Critical Thinking: Making Common Sense More Common

One of the great axioms of organizational effectiveness is that “to think is to create.” What is the level of critical thinking among your executives, managers and individual contributors? Much of what passes for critical thinking today remains at the surface level because most employees have not been trained in root cause analysis or provided with useful frameworks for thinking and innovating.

Any intervention that involves people thinking together can be made much more effective and successful by equipping people with a systematic way to think together. Critical Thinking: Making Common Sense More Common is a suite of five “lean-brain” programs that develops the thinking acumen of employees across all levels of the organization. Through highly interactive, real-time sessions, we train your leaders and individual contributors to think highly effectively through any situation, be it simple or complex, and optimally leverage the best knowledge, education, judgment and intuition of individuals and teams. Critical Thinking, Making Common Sense More Common consists of five programs for virtually all levels of employees from the individual contributor to the C-Suite:

  1. Critical Thinking (2 days) - Critical Thinking methodologies that identify and clarify all of the distinct variable involved in a situation are learned, practiced and applied to participants' real-time challenges.
  2. Critical Thinking for Executives and Managers (2 days) - Participants learn how to leverage their leadership role to improve organizational thinking through modeling personal competence, coaching the thinking of others, and applying systematic thinking to foster the evolution of the organization's human and technical systems.
  3. Systematic Problem Solving (1 day) - Critical thinking is leveraged to identify and understand the fundamental causes of problems and how to uncover and distinguish root causes.
  4. Systematic Decision Making (1 day) - Participants learn how to determine when decision making is needed, how to frame and analyze a decision, who to involve in making a decision and how to ultimately decide on an optimal course of action.
  5. Systematic Project Management (1 day)- Participants learn a disciplined, rigorous approach to defining, planning and implementing projects.

Critical Thinking: Making Common Sense More Common has many applications. Examples of interventions which benefit highly from robust critical thinking include: Process Improvement Efforts, Lean Manufacturing & Lean Thinking Projects, Six Sigma Teams, Black Belt Problem Solving Expert Groups, Strategic Planning Efforts and Implementations, High Performance Teams, Root Cause Analysis Projects, Internal Facilitators, Data-Based Organizational Change, Accountability Culture, and Talent Development efforts.

To find out more about Critical Thinking: Making Common Sense More Common, please contact Jeri Wilson, Director Cerulean Client Relations, at 310-413-8773 or email jeri@CeruleanLeadership.com.