Thinking Intelligently: One Hundred Ways to Challenge How You Think (Intelligent Risk Series)

THINKING INTELLIGENTLY

Better leadership thinking; challenging assumptions, bias and conventional reasoning

The quality of a decision is shaped long before the decision is made.

It begins with how we think.

Leaders are expected to make sense of complexity, reconcile competing perspectives and reach conclusions from information that is rarely complete or unambiguous.

The difficulty is that the way an organisation thinks can quietly constrain the decisions available to it.

Assumptions become invisible. Familiar explanations gain authority. Evidence is interpreted through experience. Confidence grows faster than understanding. Consensus discourages challenge. And once a particular way of thinking becomes established, alternatives can become surprisingly difficult to see.

The result is a problem every leader encounters:

How do you know whether the organisation has reached the best conclusion—or simply the most familiar one?

Thinking Intelligently is about challenging the thinking that happens before judgement becomes action.

The second volume in the Intelligent Risk Series, it brings together 100 questions, provocations and reflections designed to help leaders examine assumptions, test reasoning, challenge established perspectives, explore alternatives and recognise the patterns of thought shaping organisational decisions.

It does not tell leaders what to think.

It helps them question how they are thinking.

Because better thinking is rarely produced by adding more information. Sometimes it begins by asking a better question of the information already available.

This is not a book that needs to be read from beginning to end.

Open it anywhere.

Bring one page into an executive meeting. Use another to test the reasoning behind a strategic decision. Put a question to a leadership team before consensus forms. Take one into a workshop when the conversation has become too comfortable. Return whenever familiar thinking begins producing familiar answers.

Some pages will strengthen an argument.

Others may give you reason to reconsider it.

Because leaders cannot consistently make better decisions without first improving the thinking that produces them.