Use these critical thinking tools to avoid four common pitfalls you can fall into when solving problems.

During your critical thinking processes, there are several pitfalls you might fall into, but you can avoid them:

Jumping to answers too quickly

The most common pitfall is jumping to answers too quickly. You think you know what the problem is and you rush off to solve it. Some of the tools you can use to avoid that pitfall are first, defining your problem well, having that clear problem statement. Why is your stakeholder asking you to solve this problem? And then you can ask and answer focusing questions, evaluate prior efforts, look at the problem through new lenses, and understand causality. By looking at all of those, it will prevent you from jumping ahead to answers before you’ve really understood what the problem is.

Not expanding the problem space

The second pitfall is being unwilling to expand the problem space. Why would I want to make the problem any worse than it is? Here’s the problem, I can solve this. But that might be a symptom. You need to think through what’s really causing that issue. So tools like blowing up the business and asking the five Whys can help you really define what the core issue is that you’re trying to solve. Sometimes you’re going to focus on things that don’t matter. You’ll come up with a recommendation, and even though it’s insightful, it won’t really change the performance of your organization. The technique there is using the 80/20 principle and asking yourself, “If I solve this, will it have a disproportionate impact on my organization? Or am I solving for that 80% that drives 20% of the results that don’t really matter?” The 80/20 rule will help you focus on results that do.

Taking analytics at face value

Another pitfall is taking the analytical results at face value and just accepting. Well, the answer from the analysis was seven. Well, what does seven mean? What are the implications of that? Techniques to use are getting to that high road, getting out of the analysis and asking yourself, “What does this mean?” And then looking for relationships between the answer from your analysis and other problems you’re trying to solve. Are there clusters? Are there similarities to problems you’ve faced in the past?

Not considering consequences

And the last pitfall you’re going to face in your critical thinking processes is not thinking through the future consequences of your answer. If you implement this, what’s going to happen? What are the knock-on effects of the recommendation? What will your competitors do? What will happen in the organization? What are the new problems you’re going to cause? This is where the seven So Whats can be a very powerful tool to help you understand and appreciate the consequences for the recommendation you’re making.

So, understand that these are the common pitfalls, but the critical thinking tools and techniques I’ve given you will help you avoid those pitfalls and come to better answers.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Go one step further after finding an answer to your problem. You may unlock some great opportunities you never would have considered before.

When you’re trying to solve a problem, getting an answer isn’t good enough. Think critically about the results of your analysis and what’s coming back as far as your recommendations go. You should be looking for similarities or differences between the idea and the analytical answers that come out and other situations that you’ve been in. Are there common themes that you’re seeing across multiple problems that you’re trying to solve? Are some elements similar to other problems you’ve solved in the past?

You should be asking about the relative size of the recommendation. Once you’ve completed your analysis, does this even matter? If we solve this problem, will it have a big enough impact on the business for us to even care? And if not, even though it’s a great idea, we should push it off to the side and focus on things that are more meaningful.

You should also explore connections to other problems that you’ve had or other situations you’ve been in because that connection between two things that are seemingly unrelated may unlock a tremendous insight and give you an opportunity to take learnings from the past and apply them to a situation that seems very different, but is actually quite similar. Let me offer an example. At one point, I did some corporate strategy work and we were trying to figure out where we should take the business for the next 10 years. We were looking at things like, “What new products should we launch? What new businesses should we enter? Which new market segments should we pursue? Are there acquisitions we should be going after?” And what we were able to do through all of that analysis was come up with not just an answer to how we decided to prioritize our efforts, but we also generated a process for thinking about how we were going to prioritize our resources and how we were going to think about entering markets, launching products, conducting acquisitions.

Now, several years later, I was working with a technology team and that technology team had the challenge of a lot of projects that were all really great, but they didn’t have the time or the resources to pursue all of them. And when we dug into the problem, when we did the analysis and we found out they had 37 different projects that were rated high, and 54 that were medium, and 200 enhancements that they were supposed to be doing. And when we really understood that the analysis was telling us that we weren’t good at prioritizing, a little light bulb went off and said, “Wait, this is a prioritization problem. That strategy work I did in the past was also about prioritization of scarce resources. Are there things that these problems have in common that I can take from the strategy work and apply to the technology prioritization?” And what was great was I was able to just dust off my strategy process, think about how it could apply to the technology portfolio, and then we not only prioritized the portfolio, but we put a new process in place to prioritize future projects. By understanding the linkages between seemingly unrelated problems, we were able to come up with a solution that we were able to apply very quickly based upon those past learnings.

So when you look at your answers that are coming out of your problem solving processes, think critically about those answers. What connections can you make to other situations? What can you learn from other problems you’ve solved and how can you apply those learnings to the problem you’re trying to solve now? By thinking critically, you may unlock some great opportunities you never would have considered before. That extra time to go one more step beyond the easy answer the analysis gives you and ask what does this mean for the broader problem may help you create one of the best opportunities out there that you get to very efficiently and very effectively.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Using the 80/20 rule can help you spend your time and energy more efficiently.

Critical thinking doesn’t only apply to coming up with recommendations. You need to think critically about the way you’re going to spend your time and energy. Those things are limited. You have too many problems to solve and not enough time.

I encourage people to follow the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle was coined by Vilfredo Pareto, and he noticed in Italy, 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population. He was also a gardener, and he noticed 80% of the peas coming out of his garden came from 20% of the pods. And he said, “That’s interesting. Two totally different realms demonstrating the same principle.” 20% led to 80% of the impact, and that’s the 80 20 rule. 20% of the drivers will drive 80% of the results. You need to think about your work the same way. You can’t focus on that 80% that only drives 20% of the results. Focus your efforts on the meaningful.

