Judd N. Adams
Management Training, Consulting & Project Facilitation
Ideas -- Insight -- Transformation

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Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making

    The following description is for a 30 contact hour (ten 3-hour sessions) course designed and taught for the following organizations: 

• University of Denver, University College (adult continuing education), Applied Communication/ Alternative Dispute Resolution Masters Degree Program, 

• Boulder Valley School District's Professional Development Program.  

    The course is a synthesis of two separate courses -- Critical Thinking, and Problem Solving -- that I first taught at the University of Illinois, Springfield, in the early 1970's, plus much material developed since then.  The reading for the course comes from the Core Competencies Handbook and Tool Kit.   

The course can be customized to meet your specific organizational needs for a basic price of $5,000, or if you have a qualified in-house trainer, for $1,000 you may purchase the right to deliver the course to your staff and place the source book, Core Competencies Handbook and Tool Kit, on your web for the students to read.

 Course Description

      Critical thinking is the foundation for effective problem solving and decision-making, and involves the following competencies: (1) semantic precision – the ability to use words precisely and in particular recognizing poorly defined terms; (2) recognizing the elements of an argument (a persuasive communication) and distinguishing among facts, opinions, beliefs, and values; (3) ability to evaluate the validity and soundness of arguments, including distinguishing necessary from probable conclusions and recognizing common fallacies; and (4) ability to construct valid, sound arguments.

     The problem solving/decision-making part of the course involves learning a variety of models and strategies appropriate to a variety of situations including (1) improving a person’s performance, (2) resolving a conflict/improving a relationship (3) improving work system performance, (4) conducting an accident investigation, and (5) job/career decision-making.  The project requirement involves applying  one of the models to a work (or non-work) situation.

Learning/Performance Objectives 

      Critical thinking competencies (as described above) will be demonstrated and assessed though assignments that involve answering questions about  written materials that include a letter to the editor, excerpts from the transcript of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on the disputed 2000 presidential vote in Florida, a political brochure, and opinion pieces from newspapers and monthly periodicals.  Some of the assignments involve analyzing and evaluating prior student responses to the material to identify faulty reasoning.  The written assignments will be discussed in class in small groups where the objective is for the group to reach agreement on the correct answer, which involves effective listening and persuasive communication.   

      Problem solving and decision making will be demonstrated and assessed  though (1) an in class exam focused on broad cognitive understanding of the models, (2) homework assignments that involve applying aspects of the models, and (3) a project that involves applying an entire model to a problem or decision area that is of personal (professional) relevance.

 Recommended/optional books

• Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation, Douglas N. Walton, 1989, Cambridge University Press.

• Smart Choices, John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa, 1999, Harvard Business School Press.

KEY CONCEPTS AND TERMS

• Language competence is the foundation for effective thinking. 

  • “While there may be some thoughts and feelings we can have without language, there are infinitely many that we cannot” (Derek Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior).

  • A semantic dispute is a disagreement (or argument) that in whole or in part stems from a failure of semantic precision, the careful attention to the meaning of words (terms, definitions). 

• A competency is an underlying characteristic of successful performance, a mix of knowledge, skill, and motives (attitudes, values, beliefs and self-image). 
• However skilled you may be with the rules of logic, if you don’t have the attitude of objectivity, you won’t be successful at critical thinking. 
• Empathic communication involves the acknowledgment and explicit discussion of the feelings and emotional components of the parties in a discussion (or dispute), which over time can lead to understanding the other person’s paradigm, to a deep insight into how the other person views and responds to the world. 
• Paradigm, when applied to people, refers to a person’s perceptual framework (the mental processes) that governs what we attend to in the world around us, what data we extract and remember from our experiences, and what meaning we assign to these experiences. 

  • Each person has a unique paradigm and our ability to communicate effectively is in part dependent upon the similarity between people’s paradigms.  

  • Attending to, and understanding a person’s paradigm is thus part of being an effective communicator. 

  • Our personal paradigms develop (and may therefore be understood) from many sources (perspectives) including culture, gender, personality style (e.g. MBTI), family history, and education (e.g. academic discipline). 

• Contrary to people’s beliefs, there is no single problem solving model (or process) adequate for solving the entire range of problems that we experience on a daily basis. 

  • How to resolve a personality conflict, how to improve a person’s performance, how to improve a work system’s performance, how to determine the cause of an accident – for each type of problem specialized models have been developed. 

  • The commonality to all problem solving models is the gap analysis – carefully specifying the gap between actual and desired, between performance expectations or standards, and actual performance. 

  • In the words of William James: A problem well stated is half-solved.  The wisdom of James has been confirmed scientifically. 

  • Effective problem solving is essentially applied scientific thinking. Accident Root Cause Analysis involves a search for understanding both underlying conditions and precipitating events until you find interventions that will produce a durable decision. 

• Cause-effect diagrams are powerful visual tools for understanding and explaining complex relationships as captured in the expression a picture is worth a thousand words.
• Psychological Traps (Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions) refers to distortions in perception and memory that bias decision making, which can be controlled when understood.
  

Upon request I will email you the two page table that describes homework and classroom activities for each of the ten sessions, and grading criteria.

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