There are many ways to improve your thinking skills. One way is by practicing critical thinking. Teachers require their students, from elementary school on through college and graduate school, to do research to gather information, analyze the validity of data, determine the strengths and weaknesses of arguments, and so on. Unfortunately, this method seems to work well only while students are in school. Once they graduate, most quickly conform to the noncritical (often political) thinking that pervades the real world.

We have to go a step further to improve our thinking skills. Formal root cause analysis such as the 5 Whys and fishbone diagrams can, with practice, significantly improve our thinking skills when applied to real-world problems. A3 reports can do this as well. But if we really want to get good at thinking, we must also carefully see what’s actually happening in front of our eyes and combine that with root cause analysis.

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