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How to Develop the 7 Skills of Critical Thinking

According to the World Economic Forum Report, Critical Thinking is the 4th most important skill by 2025.

So far, people who have critical thinking already stand out, as they make better decisions, are more eloquent in their arguments, managing to be more credible and evolve as people and professionals.

In the Digital Age, with the increase in available information, it has become even more important to know how to distinguish what is reliable and what is fake news . With the increase in the competitiveness and complexity of services and products, it is also necessary to always be learning and innovating. The development of Critical Thinking is thus increasingly becoming a priority.

We have prepared this article to help you develop Critical Thinking. See the topics we have prepared for you:

But what is Critical Thinking anyway?

The history of critical thinking.

• Advantages of Critical Thinking in Leadership

Critical Thinking Self-Diagnosis

• Tips for Developing the 7 Skills of Critical Thinking

“Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking, while you’re thinking, in order to make thinking better”

Richard Paul

Critical Thinking is a cognitive competence, resulting from the combination of cognitive skills and dispositions. It is defined by the ability to analyze and evaluate existing information on a given subject, trying to clarify the veracity of the information and arrive at a justified idea about it, ignoring possible external biases.

With this, we seek the justified idea of reality and not blindly accept what others tell us.

It implies having the ability to make complex choices and solve problems in innovative ways, integrating existing thinking with new knowledge and applying it in different contexts.

Critical Thinking has 7 underlying capabilities:

• Ability to look at a problem through different prisms.
• Ability to argue;
• Open mind; Flexibility;
• Impartiality;
• Logical and factual and systematic analysis
• make inferences

“You must be willing to say, “I don’t Know” and then be willing to do something to change that.”

According to Bloom's Taxonomy, there are different types of thinking that imply different degrees of complexity. At the bottom is memorization and at the top is creation – being able to connect new knowledge with acquired knowledge, creating new solutions. Critical thinking requires all these types of thinking. Critical thinking requires making the brain actively learn rather than just being a passive store of information.

Critical Thinking is closely related to other abilities, such as creativity, logic, intuition, allowing us to develop new strategies and ways of seeing and perceiving the world.

Thinking critically implies being aware of yourself, your thoughts and biases, as well as capturing the needs of others, and helping them to transform them into added value.

Critical reflection is a process that requires a decentralization of the being, which implies self-questioning. Whether about a subject, a problem, or even about ourselves, it ends up causing discomfort. Self-reflection is not an easy task, as it involves questioning your methods, your “certainties” and your “truths”.

It is through this awareness and leaving the comfort zone that growth and learning come from .

“Critical Thinking is having the desire to seek, the patience to doubt, the effort to meditate, the slowness to affirm, the willingness to consider, the care to order and the hatred of any kind of imposture.”

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Common sense tends to combine being skeptical with being indecisive, indifferent, hesitant, insecure, irresolute. In fact, skepticism is the foundation of Critical Thinking and can become a valuable tool for developing this skill.

As Descartes stated in the “Discourse on Method” (1637), methodical doubt is the means to reason. It was in Ancient Greece that this concept was born, underlying the study of philosophy. Even without knowing it at the time, Socrates would come to be considered the Founder of Critical Thought, as this concept was only coined as such in the 20th century.

Socrates left the Socratic Questioning present - a form of disciplined and systematic questioning that allows to elevate logical thinking, exposing the logic behind someone's thinking. It consists of a discussion carried out by a person who does nothing but ask questions, and where each question is based on the answer given to the previous question.

Due to its antiquity, the concept has evolved in theoretical and practical terms, molding itself to multiple contexts. Initially, the philosophical approach conceptualized a hypothetical and idealized critical thinker, enumerating qualities and characteristics of this profile rather than specific behaviors.

Later, Cognitive Psychology characterizes the critical thinker through measurable skills, reinforcing that this is a skill that can be learned and improved.

Advantages of Critical Thinking

The development of the ability to think critically allows for effective reflection and a more objective view. These capabilities are what distinguishes us from machines, and therefore, the “gold mine” that must be invested in to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

Having a good Critical Thinking ability also helps to avoid conformism and to move forward as human beings.

The practical effects of developing Critical Thinking:

• Helps make decisions that are likely to yield better results
• Help to take perspective of your knowledge and strengths, as well as what you don't know or are less good at
• Leaders with Critical Thinking tend not to be afraid of having a team with as much or more knowledge than they do, as they want to be surrounded by the best
• Promotes creativity and innovation. Critical Thinking is linked to creativity as it translates into the ability to look at a problem from different perspectives.
• Promotes the ability to argue

The University of Manchester created for your students a short version of the Critical Thinking Self-Assessment. On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “Never” and 5 is “Always”, answer each statement. If you answer “Always” most of the time, we can say who is a born critical thinker. If you answered “No” or “Not always”, don't worry, there is always room for improvement and in this article we show you how with practical tips.

