”, “It is complete” ever again. This change in me, made me good but never the best!

An Assignment:

Years passed, and I would still find myself missing on some portion of work assignment or the other. In time my frustration grow that I kept missing out on some part of my deliverables. My rational was simple. Most of the work that we do is very simple day to day activity. Then why is it that some that is my manager can see things better than me. For crying out loud, I had actually done the work and all he or she had done was to tell me what was to be done and that too at a superficial level.  

Then during one of my junk food runs to Taco Bell the kid across the counter took my order and would repeat every order that I mentioned. Then at the end he repeated my order to make sure that I said “Yes” or “No”. That is when it finally dawned on me. The realization was that I did not have a system or a structured approach to make sure that the person giving me my requirements and I were on the same page. This, along with my undying desire to be the best at whatever (“Do 1 thing & Do it better than anybody else in the world”) helped me create a system of critical thinking.

Here is what I did: Every time some gave me an assignment, I would make sure that I would ask questions to make sure that I clearly understood what they meant. After all, every requirement or training is nothing but a series of words that explain a final image or a process that one has to follow.

One Friday evening my manager walked into my office and asked in his usual terse manner without even sitting down or saying hello, “Can you create a presentation to show me our product can help the operations of an insurance product company? We have to present this to our CEO.”

I was not going to fall for this. I wanted to clarify WHAT we needed to do, “Sure thing. That will be a great for the work that we have done (Note 1:  I had to make sure my manager understand that I was willing and wanted to do the work. After that he would be more willing to explain things to me).  WHAT does our CEO usual look for in such presentations? Is he looking to showcase or sell this product to the customer or he is going through all product lines to understand how we stack up against other projects in the company?”

Note 2: I ask this question to see WHAT the end objective of the presentation? This is a branch in the road. Once I understood what he wanted I could then ask further questions to make sure that I help him out with his requirements.

“This is for a new prospect that he is looking to position our product to” came the reply.

“WHY don’t you want to use send him the information I created for our sales people last week” I retorted.

“I showed that to John but he told me that is too detailed and does not deal with how we make an impact to our customer at the ‘C’ level” retorted my manager.

Ah! Ha! I am getting a feedback on the work that my sales people and I did. We had spent several days coming up with this. It just told me that I should go to some of the outing with the sales team and understand what they are telling the customer. I started to wonder who our sales team talked to in order to sell our product. I made a note to myself to follow up with our sales head and then continued.

“Okay, our product promises to improve timely delivery and quality delivery of their services. Can I start with just that?”

“Not just improve but make it objective. Just don’t make it subjective. Everything you claim should be objective; number based and should be validated by data if the CEO asks for it”.

I continued to find out exactly what my manager wanted by asking “I got that. Now, who is visiting with John?”

“Oh! It is the head of Stark Enterprise.”

I made another note to visit the website of Stark Enterprise and review their 10K along with looking up their executives, their background information on LinkedIn, Facebook, & Twitter as I usually do when anyone is going to visit with me. I also made a note to call my mentor to who I believe knew the CIO of this company to understand what this person is like and what is happening with this company.

“When are you meeting him to go over the presentation? Do you do this on your usual Tuesday morning drill?” (I was trying to see how much time I have to get the work done. I was also trying to get a pulse of how important this was for our CEO. I also wanted to understand if I had to let golf buddies know that I was out of the game on Saturday morning.

“I really need that urgently. I have to meet him on tomorrow i.e. Saturday morning at 8:00AM for a special breakfast meeting.”

I got the message that this was urgent and important. I quickly assessed what I needed to do and how much I could get done in 11 hours between the assignment start and end. I wanted to understand the problem better to able to ‘Evoke the right emotion to invoke the action of buying our software’.

I said “Hmmm…. Let me get this clear, the parts that you don’t like from the sales ppt are…” I trailed of wanting my manager to fill in.

He did not disappoint me. “Make sure that you keep the information about the features that you have at the end. That is good. Make sure that you keep the part of the market comparison that you have before. That is good too. I don’t think the sales deck sits well as it starts off with a claim that we are the best. From what I know the CEO of Stark Enterprise is quite a low key guy and does not like his partners making such claims.

”This is good” I thought. I had a good idea and I knew what my manager was looking for me as well. “Great. I get it. Do you know any other details of the meeting and why he wants to meet John now?” I was asking an open ended question to see my manager could give me any other insight that he might have missed.

Again, he did not disappoint me. “Yes, actually I did some looking around (He too had done his homework, nice!) and found that there is a lot of reshuffling going on within their company. The CEO is disappointed that their operations person has not done enough to keep up with the new sales that they getting from the industry. His son Tony Stark has joined his company a year ago and has helped boost the sales up. Now operations have to meet the demand”.

