critical thinking | P Morgan BrownP Morgan Brown

I’m reading Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, it’s a fascinating (if a bit soporific) read on how to see how things work together as a whole, rather than as individual pieces. One of the things that has struck me about the book so far is Meadows observation that we’re much better at identifying “stocks,” physical things, like bank account balances, but not so good on the “flows” that impact and change stocks. (Here’s a nice primer on systems thinking.) Those interactions are harder for us – the in-between is elusive.

It resonated with me again today when I read this post from Bobulate:

So focused are we to get from Point A to B, we forget to account for the spaces in between. Travel time, rest stops, project hand-offs, intermissions, training sessions, building foyers, sleep. These transition points — the things getting in the way of Point B — rarify them invisible. And with that, we may only be seeing part of what we really do.

Which has me thinking further – when we’re so focused on the individual points, how much do we miss? It seems the process, the in-between, the meat, if you will, are lost. And if those are lost how much learning is lost?

And if our focus is only on the end points, and not on the flow, then how many solutions are we missing just by looking through our well-worn, polarized lens?

Too much, is my answer. It’s time to stop missing the forest for the trees.

Maybe this sounds like you. I read a ton. More than I ever have in my entire life. I reader hundreds of articles a day out of my Google Reader, I read (or skim) thousands of tweets, I read a shade more than a hundred emails each day, I’m reading more books thanks to my Kindle and lets not forget to toss in instant messages, text messages and the occasional (gasp!) magazine.

It’s a lot of information. It’s a lot of consumption. And it doesn’t leave a lot of time for synthesis.

And that’s where I think we’ve got the ratio wrong.

Because synthesis is really the important part of all of this knowledge exchange. Taking an idea, an argument, and thinking about it, challenging it and putting it up against what you believe and seeing what comes of that process and then contributing that output back is the ultimate goal of this conversation.

And it’s hard.

And that’s why I believe we (I) have the ratio wrong. Right now I am guilty of a consumption rate and time commitment far in excess of any time committed to synthesis. It may be 90% consumption 10% synthesis. And that seems like a giant missed opportunity.

Maybe I need to give us a bit more credit, we all parse things quickly, doing a Malcolm Gladwell-esque Blink exercise as we triage the content we consume; but do we really sit and think of the implications of what we just read? I know I don’t do enough of it.

So I say, let’s get the ratio right. Let’s do more synthesis and less consumption. Let’s do the hard, rewarding work of taking what we’re hearing and adding our own critical analysis to it and then contribute that back to the conversation instead of simply vacuuming up what’s out there.

I believe we’ll all be better off for it, now that I think about it.

P Morgan Brown

A work in progress

Tag Archives: critical thinking

The Space Between

Getting the ratio right