Upgrading Thinking by being able to assess their use of these elements of thinking.
All the eight “parts” or elements (purpose, problem, assumptions, point of view, evidence, concepts, inferences and conclusions, consequences) of our statements and thoughts when verbalized and finalized have to be: Clear, Accurate, Precise, Relevant, Deep, Broad, Logic, Significant, Fair.
Good Thinking has to meet Nine Universal Intellectual Standards: Clarity, Accuracy, Precision, Relevance, Depth, Breath, Logicalness, Significance, Fairness.
These universal intellectual standards must be applied to thinking whenever one is interested in checking the quality of reasoning about a problem, issue, or situation. To think critically entails having command of these standards. To help Clients learn them, Coaches should pose questions which probe Client thinking; questions which hold Clients accountable for their thinking; questions which, through consistent use by the Coach in the Coaching Conversation sessions, become internalized by Clients as questions they need to ask themselves.
The ultimate goal, then, is for these questions to become infused in the thinking of Clients, forming part of their inner voice, which then guides them to better and better reasoning. While there are many universal standards, the following nine are some of the most essential:
CLARITY – Questions that focus on clarity include:
Clarity is the gateway standard. If a statement is unclear, we cannot determine whether it is accurate or relevant. In fact, we cannot tell anything about it because we don’t yet know what it is saying. For example, the question, “What can be done about the effectiveness of our middle management staff?” is unclear. In order to address the question adequately, we would need to have a clearer understanding of what the person asking the question is considering the “problem” to be. A clearer question might be “What can our upper management do to ensure that our middle managers have the skills and abilities which help them function successfully on the job and in their daily decision-making?”
ACCURACY – Questions focusing on making thinking more accurate include:
PRECISION – Questions focusing on making thinking more precise include:
RELEVANCE – Questions focusing on relevance include
DEPTH – Questions focusing on depth of thought include
BREATH – Questions focusing on making thinking broader include
LOGICALNESS – Questions that focus on making thinking more logical include