How to Improve Analytical Thinking Skills

Any team can fill a whiteboard with ideas in an hour. What most teams skip is the analytical thinking that tells them if they're solving the right problem.

An idea pointed at the wrong problem is wasted no matter how clever the idea is, and you usually don't discover this mistake for years.

By the end of this episode, you'll have four steps you can run on a real problem this week, the three thinking traps that can derail you, and a practice drill to sharpen your analytical thinking.

To help explain how and the power behind this skill, I will use a real-world example.

In the summer of 1854, cholera hit one small corner of London's Soho area, and by the time it burned out, 616 people were dead, most of them within a few streets of each other. The experts had an explanation ready. Cholera came from bad air, a poisonous vapor rising off filth and rot, called miasma, and that was the official position of the men in charge of public health.

A doctor named John Snow didn't argue with them. He walked to the General Register Office, asked for the list of the dead, took that list out into the streets, and knocked on doors until he found that nearly all of them had lived a short walk from one water pump on Broad Street.

We'll follow what he did as he applied each of the four steps I'm about to share. Let's get into it.

What Is Analytical Thinking? Analytical thinking gets confused with critical thinking all the time, and the difference decides which skill you reach for. Critical thinking judges a claim: someone tells you something, and you ask whether it's true, who is saying it, and what they left out. I covered that in the critical thinking episode, and it's worth watching if you haven't already seen it.

Analytical thinking starts when there is no claim on the table yet, just a mess. Sales are down twelve percent. Your best people keep leaving. A project that looked healthy in March is three months late in September. Nobody has handed you an argument to evaluate, so there's nothing yet to be critical of. You have to work out what's going on.

Snow's story shows the gap. Critical thinking, applied carefully in 1854, points you straight at the Board of Health, because they were the credible source making a claim, and the credible source was wrong.

In the critical thinking episode, we briefly touched on breaking a problem into pieces. In today's episode, we focus on breaking the problem into pieces and then analyzing each one.

Why Analytical Thinking Is Erod