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Dr. Werner is Assistant Professor, College of Nursing, Kearney Division, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Kearney, Nebraska; and Dr.Bleich is President and Chief Executive Officer, NursDynamics, Chesterfield, Missouri.
The authors have disclosed no potential conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise.
All organizations depend on leaders making sound decisions to fulfill their missions. Critical thinking, the analytic precursor to decision making and action taking, enriches best practice organizational outcomes. In health care, these decisions range from resource management, care delivery, program development, and more. Further, moral-ethical issues arise, constituting a different kind of decision making than those mentioned. Decision making can occur without careful critical thinking. The relationship between critical thinking and decision making should be closely linked. The authors posit that, with enhanced critical thinking, better decisions can be made with awareness of downstream and upstream consequences.
Paul and Elder ( 2008 ) stated that critical thinking is "the art of analyzing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it" (p. 2). The professional development educator, with this definition in mind, is charged with helping leaders eliminate bias, distortion, partiality, and more to cultivate leader effectiveness in making sound decisions. Learning strategies that help individuals apply critical thinking within their job roles add value to organizational well-being.
Helping Leaders Define Criticality
In life, everyone has the ability to think and problem solve. From the early onset of life, trial and error emerges as one way of learning. When success is reached, individuals begin to test how to apply one satisfactory result to other situations. In this process, it is intuitively discovered that some strategies work in one scenario, but not necessarily in all situations. This is the early childhood onset of critical thinking, to process the experience where a thought worked to another experience, where it may also work or not work. Is is known that brain science now informs on how the brain processes, retains, summons, and uses information in life ( Howard, 2012 ).
When training leaders, it is initially important to spend time in concept validation: what is critical thinking? In the movie Men in Black ( Spielberg, Parkes, MacDonald, & Sonnenfeld, 1997 ) is a scene in which a group of job applicants taking an aptitude test, not knowing what...