• I look for evidence before I believe claims;
• I look at problems from different perspectives;
• I feel confident to present my own arguments, even when they challenge the views of others;
• I actively look for evidence that might contradict what I already know;
• My opinions are influenced by evidence, not just personal experience and emotion;
• If I'm not sure about something, I'll search to find out more;
• I know how to look for reliable information to develop my knowledge of a topic;
• Based on the information I can draw logical conclusions;
• I can solve problems in a systematic way (define the problem, identify the causes, prioritize, etc.), that is, without making decisions only by intuition.

If you answered no or “not always” to more than half of the statements in the self-diagnosis, then it means that you have a large learning window and, consequently, a great potential for improvement.

Tips for Developing the 7 Critical Thinking Skills

To be good at Critical Thinking, you have to develop the 7 skills that underlie it

Adopt these tips in your daily life and tell us about the effects it has had on your life.

1. To develop curiosity

Focus on goals , not obstacles - Focusing on goals will help you focus on solutions and alternatives.

2. To develop the ability to look at a problem through different prisms

Train empathy - Being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes makes it easier to understand how they came to the conclusions they did. Even if you don't understand the other's point of view, try to understand why he thinks the way he does and always respect individuality.

3. To develop the ability to argue…

Actively participate in debates and prepare yourself by researching and comparing arguments. Always look for (reliable) foundations that deny or corroborate your arguments. Be open to looking for information that goes against your ideas.

4. To develop open-mindedness and flexibility…

By keeping an open mind, you are maintaining flexible thinking, which means that you are able to change or adapt it if better additions or suggestions arise. You can develop this by having friendly debates with people you know have a different opinion than you do. Try to be open to their arguments and points of view and not judge.

Question stereotypes. Ask yourself where they come from and why you have them. Great Stereotypes are often nothing more than an exacerbated generalization, and these are blinders for our eyes.

5. Impartiality;

To eliminate any prejudice, play devil's advocate and build a case against your decision

Practice balanced thinking. This thought implies overcoming impulsiveness and automatic reactions, taking a few moments to reflect before taking action. Look before you leap. Practice knowing yourself and others. Learn to understand and master your emotions, observe and analyze your own behavior, find more “healthy” and appropriate ways to react. To not get carried away by emotions.

6. To develop logical, factual and systematic analysis…

If you're stuck making a decision, don't artificially limit your options. We usually think of decisions as if they were binary. By thinking of decisions as binary – black or white – you are missing out on a range of alternatives. Put all options on the table, even those that seem absurd. Take a closer look at the various options to find the best solution.

Create a series of experiments to validate whether the result is desirable. In many situations, it's best to "put your foot in the water" before fully committing. This is a validation process, where you test ideas on a small scale before committing 100% to any decision.

To get some perspective, focus on the future. Take some emotional distance, imagining the potential implications and consequences the decision will have in the future, outlining all the possibilities

7. To make inferences…

Try to listen to your intuition. Sometimes our mind acts in a concrete way that we cannot rationally explain. Intuition is often conceptualized as the result of unconscious processing of information, that is, as performing an internal analysis of information that we do not have processed at an unconscious level. You can listen to your intuition by paying attention to the thoughts that come to your mind and writing them down in a notebook.

Exercising Critical Thinking is essential for anyone who wants to improve their skills. This approach allows for well-formed opinions and more assertive decision-making. By developing Critical Thinking you will be adding potential and personal value, as this is one of the most important skills to develop until 2025. 

LEARN MORE ABOUT CRITICAL THINKING PRACTICE

Learn about our Critical Thinking program.

Sara Oliveira

Bibliography

Baker, G. S. (2020). CRITICAL THINKING  (1st ed.). sannainvest ltd.

Behling, O., & Eckel, N. L. (1991). Making sense out of intuition.  Academy of Management Perspectives ,  5 (1), 46-54.

Bradley, S. & Price, N. (2016). CRITICAL THINKING: PROVEN STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE DECISION MAKING SKILLS, INCREASE INTUITION AND THINK SMARTER!.

Burke, L. A., & Miller, M. K. (1999). Taking the mystery out of intuitive decision making.  Academy of Management Perspectives ,  13 (4), 91-99.

Dörner, D., & Funke, J. (2017). Complex problem solving: what it is and what it is not.  Frontiers in psychology ,  8 , 1153.

Hacker, D. J. (1998).  Definitions and empirical foundations  (pp. 15-38). Routledge.

Kingsbury, J. M., & Bowell, T. A. (2016). Thinking critically about beliefs it's hard to think critically about.

