14 Summary of Clarity

Clarity: Getting Clear about Your Headscratcher

This section introduced a set of tools to help you get clear on your headscratcher. When thinking critically, you must plan on spending more time on clarity than you are typically comfortable spending. In fact, you and others may become restless—and someone might even say, “Can we move on now, solve the problem, and stop talking about it?” Remember, we don't like to spend too much time on clarity because we don't like to think that much; also—it's hard. Getting clear is not easy. It not only takes discipline, but it also can be deflating, uncomfortable, and frustrating. You get bunches of “I don't know” and sometimes “I don't care!”—but it's crucial to be clear. The single biggest reason why projects, initiatives, and goals fail is the headscratcher wasn't really clear in the first place. Get clear, and stay the course—it'll benefit you in the end.

Getting Started

Start with small stuff when you begin to implement critical thinking. Don't try to solve world hunger right out of the gate. Start with getting clear on your own personal communication, perhaps by deciding that you want to start writing simple, short e-mails. Use inspection to determine how to do this. Expand to meeting invitations; use why to articulate the meeting's purpose. When attending meetings, use inspection, why, and so what. Of course, be cautious about how you ask those questions; don't ask for clarity on every sentence in a meeting. Ask once, maybe twice—then stop. Others will catch on. Then use critical thinking on more complicated situations, such as project requirements and priorities. You'll love the results that come with thinking critically. You'll find that if you start a little at a time on the small stuff, you'll see the impact—and you'll definitely want to do more. Then you'll expand its use.

Practice

Just like any skill, critical thinking takes practice. You can't read a book about something and simply be good at it. We ask people to practice every day—but only for 5 or 10 minutes—on the small stuff first. After all, when you learned to ride a bike, you practiced on your street and around the neighborhood; you didn't practice by entering the Tour de France! When I say practice, I don't mean stopping your work to do so. Rather, it's practice that involves your work. You can do it as you are writing e-mails, as you prepare for conversations, and while you are in meetings. Ask small, short questions.

You'll practice only one tool at a time. Some of the tools need more time, such as the ingredients diagram, but that too can be rehearsed practically. Don't feel you have to fill in pages and pages of the diagram. Start at the high level first, and then stop.

It's also essential to practice with someone. If you're the only one you know who read this book, just paraphrase some of the tools for someone, and work with that person to practice. Grab a colleague and work together to define what faster means in the context of your work. Once you've practiced, you are ready to apply critical thinking to the big problems.

Clarity: Not about Solving the Problem

There's an overwhelming desire to solve the problem in the clarity stage. Many ideas about how to do so will come to mind, especially when you get into tools such as why and the ingredients diagram. These ideas might be great ones, or they might not work at all. Write them down and keep a list, but don't close off the clarity process. Keep getting clear. Too often, we implement an early conclusion, only to fail because we were still unclear as to what the problem really was.

When Am I Done with Clarity?

This is a great question—and one with no definitive answer. There is no formula for problem solving. If there were, we'd plug the world's problems into the formula, and we would have no problems. There are only ways to look at problems that generate ideas for solving them. Similarly, there is no definitive stopping point for getting clear. It's a judgment call. However, there is one rule that can aid your judgment. You are ready to move on when you can answer yes to this question: “Do the participants discussing this headscratcher all have a consistent definition of what it means, why we are working on it, who should be involved, why it needs to be solved, and what success looks like when it's solved?” In other words, have you spent time asking a sufficient number of questions about what the headscratcher really is? If the answer to that is yes, then you are clear (or certainly clearer than if you answered no). Then it's time to move on to conclusions and determine how to solve the problem. There's a test you can use to gauge clarity: ask all the participants discussing the headscratcher to write down what they each think the problem is (not the solution but the problem). If everyone writes the same thing down, you are clear!

However, the critical thinking process doesn't guarantee you've left clarity for good once you move on to conclusions—nor can it guarantee that your solutions are correct. It does, though, greatly increase the probability you won't have to revisit the issue and will come up with quality solutions the first time around. When no one is still scratching his or her head about the headscratcher, then everyone is clear, and it's time to move on to conclusions.

Can I Use Critical Thinking by Myself and Not with a Group?

The short answer is yes; however, it takes an extraordinary amount of self-discipline to be successful. You have to be brutally honest with yourself. When you ask yourself why something is important to solve, you just can't brush off answering questions with “Because it is.” Answer the question as if you were talking to someone else. That's the value you miss when you're doing this alone: there's nobody to keep you honest, to ask you the hard questions you don't want to answer. If you're capable of splitting your personality to play multiple roles, you can be successful. The person asking the questions is Person A. The person who answers them is Person B. Just don't let either role intimidate the other!