In the article "Keys to Critical Thinking", the author notes that management in today's workforce is much more dependant on critical decisions made by executives. These decisions can make or break a company due to competition, market flow and unwise capital investment. The article mainly focused on the recruitment process for young, new executives.
According to the article, Critical thinking skills should be a core competency for their companies (Helliwell, 2000 p. 2). This poses the question of how to teach future executives the abilities to make critical decisions which will allow the forward progression of the company. Another aspect is how to hire new management, with the most talents and leadership qualities. These qualities have changed due to the change in business, which is faster than in the past. Most companies are now looking for management to adapt quickly and provide results immediately instead of having the management grow with the business and produce a benefit to the company over many years. .
The solution to these questions is very simply, yet hard to grasp for humans because we are inundated with so much information it is sometimes hard to make simple decisions. The author notes that the critical decision process contains four steps. The first of which is to analyze the problem. The second is to gather the information about the problem, and verify the sources. This step is crucial because some of the information could be based on fallacies, or emotions. Emotions can cause distorted perceptions on the information and therefore cause different decisions to be made from the information. Once the proper information is gathered, the third step is to analyze the decision makers gut instinct. Gut instinct should be used throughout the entire decision making process, but cannot be used solely for decision making. The last step is to look at the positive and negative aspects of the decision.