Lai, E. R. (2011). Collaboration: A literature review. Boston: Pearson

Marrapodi, J. (2003). Critical thinking and creativity: An overview and comparison of the theories.  Unpublished ED7590 Critical thinking and adult, Providence, RI .

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How to build critical thinking skills for better decision-making

It’s simple in theory, but tougher in practice – here are five tips to get you started.

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Have you heard the riddle about two coins that equal thirty cents, but one of them is not a nickel? What about the one where a surgeon says they can’t operate on their own son?

Those brain teasers tap into your critical thinking skills. But your ability to think critically isn’t just helpful for solving those random puzzles – it plays a big role in your career. 

An impressive 81% of employers say critical thinking carries a lot of weight when they’re evaluating job candidates. It ranks as the top competency companies consider when hiring recent graduates (even ahead of communication ). Plus, once you’re hired, several studies show that critical thinking skills are highly correlated with better job performance.

So what exactly are critical thinking skills? And even more importantly, how do you build and improve them? 

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is the ability to evaluate facts and information, remain objective, and make a sound decision about how to move forward.

Does that sound like how you approach every decision or problem? Not so fast. Critical thinking seems simple in theory but is much tougher in practice, which helps explain why 65% of employers say their organization has a need for more critical thinking. 

In reality, critical thinking doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us. In order to do it well, you need to:

• Remain open-minded and inquisitive, rather than relying on assumptions or jumping to conclusions
• Ask questions and dig deep, rather than accepting information at face value
• Keep your own biases and perceptions in check to stay as objective as possible
• Rely on your emotional intelligence to fill in the blanks and gain a more well-rounded understanding of a situation

So, critical thinking isn’t just being intelligent or analytical. In many ways, it requires you to step outside of yourself, let go of your own preconceived notions, and approach a problem or situation with curiosity and fairness.

It’s a challenge, but it’s well worth it. Critical thinking skills will help you connect ideas, make reasonable decisions, and solve complex problems.

7 critical thinking skills to help you dig deeper

Critical thinking is often labeled as a skill itself (you’ll see it bulleted as a desired trait in a variety of job descriptions). But it’s better to think of critical thinking less as a distinct skill and more as a collection or category of skills. 

To think critically, you’ll need to tap into a bunch of your other soft skills. Here are seven of the most important. 

Open-mindedness

It’s important to kick off the critical thinking process with the idea that anything is possible. The more you’re able to set aside your own suspicions, beliefs, and agenda, the better prepared you are to approach the situation with the level of inquisitiveness you need. 

That means not closing yourself off to any possibilities and allowing yourself the space to pull on every thread – yes, even the ones that seem totally implausible.

As Christopher Dwyer, Ph.D. writes in a piece for Psychology Today , “Even if an idea appears foolish, sometimes its consideration can lead to an intelligent, critically considered conclusion.” He goes on to compare the critical thinking process to brainstorming . Sometimes the “bad” ideas are what lay the foundation for the good ones. 

Open-mindedness is challenging because it requires more effort and mental bandwidth than sticking with your own perceptions. Approaching problems or situations with true impartiality often means:

• Practicing self-regulation : Giving yourself a pause between when you feel something and when you actually react or take action.
• Challenging your own biases: Acknowledging your biases and seeking feedback are two powerful ways to get a broader understanding. 

Critical thinking example

In a team meeting, your boss mentioned that your company newsletter signups have been decreasing and she wants to figure out why.

At first, you feel offended and defensive – it feels like she’s blaming you for the dip in subscribers. You recognize and rationalize that emotion before thinking about potential causes. You have a hunch about what’s happening, but you will explore all possibilities and contributions from your team members.

Observation

Observation is, of course, your ability to notice and process the details all around you (even the subtle or seemingly inconsequential ones). Critical thinking demands that you’re flexible and willing to go beyond surface-level information, and solid observation skills help you do that.

Your observations help you pick up on clues from a variety of sources and experiences, all of which help you draw a final conclusion. After all, sometimes it’s the most minuscule realization that leads you to the strongest conclusion.

Over the next week or so, you keep a close eye on your company’s website and newsletter analytics to see if numbers are in fact declining or if your boss’s concerns were just a fluke. 

Critical thinking hinges on objectivity. And, to be objective, you need to base your judgments on the facts – which you collect through research. You’ll lean on your research skills to gather as much information as possible that’s relevant to your problem or situation. 

Keep in mind that this isn’t just about the quantity of information – quality matters too. You want to find data and details from a variety of trusted sources to drill past the surface and build a deeper understanding of what’s happening. 

You dig into your email and website analytics to identify trends in bounce rates, time on page, conversions, and more. You also review recent newsletters and email promotions to understand what customers have received, look through current customer feedback, and connect with your customer support team to learn what they’re hearing in their conversations with customers.

