By John Adair
Practical thinking for better decisions
Subject
Themes
Three forms of applied thinking underpin effective leadership and professional life: decision making, problem solving, and creative thinking. Though they overlap considerably, each serves a distinct purpose. Decision making centres on choosing between courses of action. Problem solving pursues solutions to obstacles. Creative thinking generates new ideas. Mastering the processes behind all three does not guarantee outcomes, since luck inevitably plays its part, but it ensures that well-tested methods are applied purposefully.
Three forms of applied thinking underpin effective leadership and professional life: decision making, problem solving, and creative thinking. Though they overlap considerably, each serves a distinct purpose. Decision making centres on choosing between courses of action. Problem solving pursues…
The approach to decision making and problem solving presented here sits within a broader tradition of management thinking that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century, drawing on insights from military leadership, cognitive psychology, and organisational behaviour. Its central premise,…
Beneath conscious thought lies a powerful dimension of the mind that continues working even when attention is directed elsewhere. This subconscious faculty, termed the Depth Mind, performs the same functions as conscious thought (analysing, synthesising, and valuing) but does so during sleep,…
One of the most consequential barriers to effective thinking is not a lack of information or analytical ability, but the presence of assumptions that operate beneath conscious awareness. These invisible constraints shape how problems are perceived, which solutions are considered, and which…
All purposeful thinking rests on three interconnected mental functions: analysing, synthesising, and valuing. These functions operate in every form of applied thinking, whether the task is making a decision, solving a problem, or generating creative ideas. Understanding how they work, recognising…
A fundamental distinction separates the quality of a decision-making process from the quality of its outcomes. Wrong decisions and bad decisions are entirely different things, and confusing them leads to misguided conclusions about what makes thinking effective. Grasping this distinction is…
Thinking skills cannot be acquired through formal instruction in the way that chemistry or mathematics can. No established academic curriculum covers decision making and creative problem solving as a unified discipline, and no body of empirical research provides a standard textbook. The task of…
The human brain contains roughly 10,000 million cells, each capable of linking with approximately 10,000 neighbours, producing a staggering number of possible combinations. Yet most people use only a fraction of this extraordinary capacity. The brain itself is merely the physical hardware; the mind…
Effective decision making follows a five-step framework: define the objective, collect relevant information, generate feasible options, make the decision, and implement and evaluate. These steps resemble five notes of music. Logically they proceed in sequence, but the mind darts about, combining…
Thinking is both a solitary and a social activity. Leaders must decide how far to make decisions after silent reflection and how far to consult others. Three elements always shape leadership situations: the leader's personality and character, the situation itself (partly constant, partly varying),…
A problem is literally "something thrown in front of you," a word sharing Greek origins with "ballistics." In puzzles like the nine dots or six matchsticks, all the elements of the solution already exist within the given material. Solving such puzzles does not change your life. A decision, by…
When conventional problem-solving techniques have failed and you find yourself digging the same hole deeper, it is time to try a more creative approach. Rather than worrying at a problem like a terrier, you may need to dig your hole somewhere else entirely. Brainstorming, introduced in the 1930s,…
Brainstorming tackles one form of unconscious assumption, but deeper creative problem solving requires challenging the invisible frameworks that constrain thought more broadly. The nine dots puzzle, first published in 1969, demonstrates this perfectly. People impose an imaginary boundary around the…
Developing thinking skills is fundamentally a task of self-development. Decision making and creative problem solving are not formal academic subjects; there is no structured curriculum supported by empirical research. Winston Churchill captured the spirit well: "I am always willing to learn, but I…
By John Adair
Subject
Themes
Three forms of applied thinking underpin effective leadership and professional life: decision making, problem solving, and creative thinking. Though they overlap considerably, each serves a distinct purpose. Decision making centres on choosing between courses of action. Problem solving pursues solutions to obstacles. Creative thinking generates new ideas. Mastering the processes behind all three does not guarantee outcomes, since luck inevitably plays its part, but it ensures that well-tested methods are applied purposefully.