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I was recently asked to review a new eBook called Critical Thinking – Getting it Right by Christian Knutson. Today, I wanted to share with you what the book is about and what my overall thoughts were.
The short version is that I think you would really dig this book. It’s a quick read, and it’s full of actionable items that you can actually put into practice. Christian has provided some incredible content in this book. It would be of enormous value to anybody who has to make decisions at work – so that means you, and every other engineer out there. Christian has a huge amount of expertise in this field, and it really shows when reading this book.
I highly recommend this book. Case in point. But, allow me to explain in detail, for the record, why I enjoyed this so much.
About the Author
To start, I thought it might be a good idea to share a little bit about the author. Christian Knutson (Twitter: @TheEngineerLead) has over 18 years’ experience leading both military and civilian teams. He’s a licensed civil engineer with an MBA from Colorado State University and has his Professional Project Manager designation from the Project Management Institute. His work has taken him to all corners of the globe – he’s lead multi-million dollar construction projects in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. As though that weren’t enough, Christian is also a regular contributor to Engineering.com and runs one of the most popular engineering leadership blogs on the net, www.EngineerLeader.com, which I recommend you check out – it’s a favourite of mine.
Needless to says Christian knows his stuff. He’s exactly the kind of person you’d want to learn critical thinking techniques from.
About the Book
The book is broken up into the following sections:
- What is critical thinking and why do I need to care?
- What critical thinking is and what it isn’t.
- Barriers to critical thinking
- Developing the critical thinking skill
- Methods to the madness – putting critical thinking to work for you
- The science project: solving it without losing your mind
What is Critical Thinking and Why do I Need to Care?
The first section covers exactly what you might expect. It’s an introduction to the book, and provides some compelling reasons why you should care about critical thinking. As Christian puts it on the first page of the book “The reason we need to care about critical thinking is simple: too much rides on this skill in our personal and professional lives to not have it.” I can’t help but agree.
The section goes on to explain that critical thinking is basically about recognizing you have a decision to make, establishing your options, grading each of those options in a systematic way, choosing a winner, and making it happen. This is especially useful for engineers, who often have to make decisions regarding complex systems with many alternative options.
What Critical Thinking Is and What It Isn’t
In section 2, Christian talks about the various myths that surround critical thinking and tries to dispel those before you move on through the book. For example, he explains that critical thinking is not a replacement for feelings or empathy in the decision-making process. Just because you have data to back up your decisions doesn’t mean you have a license to be a jerk. I thought this section was great – knowing what something isn’t is a great way to help learn what it is.
Barriers to Critical Thinking
The third section of the book covers barriers to critical thinking. The best way for me to explain this is that it’s a section on mindset. It you don’t approach critical thinking with the right frame of mind, you introduce bias into the whole process. This makes effective critical thinking all but impossible, which is a bad time.
Developing the Critical Thinking Skill
Section 4 discusses the elements of critical thinking and how they all come together when you finally present a decision to your superior. He talks about how important it is to present things in a logical manner with respect to having your decision adopted by the people you’re presenting to. Without a logical decision-making proceess, how can you present your findings logically? Here, he really sets the scene for the next section where he gives tried and true techniques for actually engaging in critical thinking.
Methods to the Madness – Putting Critical Thinking to Work for You
This was my favourite section. Here, Christian offers a number of different critical thinking techniques, complete with printable templates for some of them. He also explains where each method might be most appropriate, since not all decision-making situations are created equal. What I liked so much about this section was that it made the book very actionable. It’s not just a guide to tell you how important critical thinking is – it guides you through how you actually do it.
The Science Project: Solving it Without Losing Your Mind
Finally, the last section gives an example of the kind of situations where implementing critical thinking techniques is an especially good idea. He talks about the hair-brained ideas you boss comes up with at random – lovingly described as “science projects” in the book. I love that, because I’ve had the experience of my boss coming to me with a “great idea”, and I’m sure you have too. This final section sets the scene for when we should strongly consider digging out this book and choosing among the various methods for critical thinking and putting them into practice.
Closing thoughts
I really enjoyed this book. To be honest, I had never put that much thought into how decisions are made before reading this. I had a dozen “eureka!” moments while reading this, which is a lot of “eureka!” per page. At only $10 for the eBook, I think this is an absolute steal.
You can check it out on the Engineer Leader blog by clicking here.
If you do end up grabbing a copy, be sure to come back to the blog to let me know what you thought of it. I’d be very interested to know, and I’m sure Christian would, too!
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