The Importance of Building Critical Thinking Skills

Written by: Casey Nguyen

Leading a large corporation like Microsoft with 166,475 global employees through the pandemic is no doubt a lot of weight on Satya Nadella’s shoulders. Despite all the unprecedented challenges that COVID-19 imposed on the daily operations of the company, Microsoft reported a net income of $15.5 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2020, which is a 33% rise from the corresponding period of the year prior. 

In 2020, through an interview with Salman Khan, the Founder of Khan Academy, Satya perfectly highlighted the importance of critical thinking skills in this following statement:

“As leaders, you innately have to go at it and create clarity when there are all kinds of complexity and uncertainty. You have to create energy as a leader to be able to rally people around a particular sense of purpose, mission and direction… and solve an unsolvable problem. You have to remove some constraints. Sometimes, we tie ourselves in knots and say, “we can’t move.” You’ve got to be able to let go of some things and boldly go to a new place and then work out some problems that come with it.”

Transitioning to the CEO role in 2014, Satya’s journey is one of the many powerful examples of what it means to successfully adapt and innovate in a rapidly changing business environment. When asked what advice he would give to young students and professionals, he emphasized on the importance of maintaining the “thirst for learning and intellectual honesty” while not being rigid in one’s thinking.

What does that mean for today’s undergraduate business students who aspire to be tomorrow’s leaders?

In a 2019 Brookings Institution research report, findings reveal that over 70 percent of physical tasks and “information collection and processing activities” can be automated. PwC’s 23rd CEO Survey released in 2020 also found that 74 percent of CEOs are worried about finding talents that possess strong transferable skills like creativity, problem solving, and navigating digital technology.

The rise of technology and automation makes it more important than ever for business education to prepare students for 21st century business demands. A big part of that is developing critical thinking skills - which does not happen overnight. Therefore, students need to learn critical thinking early on in their freshman or sophomore year in order to practice this thinking habit throughout their college career.

What is Critical Thinking?

We are all familiar with the Bloom’s Taxonomy that is deeply ingrained in most universities’ learning outcomes. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom created this taxonomy to theoretically categorize the levels, or “stepping stones'', of the development of thinking and reasoning skills. Each stage of the taxonomy requires students to learn and think at a higher level of abstraction.

The taxonomy’s current form and usage has evolved from its original model in order to more accurately reflect modern learning processes and to allow the levels to represent activities and behaviors of lower and higher order thinking skills.

How does critical thinking fit in the picture? 

It is a broadly defined umbrella term that represents all higher level thinking skills. Interestingly enough, critical thinking as a concept can be viewed in three different lenses: Skill-oriented, person-oriented, and social norms.

The skill-oriented perspective of critical thinking defines it as the essential thinking skills employers seek in new graduates and employees. This angle looks at problem-solving on an individual basis - what thinking skills does a person need in order to go through an effective problem-solving process? In Peter Facione’s various publications, the first of which is from 1998, he breaks down the process of critical thinking into six skills: interpretation, analysis, inference, explanation, evaluation and self-regulation. These skills enable workers to contribute creative value to the direction of a project by independently making observations, assessing evidence, and presenting informed conclusions. An important note to consider is that this perspective focuses on recognizing the objective patterns for making an argument and does not account for the nuances of real world problem-solving where inherent factors like culture implicitly create biases in decision making.

Critical thinking from a person-oriented view shifts the focus from thinking skills to personal characteristics, or in other words, the defining a theoretical critical thinker. From this angle, critical thinking is interpreted as interpersonal traits that allow for effective problem-solving in a team environment. This perspective gives a broader framework to character development in business education and emphasizes the importance of soft skills such as communication, collaboration, conflict resolution, persuasion, goal-setting and other essential qualities of an ideal leadership. With this context, it appears that business programs embrace abstractions in nurturing future leaders. These ideal leadership characteristics are important to aspire to, but they are not often represented in reality because many existing leaders are egocentric in their views and rigid in making decisions due to their confidence on the track record of their success.

As to the social norms perception of critical thinking, students’ development of the essential skills and characteristics is influenced by theories and the social context. This angle looks at problem-solving in a societal context. The set of values and norms in the real world interconnect with an individual’s experiences. Critical thinking in this light emphasizes the importance of creating conclusions that “have a strong theoretical appeal” and are grounded in reality. In other words, critical thinking is the ability to express one's subjective beliefs, discuss them with others, and reflect on the feedback and differing views as a way to develop a mindset that is more inclusive of the broader social environment (i.e. community of inquiry).

