Critical Thinking
and Collaborative Problem Solving
Problem solving process can be defined as a cognitive activity to close the gap between “what should be happening” and “what is actually happening”. Seen from this perspective, most of our activity in our daily lives are nothing but problem solving or decision making.
Our decision making process is affected by many factors, generally at subconscious level. These factors include desires, beliefs and prejudices, have their roots in personal habits or group psychology and are mostly not the outcomes of rational thinking.
Fortunately, however, these factors are not beyond the boundaries of our thinking power. We can think about them one by one, and understand their effects on our way of thinking to a great extent. This practice, like all the others, is an intermediate step to develop a habit: Habit of rational thinking or, awareness of irrational thinking in our mind.
We all have an innate capacity to solve problems, which is further developed through 15-20 years of education. However, complexity of factors acting on our cognition are multiplied by the complex factors acting on other people, when we come together to form teams. Personally, I don’t find it possible to analyze and solve this combined complexity for finding the best common ways to communicate and collaborate.
Critical Thinking is a two days workshop that I have developed during last 15 years. Our approach is to build a ground for effective communication and collaboration, indispensable elements of teamwork, step by step by;
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Raising the awareness of cognitive process of the mind and irrational thinking.
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Realizing “unnecessary” factors in our thinking system and replacing them with Lean Principles and your company values which work as compasses at the hands of everybody. Right principles show the right direction in every problem and in every problem solving step. Reducing hesitation, principles free human potential in decision making, especially under conditions of uncertainty. Consequently, individual problem solving capacities are aligned towards a common goal.
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Providing a common language for Problem Solving for effective communication and collaboration.
“Common sense” behavior is a good example of bad interpretation in group psychology. In groups, we usually do not feel the necessity to examine why we should act in a certain way. If we examine, however, we rarely find clearly stated principles guiding individual and organizational behavior. Individual problem solving behavior, equipped with Lean Principles is therefore, the only way to high performance culture in operations.
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