Quality
Critical Thinking
“When "we've always done it this way" is the only answer”
The problem is rarely a lack of intelligence. It is a lack of time to reflect. Organisations decide fast, validate one another, mistake consensus (so often forced, or merely consented to) for accuracy. Groupthink is more comfortable than productive disagreement, and its cost only shows later, in the wrong decisions no one had the courage to contest.
Critical thinking is not mere scepticism. It is the capacity to ask "how do we know this?" without breaking the relationship, and to withstand the discomfort of the answer.
Thinking well is not thinking more. It is learning to doubt what seems obvious. It is learning to think about how you think.
Level 1
Provoke
A session in which the team is confronted with its own assumptions. Exercises that expose cognitive biases, groupthink, the illusion of consensus. Uncomfortable, and productive.
AbbVie, Talking Sessions, 2018-2019
A cycle of conversations with the extended management team, no PowerPoint, no templates to fill in, born from a request by the participants themselves. Sessions that led the team to question the labels it uses and the standard outcomes it chases. At the end, they asked for more, choosing the themes they found most meaningful and most missed.
Level 2
Develop
A structured programme to build questioning into everyday work. In practice: who asks the difficult question in each meeting, how a disagreement gets recorded, what happens when a decision turns out badly.
Academia VdA, 2025
At VdA's in-house academy, a cycle of sessions on the metacompetencies of thinking: listening, metacognition, critical thinking. The lawyers collectively mapped the assumptions no one questions in the legal context and practised counter-position: building the best argument against their own stance. And they worked through Harry Frankfurt's distinction between truth, falsehood and bullshit.
Level 3
Transform
When the organisation needs to relearn how to think together. An intervention that works on critical thinking as a cultural quality — from leadership to management practices, through the way decisions are made and mistakes are handled.
Solvay, 2024-2025
Metaconversations with the HR leadership team. Through informal conversations and direct observation of meetings, the team identified its own decision patterns: which assumptions are never voiced, which disagreements go quiet, which consensus is just haste. Naming them gave the team back the possibility of thinking together.