In contemporary business education, the skill-oriented approach is the most suitable for building and grading critical thinking in the classroom. Essentially, all three perspectives are relevant in defining critical thinking and explaining why it is important to have in the modern workplace.

The Importance of Building Critical Thinking Early On

It is important to nurture critical thinking in undergraduate business students early on in their academic career because it requires continuous practice for learners to improve their thinking habits. Additionally, a 2017 research found that critical thinking is more influential than intelligence in predicting how often an individual makes good decisions as opposed to poor decisions. Therefore, the sooner young students acquire critical thinking, the sooner they can become prepared to thrive in their professional careers and personal lives.

In Satya’s interview with Sal, he mentioned that a big challenge that affects all sophisticated societies, “From ancient Greece to modern Silicon Valley”, is “hubris that comes with success.” One of the ways he decided to reinvent Microsoft was to change the company’s culture from possessing the “know-it-all mindset” to embracing the “learn-it-all” attitude. To further grow Microsoft, Satya had to reevaluate the company’s business model and adapt it to modern demands while still accounting for the interests of stakeholders, employees, and current customers. 

As undergraduate business students are the leaders of tomorrow, in order for them to develop the curiosity and resilience necessary to take society to the next level, they must be strong critical thinkers in all its definitions.

Take an example of an entry-level employee being tasked with researching a big sales lead to help an account executive win the lead’s business. 

If the employee lacks critical thinking, they would jump straight into research and spend a great deal of time looking at information that is not relevant or beneficial to the sales process. They would provide a deliverable that does not assist sales while wasting company time for it.

If the employee possesses critical thinking, they would begin by asking the account executive about the information they need and don’t need, their current understanding of the lead, and their previous interactions with the lead. Understanding the context would save the employee time in finding the relevant information, and they could even discover details that were previously unaccounted for.

In this scenario, the employee with critical thinking has a better chance of impressing their manager and be considered for a promotion to a higher paying and more impactful role.

Students who are comfortable with tackling ambiguous problems are more likely to succeed in their professional career and quickly move up the ranks. Getting comfortable requires having routine exposure to similar challenges in learning environments in and out of the classroom. 

Although business educators unanimously agree that critical thinking is important and aspire to prioritize the development of these higher level thinking abilities, course curricula and instructional practices still fall short in nurturing critical thinking through no fault of their own.

The Skills Gap in Business Education

In 2011, O’Shaughnessy wrote a provocative post, “8 Reasons Not to Get a Business Degree”, and expressed that the top three most valuable skills that employers look for in students - communication skills, problem-solving skills, and teamwork skills - are more often found with a liberal arts education.

Business programs understand the importance of critical thinking, but various constraints, such as limited time and support, leave them unable to integrate modern learning designs that are better at fostering thinking abilities. Business educators inevitably approach instruction with the mindset that critical thinking will develop as young students gain more specialized knowledge. It is indeed difficult to incorporate critical thinking into core business curricula when instructors have little understanding about what goes into building critical thinking and assessing it.

As a result, rote learning practices like multiple choice quizzes and exams continue to be used, which only further trains lower order thinking skills that students are accustomed to using through their early academic career. The skills gap continues to widen as the traditional teaching paradigm remains entrenched in business education while real world business challenges become increasingly complex.

Effectively teaching critical thinking necessitates active and collaborative learning models that encourage students to practice self-reflection while solving problems without right answers. Building critical thinking skills does not happen overnight. Students need to be inspired to learn and practice these skills throughout their college experience.

Read more about Teaching Critical Thinking Skills (And How Technology Can Help).

Conclusion

As we are living in uncertain times, action is imperative to prepare young students for current and future challenges of the 21st century workplace. Given how technology is rapidly changing the way we live, we need to equip our students with the right thinking toolkit that would help them excel under uncertainty.

Market Games is a strong advocate for incorporating active and collaborative learning into the core business curriculum as a way to nurture students’ critical thinking skills early in advance. We are always open to discuss innovative ways to assist business programs and instructors move from aspiration to progress painlessly. We aim to do the heavy lifting of conducting research on the most urgent challenges in business education and provide actionable insights. Please reach out if you have any topics that we should research and write about.