Clarifying my own worldview and higher purposes is a challenge that takes time and attention, yet it sets our foundation. Everything else builds on this disciplined thinking, reflection, and exploration. Without this clarifying work, we are easily disrupted and chase illusions.

As an Example
An idea intuitively comes to me.  How do I know if my idea is a good idea?  What framework can I use to test my idea or the idea of another person?  How do I help a group go from lots of inconsistent “I think(s)” to a genuine “We think?”  How do we enable all voices to be heard so we don’t miss a key opportunity?  How do we talk about how we think, not just what we think?

Can My Hand Guide Me?
There exists an invisible scaffolding that sits behind, supports, and is a shared reference for all well-reasoned conclusions. We call it The Big Green Hand in our Labs. Working with Richard Paul for three years at the Center for Critical Thinking (Sonoma State University, California) in the early 1990s, Jane Lorand has adapted many of key practices that she learned.

We develop skills to use the Big Green Hand to help us anytime we have to figure something out. We learn how valuable it is because many hands make light work when all the hands know how to do the work!

Thinking together critically is very satisfying. If one hand reflects Critical Thinking (the Big Green one) and our other hand helps us recall the Systemic Thinking we need for complex issues, two hands working together empower us in every aspect of life.

Building Confidence to Talk About our Thinking
A well-reasoned conclusion may not, ultimately, turn out to be right because circumstances change or our assumptions turned out to be flawed.  However, if we can legitimately show how we’ve used this scaffolding, we will be able to discuss how we came to our conclusion. We feel more confident when we know we can explain how we thought the problem or opportunity through. We are much better able to work openly, without fear, with the ideas of others.

Testing for Truth
In this era, where we daily experience many assaults on the truth, we need standards to help us decide whether something is true or valid or authentic.  Usually, the trick is not about getting more big data. We need logic, of course. However, we also need to know when we have sufficient clarity, significant information of quality, consistency, depth and coherence.

Intellectual Humility
To meet the challenges of the many complex issues facing us today, we need to lead with intellectual humility: we don’t know the scope of what we don’t know! We learn the basic attitudes and practices that sit under the banner of intellectual humility.

Avoiding Interpersonal Conflict
It is our experience that when we see interpersonal conflict in the workplace, it is often because well-meaning people have fundamentally misunderstood each other, BUT they think they have understood each other.  We see that there is an intellectual root to what later flowers or manifests as suspicion, self-seeking, and self-protection.

We find again and again that the people left the table with diverse understandings of what “the problem” was and what we’re going to do about it. It is so easy to address this at the front end rather than swirling in the interpersonal conflict later – if only people knew how to check before they left the table!