Critical Thinking and Decision Making.
In today's business world decision making has become more complicated than it has been (McCall & Kaplan, 2003). Dealing with people only gets harder as time goes buy and critical thinking and decision making skills only become more needed with time in today's workplace. This paper will discuss both critical thinking and decision making, as well as give both author and personal opinions on both. It will also discuss their inter-relation and benefits.
What is Critical Thinking and Decision Making.
Critical thinking is defined by The College of Wooster as 6 stages. Those stages include; understanding, research, evaluation, pre-solution, refine and modify, and the final solution. The first step, understanding, is a personal, mental process. One must internally understand a situation before they can move to the next step. This step can include reading a statement multiple times. It may also include a comparison to a personal situation that gives a clearer understanding of the problem. Once as understanding has occurred, research must be done. This step is self-explanatory. One must gather information on a given topic from different sources to obtain an unbiased view. Once the research has been completed an evaluation must occur. At this point the research is compared to their own personal view. This is the evaluation. Some topics will be discarded due to relevance and some will remain due to the same. Once the topics have been narrowed down the pre-solution will start. All the relevant topics and ideas will be combined into the beginnings of a solution. At this point the pre-solution must be refined and modified. At this step the pre-solution is sifted through and edited in areas of relevance. After the refine and modify step one has their final solution. This is the basic of critical thinking as defined by The College of Wooster (Critical Thinking Defined, 2002).
