- Introduction
- Critical Thinking and Incremental Improvement
- An Obstacle to Critical Thinking Within Organizations: The Covert Struggle for Power
- Another Obstacle: Group Definitions of Reality
- A Third Obstacle: The Problem of Bureaucracy
- The Problem of Misleading Success
- Competition, Sound Thinking, and Success
- Stagnating Organizations and Industries
- Questioning Organizational Realities
- Assessing Irrational Thinking in Organizational Life
- The Power of Sound Thinking
- Some Personal Implications
- Conclusion
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Critical Thinking and Incremental Improvement
The success of any organization is largely a function of the quality of the thinking done within it. But success is usually partial rather than complete. Doing one thing well, we may do another thing poorly. Thinking well in one context, we may think poorly in another. We may achieve our goals in the short-run at the expense of achieving them in the long-run. We may succeed simply because we perform at a somewhat higher level than the competition. We rarely have absolute success in human life. The spirit of critical thinking is an organized and disciplined way of achieving continual improvement in thinking and therefore of attaining fuller and more complete success over time. It consists in thinking at progressively higher levels in virtue of a deliberate and practical commitment to quality of thinking.
Test the Idea Self-Assesment
Name one domain or context (for example, the professional domain) in which you believe that you think reasonably well and compare it to another in which you believe your thinking to be of lower quality (for example, in intimate relationships). Explain in the "evidence" you have that convinces you of this.