The critical thinking process is sort of like a treasure hunt – you’ll find some nuggets that are fundamental for your final conclusion and some that might be interesting but aren’t pertinent to the problem at hand.

That’s why you need analytical skills. They’re what help you separate the wheat from the chaff, prioritize information, identify trends or themes, and draw conclusions based on the most relevant and influential facts. 

It’s easy to confuse analytical thinking with critical thinking itself, and it’s true there is a lot of overlap between the two. But analytical thinking is just a piece of critical thinking. It focuses strictly on the facts and data, while critical thinking incorporates other factors like emotions, opinions, and experiences. 

As you analyze your research, you notice that one specific webpage has contributed to a significant decline in newsletter signups. While all of the other sources have stayed fairly steady with regard to conversions, that one has sharply decreased.

You decide to move on from your other hypotheses about newsletter quality and dig deeper into the analytics. 

One of the traps of critical thinking is that it’s easy to feel like you’re never done. There’s always more information you could collect and more rabbit holes you could fall down.

But at some point, you need to accept that you’ve done your due diligence and make a decision about how to move forward. That’s where inference comes in. It’s your ability to look at the evidence and facts available to you and draw an informed conclusion based on those. 

When you’re so focused on staying objective and pursuing all possibilities, inference can feel like the antithesis of critical thinking. But ultimately, it’s your inference skills that allow you to move out of the thinking process and onto the action steps. 

You dig deeper into the analytics for the page that hasn’t been converting and notice that the sharp drop-off happened around the same time you switched email providers.

After looking more into the backend, you realize that the signup form on that page isn’t correctly connected to your newsletter platform. It seems like anybody who has signed up on that page hasn’t been fed to your email list. 

Communication

3 ways to improve your communication skills at work

If and when you identify a solution or answer, you can’t keep it close to the vest. You’ll need to use your communication skills to share your findings with the relevant stakeholders – like your boss, team members, or anybody who needs to be involved in the next steps.

Your analysis skills will come in handy here too, as they’ll help you determine what information other people need to know so you can avoid bogging them down with unnecessary details. 

In your next team meeting, you pull up the analytics and show your team the sharp drop-off as well as the missing connection between that page and your email platform. You ask the web team to reinstall and double-check that connection and you also ask a member of the marketing team to draft an apology email to the subscribers who were missed. 

Problem-solving

Critical thinking and problem-solving are two more terms that are frequently confused. After all, when you think critically, you’re often doing so with the objective of solving a problem.

The best way to understand how problem-solving and critical thinking differ is to think of problem-solving as much more narrow. You’re focused on finding a solution.

In contrast, you can use critical thinking for a variety of use cases beyond solving a problem – like answering questions or identifying opportunities for improvement. Even so, within the critical thinking process, you’ll flex your problem-solving skills when it comes time to take action. 

Once the fix is implemented, you monitor the analytics to see if subscribers continue to increase. If not (or if they increase at a slower rate than you anticipated), you’ll roll out some other tests like changing the CTA language or the placement of the subscribe form on the page.

5 ways to improve your critical thinking skills

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Think critically about critical thinking and you’ll quickly realize that it’s not as instinctive as you’d like it to be. Fortunately, your critical thinking skills are learned competencies and not inherent gifts – and that means you can improve them. Here’s how:

• Practice active listening: Active listening helps you process and understand what other people share. That’s crucial as you aim to be open-minded and inquisitive.
• Ask open-ended questions: If your critical thinking process involves collecting feedback and opinions from others, ask open-ended questions (meaning, questions that can’t be answered with “yes” or “no”). Doing so will give you more valuable information and also prevent your own biases from influencing people’s input.
• Scrutinize your sources: Figuring out what to trust and prioritize is crucial for critical thinking. Boosting your media literacy and asking more questions will help you be more discerning about what to factor in. It’s hard to strike a balance between skepticism and open-mindedness, but approaching information with questions (rather than unquestioning trust) will help you draw better conclusions. 
• Play a game: Remember those riddles we mentioned at the beginning? As trivial as they might seem, games and exercises like those can help you boost your critical thinking skills. There are plenty of critical thinking exercises you can do individually or as a team . 
• Give yourself time: Research shows that rushed decisions are often regrettable ones. That’s likely because critical thinking takes time – you can’t do it under the wire. So, for big decisions or hairy problems, give yourself enough time and breathing room to work through the process. It’s hard enough to think critically without a countdown ticking in your brain. 

Critical thinking really is critical

The ability to think critically is important, but it doesn’t come naturally to most of us. It’s just easier to stick with biases, assumptions, and surface-level information. 

But that route often leads you to rash judgments, shaky conclusions, and disappointing decisions. So here’s a conclusion we can draw without any more noodling: Even if it is more demanding on your mental resources, critical thinking is well worth the effort.

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