Thinking and Decision Making

Thinking and Decision Making

MGT/350

Thinking and Decision Making

Critical thinking is the art of thinking about thinking while thinking make thinking better. To show this we will examine three types of thinking, Creative Thinking, Scientific Thinking, and Persuasive Thinking. This paper compares and contrasts the three methods and how each affects the Critical Thinking process. It applies these thinking skills to the decision making process by discussing how they are used in the workplace and what bearing they have on workplace decisions. It further shows how critical thinking is used to examine thinking by taking thinking apart and identifying weaknesses and reconstructing to make it better.

Creative thinking offers loosely defined and flexibly interpreted thought. Creativity changes forms, conditions, functions, or processes into new ones absent the rigidity of other thinking styles. It employs metaphors in communicating, illustrating key points with comparisons. Creative thinking expands with courage and calm, but contracts with worry or doubt. It uses brainstorming as an open format for ideas and star bursting to create mind-opening questions. Concepts such as “thinking outside the box” embody creative thinking.

Scientific thinking involves scientific method in its conceptualization of thoughts and ideas. Science requires rigid proof, empirical data, and observable phenomena. Scientific thinking uses four steps:

1. Observation - Define problems and obtain information through observing issues, relationships, behaviors, etc.

2. Hypothesis- Form theoretical statements regarding the relationships observed in predictive fashion, such as “If A happens, B will happen” (Kirby & Goodpaster, 2007, p. 221).

3. Experimentation- Test hypothesis through various experiments, collecting objective data.

4. Verification- Scrutinize data collected proving or disproving the hypothesis.

Scientific thinking uses...