Critical Thinking & Decision Making for Business

Cultivate critical thinking as an active, brain training mode that uses reason, analysis, logic, and open-mindedness to improve problem solving and decision making in daily business.

Develop critical thinking by applying reason, analysis, open mindedness, and logic to connect daily actions to productivity and outcomes.

Distinguish causation from correlation in everyday life and data analysis using examples like alarm clocks and patterns in health care, and examine CO2 emissions versus population since 1850.

Develop open-mindedness and critical thinking by questioning what you know, accepting new ideas, and staying curious amid changing routines and technologies.

Analyze situations by evaluating information to distinguish true and useful from fake and useless, and actively seek data to make informed, better decisions.

Apply logic as the core of critical thinking to derive conclusions from facts and decide the best actions, acknowledging that reasoning improves daily decisions.

Explore the benefits of critical thinking, including clearer reasoning, better persuasion, and improved communication, through analysis, open-mindedness, and emotional intelligence for audience-adaptive dialogue.

Practice logic-based reasoning and observational analysis to sharpen critical thinking and decision making through a riddle about choosing a safe apple from three to find the way home.

Explore a riddle about a professor's offer of one more chance, using critical thinking and decision making to interpret the hair color clues and help the student pass the exam.

Explore a riddle about three women to practice critical thinking and decision making, identifying which one stole the watermelon.

Analyze a background story riddle about a mother with four children, Jenny, Rose, Lisa, and the remaining child, and practice critical thinking and decision making in business contexts.

Advance critical thinking through non-linear thinking, expanding reasoning in multiple directions. Compare linear thinking with non-linear thinking, and explore how this approach supports career development.

Explore non linear thinking by distinguishing symptoms from root causes, conducting experiments to isolate issues, and guiding quick, accurate fixes for problems like stomach pain, computer faults, or stress.

learn to recognize jumping to conclusions as the opposite of critical thinking and practice analyzing a problem before acting, rather than rushing to costly I.T. repairs.

Develop non-linear thinking and critical thinking to stay relevant as change accelerates and machines advance, illustrated by the Fosbury Flop redefining success.

Develop the ability to evaluate external information from newspapers, government announcements, and credible market research, alongside internal data and KPIs, to avoid fake news and make trusted business decisions.

Assess relevance and apply critical thinking to choose credible information for business decisions, avoiding irrelevant data and selecting the right data tools.

Assess source credibility by examining the author and motives, recognizing promotional reports that downplay risks, and identify trustworthy sources from non-profit and public institutions like WHO and UN.

Apply checks: timing up to date, relevance, and author clarity, to Facebook posts tagged 'credit original'. Show that credible sources reveal the original author and publishing date.

Develop nonlinear thinking to identify multiple solutions by formulating assumptions through four steps: asking the right questions, organizing data, evaluating information, and developing assumptions, to address a sales decline.

ask the right questions at the right time to verify a sales decline, identify which sales are affected, investigate root causes, and use better information to guide decisions.

Organize business data using spreadsheets to clean, format, and analyze numbers, compare comparable information, and use tables and functions to track sales and marketing budgets.

Develop critical thinking by analyzing marketing data and observations, noting how budget allocations influence overall sales, and crafting assumptions about outcomes when reallocating spend between TV and social media.

review the progression from numbers to information to assumptions through critical thinking as we analyze declining sales, verify the problem, and plan evidence-based decisions using marketing budget insights.

Clarify your actual goal from the sales analysis, then evaluate options—increase total sales, make all products profitable, or both—and compare approaches one by one.

Analyze reallocating the marketing budget from product one to the fast-growing product to boost overall sales, using weighted performance and justification for TV advertising shifts.

Apply assumption one to address not all products being profitable by focusing product one's budget on TV ads; increasing to 4.5 million jets boosts February sales to 6.5 million.

Demonstrates using assumptions to boost total sales and profitability by combining actions, prioritizing tv advertising over social media, and reallocating budget from product one to product four.

Explore how critical thinking distinguishes decision making from problem solving through a step-by-step process, using data analytics to identify patterns in how the money is spent between products.

Identify how bias shapes decision making by examining selective perception, sunk cost fallacy, overconfidence bias, and hindsight bias, and how memory tricks influence judgment.

Identify selective perception as a bias that narrows information to fit a preferred answer, and practice open-minded, critical thinking to compare diverse evidence and measure progress.

Identify the sunk cost fallacy as a bias where past time and money influence decisions. Focus on future, with examples like leaving a bad movie or reevaluating a costly project.

Identify the overconfidence bias in judging skills, and recognize that unknown challenges exceed the obvious. Plan for disruptions, communicate with suppliers, and adopt a plan-to-fail mindset, per the Intel example.

Identify how hindsight bias inflates expert certainty by narrating Myanmar's covid-19 story, then learn three steps—acknowledge bias, assess whether you can predict the future, think critically—to counter it.

Apply structured critical thinking to identify biases like selective perception, overconfidence, hindsight, and the sunk cost fallacy, collect information, organize what you know, and develop assumptions to improve outcomes.

Practice critical thinking as a muscle to improve problem solving and find good solutions in business, and review modules as often as you like to keep an open mind.