Critical Thinking - Personal Experience in the Workplace

Critical thinking and the application of thinking is used everyday in real life and organizations. With the economy today and competition an organization must make good sound decisions that will help the organization grow. If a decision is not well thought out it could cost an individual and organization. This paper will describe, explain critical thinking, and provide a personal experience, the importance and benefits of critical thinking in the decision-making processes.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the ability to frame the problem, make a decision, what is the impact and finally implement the decision. There are many times that management make decisions without using these steps and usually the wrong decisions are not made. Organization should make sure that the people in their management positions that make critical decisions that would effect the organization are good critical thinkers. Critical thinking is a type of thinking used to come to a good sound decision in personal life, the workplace and in school. One example of getting the students to use critical thinking is in math. The teachers would give the students a math problem, where the students need to use the steps to come to the right answer. Critical thinking helps develop a plan, carryout the plan to meet the projected goal.

Personal Experience in the Workplace

On personal experience I had that concerned critical thinking was a presentation that my manager handed me. It was about how to present the team concept, diversity issues and the organization policies to the employees at one of our town halls that only included all the areas of our department. I had to find a way to make this presentation where it was not boring, it got the message across and everyone would understand it. I wanted the information to be accurate, fun and creative. The first step I did was to gather all the information that I needed to present, after that what the criteria will be, that I would be using in my presentation, and how would I present it. I decided the best way to make the presentation and be able to keep my audience's attention would be to do a PowerPoint presentation using fun pictures and animation. I started my presentation first with the organizations' policies, then from there I got into the team concept that the organization was going too, talked about diversity and that the organization wanted each department to come up with activities to help the employees embrace diversity. The activities were also part of the presentation. In the presentation were the plans, the steps and the dates that all these ideas were going to get implemented. After the presentation I opened it up to questions to make sure that the all the employees understand and addressed all their concerns. My manager was pleased with the presentation and thought the all the employees understood. She stated that