Honing Critical and Creative Thinking Skills
Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, must be engaged in some publicity program for his school. He appeared in an article in Sunday’s New York Times and wrote an editorial in today’s Financial Times. Both articles argue for the importance of critical and creative thinking, and lament the inability of today’s MBA programs to provide the necessary training. “True value in business comes not from applying quantitative analytical techniques to choose from among existing options but from creating options that do not yet exist,” writes Martin. He points to a major barrier to critical, creative thinking: the overreliance on theories and models that are seldom multidisciplinary, and advocates a more “liberal arts” (interdisciplinary, cross-cultural) approach to business school curriculum.
For those of us who are marketing and communication practitioners, our MBAs behind us, what can we do to improve our critical and creative thinking skills? In this time of New Year’s resolutions, I can think of three things I want to do or do more of. First, I plan on reading more—not just more business books, but more reading, in general. Being an immigrant, I have become, belatedly, very interested in politics and history. And, these days, healthcare is inextricably linked to politics. Second, I am going to look for the right venue for developing my thinking skills—a workshop or some other form of professional or personal development, or participating in a novel project. Third, I want to spend more time with my clients and my creative teams, working with them to look at problems and issues from different perspectives, writing tighter briefs, asking the creative teams more questions (and in turn giving more ideas the benefit of the doubt).