Let me offer an example. I have a client that creates capital equipment. They’re a manufacturer, and they were having a whole bunch of service issues in the field. Customers were calling up with a variety of complaints. And at first, this client was going out and trying to solve every single issue out there. But then they said, “Wait. Maybe there are certain issues that are causing more of our problems than others, and we only have limited resources that we can spend going out and fixing these issues, so let’s do an analysis.” And when they conducted that analysis, they found out that of all the service issues they had had reported, two issues were driving 80% of the complaints. One was about their software crashing and one was about the motors breaking down. What this client was then able to do was take all of their resources, focus them on these two issues, and solving those two issues would solve upwards of 80% of the complaints from their customers. That’s not to say the other complaints weren’t as important, but in terms of focusing their resources, they thought critically about what the problem is and where they were going to spend their time.

This has implications for you. When you think about a problem that you’re trying to solve, think through, “What are the major drivers of impact?” If you’re running a business unit at a high level and you’re trying to grow your profits, you can either look at revenues or costs. In revenues, you can look at volume or price. In volume, you can look at current customers and prospective customers. And within those, you can look at geographic regions. And let’s say we said, “Hey, this is going to be a revenue issue. You can’t look at the entire country.” What you’re probably going to want to do is focus on those couple of geographic regions that can drive the most impact for the metric you’re trying to increase.

So, look at whatever problem you’re trying to solve, understand what the drivers are, and understand how much each driver contributes to the overall impact you’re trying to have. Spend your time solving for those issues, the ones that have a disproportionate impact on the metric you’re trying to move. It’ll be a much more efficient use of your time, and you’re going to solve the biggest problems your organization faces first.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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Thinking critically about the way your business runs can help you generate new ideas to run things better.

When you go to generate new ideas to run things better, you need to think critically about the way your business runs. I like to look at three things: a business model blowup, a revenue blowup, and a cost blowup.

On the business model blowup, fundamentally rethink about how you go to market, even rethink what your market actually is. You’re going to challenge the entire business model for the way you deliver products and services. On the revenue blowup side, how do you dramatically expand the products, your pricing, the geography, the reach of your business? And on the cost blowup, how do you fundamentally eliminate drag from the business, to become much more efficient?

One company I hold up as an example of one that fundamentally blew up the business, blew up the cost, blew up the revenues is Skybus Airlines. If you think back several years ago, the way the airline industry functioned, everybody was the same. Tickets were all bundled. They had a similar operational model, and prices were pretty predictable. Along came Skybus and they said, “We’re going to blow up the way all of this works. From now on, all meals were going to be paid for it individually.” And people were going to stop subsidizing the meals of other passengers by paying for a bundled ticket. They said, “Don’t call us. We’re not going to have a call center.” Call centers are very expensive to run. Skybus said, “We’re going to do everything online.” It’s a different customer service model. They said tickets aren’t refundable. It costs a lot of money to rebook passengers. They said, “Once you buy it, it’s done.” The impact of all these changes Skybus made because they thought critically about the business model, was pretty tremendous. They were able to sell tickets for $10 or $20 each way. Sure, some of the tickets on the plane cost $200 as you got closer to the flight time, but their pricing model by unbundling everything, and by reducing their overall cost structure, allowed them to compete differently.

I personally benefited. I took my entire family to California from Ohio for $200 total, each way. In the past, those tickets would have cost me thousands. Now, these changes that Skybus made were very radical and they were risky, and these risks won’t always play out well for you. One day, I was teaching a class on how innovative Skybus was and I was talking about how great their business model was. When I got home that night, and I went to book some new tickets on Skybus, I was greeted by a splash screen that said they were out of business. Now, even though Skybus wasn’t successful in the long-term, their critical thinking and looking at the business differently, altered the landscape. I’m sure if you fly today, you’ve noticed that pricing is unbundled. So, that critical thinking led to massive changes in a huge industry.

As you think about applying some of these critical thinking tools, let me offer you some questions you can ask. On the business model blowup, ask yourself, if we had to do over, what will we do differently? If we’re starting this business again today, what would we change? How would you double the size of whatever metric you care the most about is, in two years? That’s a huge goal. Doubling something? But it’s going to challenge you to look at your business differently. On the revenue blowup side, ask, who could create more value with our customers than we can? Who does it better? That’ll get you to look outside of your own walls at different ways of doing things. How would you triple your revenues or your profits within five years? Again, that big provocative number to get you to remove some of the constraints that you currently face. For the cost blowup, how would you run this business with 2/3 fewer people? Wow, new processes, new technologies, new ways of doing things. By making a massive cut, it’s going to force you to look at your business differently.

I love this one question. How would you eliminate your job? That’s pretty unnerving to say I want to put myself out of a role, but by asking that question, it forces you to think critically about the work that you do. What work should you stop doing? What work should you delegate to other members of your team? What work can you automate? And my last favorite question is, what’s the most wasteful thing we do as an organization? And what’s stopping us from stopping that? Look at your business. We all know where some of the waste is. Understanding what the waste is, and what the barriers are to eliminating it, can create new solutions for making your business more efficient and more effective.

So, as you look at your organization, ask yourself, how can you blow up the business model? How can you blow up the revenue side? How can you blow up the cost side? And those answers to those critical questions will help you identify new opportunities that can make your business much more competitive and much more effective.

Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to think critically. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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