I nearly jumped out of my seat. “Tony! I know him!! I used to work with him at my previous company. Do you want me connect with him?” I made another note to make a quick call to Tony over the weekend.

“I guess not. Let us see what we get out of this meeting and then we’ll see” my manager replied.

“Okay, let me get started on this right away. But before you go, I am going to tell you what I have” and read out from my notes that looked something like this.

I said “I will get you a presentation that is still based from our sales presentation customized to Stark Enterprises. The deck will cover an executive summary of the problems that their industry faces in terms of operational requirements to meet with demand. I will also make sure that we do some research on the kind of work they do at Stark and try to highlight just these problems. Following this we will list out what our solution does and how it solves such problems. Finally, we will end with product comparison and some key features. I will also add one final slide that talks about how we our product will provide them a value for their investment and ROI from where we stand. I will then send you this information before 5AM to your inbox. We can talk at 5:30AM to see if we need to make any changes. ”

“That sounds perfect” my manager replied as he walked out of my office.

I knew I had to make sure that I focus on “Evoking the right emotion to invoke the right action”. I also knew I had to hold back both Prashanth (My graphic designer) and my business analyst to help me with this document.

After apologizing to my wife for not being there at home on Friday night, I studied my notes for a couple of minutes and called in Prashanth “Hey Mr. Magic! I need your help urgently.”

“Sure…” the voice at the other end replied.

I knew I had messed with their Friday nights but just a small price to pay to be the best in the world! From what I could see I knew it was an all-nighter.  But on the bright side, the Saturday morning golf round was still possible (while groggy)! 

Results:

The presentation came out well. We had missed out some small details. My manager and the CEO were able to convince the customer that they should buy and implement our product. The assignment was a success. It was a success primarily because of the following:

1. Unlike before, I was not going to start off without understanding “What”,  “Why”, “When” in a repetitive manner. The “How” was up to me. If I did not know HOW, I could always ask and find out from experts or even hire a contractor or in the worst case read it myself. But I really HAD to know what and why before getting started.
2. It was a success because I went beyond just doing something for the sake of something but doing something that would make me proud of EVERY LETTER in the power point deck. It was because I wanted the document to achieve its objective of convincing the customer to buying the product.
3. I had taken the time to understand the requirements of the customer and his mindset by reading about him all through the late Friday evening. I had even taken the time to make sure that we put HIS favorite colors in the power point deck than the corporate colors. We had made sure that we talked into terms of his favorite hobby of sailing at every opportunity in the presentation. In the end it was a success NOT JUST because it yielded the desired results (That is critical) but also because I felt that I had done the best job that I could do and it was probably better than what anybody else in the world could have done!

Conclusion 

There is no art to critical thinking, it is a science. Just be prepared and focus on understanding WHAT you have to do, WHY you have to do it, WHO is the customer of the information/service/product, and WHEN the work has to be done. Remember to make sure that you actively listen (Listing out all that you have understood back to the person that you working with at the end of your requirements gathering session like the Taco Bell kid did with me). You do this and there is no way you will go wrong. A great Indian thinker once said “Knowing the problem is more than half the solution.” I think I understand what he meant.

Epilogue 

People tell me that some you have to be a “born out of the box thinker”. I tell them that they wrong. People that think out of the box are intuitively used to the critical thinking listed above and follow this process in their daily life. So much so that they are always the ones providing unique answer to questions posed at them by life.

If you don’t believe me, check with me and I will ask you a question that you have never heard ever in your life about out of the box thinking!

About the Author

As the founder of Vantage Agora (VA), Harsha has been instrumental in the growth of the company since its inception. Harsha has over 20+ years of experience in consulting, Enterprise Social Networking, Business Intelligence,  and Process improvement. His work with companies such as Fidelity, American Airlines, I2 Technologies, etc, has made him an Expert in Business intelligence and Process improvement. 

Harsha has developed a patent pending 'Enterprise Social Network – VA Club', Harsha also has 4 process improvement patents.

Harsha graduated MBA from southern Methodist University (SMU) Dallas, a masters in Computer Science from Louisiana State University (LSU) Baton Rouge, and a Bachelors in Engineering from Bangalore University (BU).

About Vantage Agora

Vantage Agora (VA) is a global provider of back-office solutions, custom IT services and consulting services for companies in the insurance, finance, and healthcare sectors. As a SSAE 16 Type II audited company, Vantage Agora utilizes advanced data processing and quality control systems on a secured network to ensure efficient, comprehensive management of back-office functions such as insurance, accounting, financial and administrative tasks. Founded in 2004, Vantage Agora has offices in Cleveland and Dallas.

Know more about Harsha and Vantage Agora.