Critical thinking is one of the most in-demand soft skills, but it can be difficult to see how important it is on a day-to-day basis without going through a real-life critical thinking example. In the video below, we explain how many people could misinterpret the results from Microsoft’s recent 4-day workweek experiment by failing to put into action the key critical thinking skill of synthesis.

Synthesize is phase 2 of the critical thinking roadmap and it’s about making sense of information (i.e., determining meaning) and decoding significance (i.e., identifying what is important). A quick review of Microsoft’s experiment may lead many to a conclusion that is unlikely to represent an accurate understanding of what happened in the example, and critically, what should be done as a result.

By applying two of the 16 critical thinking skills – pattern recognition and identifying relevance – you can arrive at a much more robust interpretation of the experiment.

The potential impact of critical thinking is significant as you can observe in this critical thinking example. According to a survey by a leading provider of critical thinking-related services Macat, 84% of senior managers believe their organization suffered a loss due to an absence of critical thinking in their workforce. In this particular example, it is easy to see how people could get stuck on the egocentrism plateau – one of three barriers to critical thinking – and only see the situation from one perspective.