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Open to Think: Decide with Critical Thinking, with Dan Pontefract, Leadership Strategist and Author, Open to Think
Our ideas, turn into great ideas when we judiciously decide what to do with them and what not to do with them. That is a critical thinker. Critical thinking not only requires us to be the deciders, it requires us to sift through truth, to make good decisions in a timely matter.
Here’s an example of how bad or poor or critical thinking can end up costing you billions of dollars. In the lead up to the release of iPhone 7, Samsung, the competitor to Apple, issued essentially an edict in their organization. They said, “We will beat Apple to the release of iPhone 7 with our own phone called the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.” However, in that haste of a decision, they also forgot to say to their employees to take the time in which they ensure that the product was safe. For some of you who had that Galaxy Note 7 you’ll know that ultimately there was a flaw in the battery. Everyone was so fixated on the doing, they forgot about the decision-making that had to go in to make the battery safe. And if you had one you’d know that in any flight you took our train or wherever, the battery was likely to explode.
And this caused fires, and injuries, and other ailments. But sadly for Samsung, there was a $5.3 billion write down because the product had to be recalled. And so there’s a real world example of how critical thinking is critical to the end result of your product service and your organization.
And when we make these types of decisions in our organizations, when we jump to that decision without having sifted through the ideas to make sure that they are good ideas to turn to great ideas, or we’ve sifted through opinion and not fact and not truth and made a decision based on that, our outcome, our action, our result ends up negative. A critical thinker ensures he or she is sifting through ideas to get to the better idea, but that they also are judicious with their decisions, making them fact, data, research and truth based.