Critical Thinking in the Information Age
A few months ago, my parents asked me (over a family lunch), “What is it, that you do?”
My previous answer (“I am a Consultant”) wasn’t doing it for them anymore. They really wanted to know what companies pay me to do. It took me a few more visits before I could come up with an answer that, not only helped them to understand my vocation, but which I felt happy with. It was a good exercise in introspection. Here’s what I came up with:
“I look at information and give the people in charge, the reasons they need, to make the right decisions”
My parents were satisfied with the answer - although still somewhat confused. They didn’t understand why organisations needed that kind of help. That led me to do some more thinking.
Often, the various levels of management in a company are so busy with the day-to-day mechanics of their business, that they find themselves working in silos and never seem to find the time to step away from business-as-usual and wonder if their collective efforts are actually working together towards a common goal. When a company is faced with business-as-usual issues, multiple transformation projects under a program of change, the drive to cut costs and improve margins and any number of other targets, stepping away and looking from the outside in, is not always possible. And even if it was, they are not best placed to do anything about it - because they are so busy with the day-to-day.
That’s where I come in. I can stand outside of the day-to-day and look from the outside in, gather information, apply critical thinking and inject the expertise that I have gained with multiple verticals over more than 30 years and provide actionable insights that drive decisions. And that is a niche service in today’s fast-paced, information saturated business world.
It’s a niche, because we live in a time where finding people who can apply critical thinking to figure things out and create innovative ideas is in short supply. It is as much art as it is science. The science (data and information) is readily available. But the art can only come from spending a lot of time in a broad set of business environments at different levels - often from the ground up.
I understand why this is confusing to my parents. Their work days were spent in the Industrial Age, where they were (for the most part) small cogs in a big machine. They produced something tangible that played a part in a bigger product. We are living in the Information Age, where information (not labour) is the new currency. That doesn’t mean that labour is not essential to our way of life; it most certainly is and it is as valuable as information. Some believe that AI and Robotics will remove the need for people to deliver manual labour - that’s a bigger conversation for another time.
Information, in and of itself, doesn’t deliver value. Many organisations are great at gathering huge amounts of data, but not so great at generating value from that data. That requires data literacy.
Data literacy is the ability to interpret data. To combine and overlay relational data so that it tells a story that drives decisions through actionable insights. That is the real value.
That’s THOUGHT LEADERSHIP – just one of the pillars of what we do really well.
I could tell my parents that I do thought leadership. But that’ll take more than one lunch!