Having spent most of my professional career trying to change things for organizations, and a proponent of Best Practices to ensure that happens, the application of Critical Thinking to these challenges should be of interest to us all.
In process improvement we often focus on a few steps to ensure we get a result. At a very high level these are “the way things are” of the current state of a process, and the lower level “the way things could be” or the future state.
Diagramming and communicating both states permits self-directed learning to occur, even if the individual is not a subject matter expert in the area. TaskMap has been Harvard Computing Group’s main vehicle to make this happen for the past 7 years.
Why Critical Thinking is important to process improvement
Critical Thinking is one our mainstays in getting organizations to accept and embrace change. Without it we can’t have an effective discourse, which in itself will limit the potential of outcomes.
Jack Mezirow describes his shopping list of what has to happen in order for effective discourse to occur. The requirement for effective change in an organization or individual.
- More accurate and complete information
- Freedom from coercion and distorting self-deception
- Openness to alternatives points of view: empathy and concern about how others think and feel
- The ability to weigh evidence and access arguments objectively
- Greater awareness of the context of ideas, and more critically, reflectiveness of assumptions including their own
- An equal opportunity to participate in the various roles of discourse
- Willingness to seek understanding and agreement to accept a resulting best judgment as a test of validity until new perspectives, evidence or arguments are encountered and validated through discourse as yielding a better judgment
From Learning as Transformation, Jossey-Bass Jack Mezirow
The relationship between this learning factors and process improvement is very powerful. We will map these to transformational process improvement in a future post.
