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Welcome to the Potential Leader Lab podcast. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today, we're going to talk about why leaders need to do less and think more. As always, I'm going to start you off with three quotes, get us in the right frame of mind to think about the thing we're going to think about. So the first one is Daniel Levitin. He says, Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Next, we have Christopher Hitchins. The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks. And then finally, Aristotle. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Now, my reasoning for this discussion is that most of, not all, but most of what leaders work on requires what I'll call cognitive heavy lifting. And just so we have a common understanding, let's define what that means. I'm going to define it with two different, I'll give you two different references for it, and then taxonomy or a framework. The first two are books, and you're probably familiar with both of them, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
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What we're talking about here is a system two. So system one operates automatically and quickly with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. So system one thinking is easy. System two allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of system two are often associated with the subjective experience of agency choice and concentration. The second book I'll reference is Deep Work by Cal Newport. I'm a huge fan of this definition of deep work. Professional activity performed in a state of distraction free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate. My theory and what I will support from a standpoint of my belief is this is the work leaders need to do. Now, again, not all the time. Nobody's going to do this 100 % of the time. But I believe that leaders need to think and that we have this mindset that leaders act. Leaders do act. Leaders do need to take action, but they also need to do the cognitive heavy lifting to understand what action needs to be taken because they are in charge of directing others.
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Most of the time you have a yeah, but heavy is the head, right? You've got some big decisions to make, and those take time and effort, and they take thinking. I don't know how we do that. I don't know how everybody does that. I don't know if it's done on the fly, if it's done in five minutes, 10 minutes. But I'm talking about taking time to think and also to write, which we'll talk about later. These are really higher order thinking skills. It's important from both a leadership development standpoint and a business acumen standpoint. I'm just going to share with you Bloom's taxonomy. This is where higher order thinking skills come from. It's actually from the field of education. They talk about these levels. The levels are remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Now, what we refer to as higher order thinking skills are the last three. So if you think about remembering, understanding, and applying, that's really when you were in school. You learned multiplication. You remembered multiplication tables. Two times two, two times three, you remembered. You understood it and you applied it. Those are the cost of admission, we need those things.
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But then we need to develop the ability to analyze, evaluate, and create. Now, I think those are in order. Analyze, first of all, which is, to be honest with you, 99 % of the people that I work with, any leader in an organization is really good at analyzing. And essentially, when you analyze, you tear stuff apart. You break it down into its components, and you look at each of the individual things and you figure out if it's good, bad, whatever that might be. Now, the next step up from that is evaluating. So I've tored apart, I'm looking at it, it's all laying there on the table. Are all of the parts good? If I put it back together, will it work again? Do I need to put different parts in? So I start evaluating. Now, and again, I think as we go up, fewer percentages, we spend less time getting good at these things. How am I evaluating? That's the question you have to ask yourself, right? And then finally creating. I'm making something that didn't exist. I'm making something new. If you go back to deep work, it creates new value, improved skill, hard to replicate.
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That's what the job of a leader is in a company to create strategy. You're trying to create things of value that don't exist that are going to improve the value of the organization, improve your skill and others, and be hard to replicate. Again, widen the moat between you and the competition. It doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen on the fly. It doesn't happen on the back of a napkin. It happens with hard work and heavy cognitive lifting. Now, the questions associated with each of these, with remembering who and what, with understanding how would you generalize, how would you express because you want to understand, with applying, how do you demonstrate that? With analyzing, how can you sort the different parts? With evaluate, what criteria do you use to assess it? Then creation is what would happen if... If you think about that, if you think about this in the context of a pyramid like Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, you have create at the top. It and you want to think about how do you develop people so that they're thinking through, analyzing, evaluating, creating, because that's what's going to move the needle in your organization.
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That's what leaders need to do. Now, we have those things. I also want to tell you that writing is linked to thinking, especially critical thinking. I know you're going to ask the question, do you mean typing? I actually don't. There are studies out there that show I'm not criticizing. You can type, it'll work. It's not going to not work. But the act of actually writing is different than typing. You can do the research. Don't have to trust me. Go out and do the research. Now, critical thinking is a thinking in which you question, analyze, interpret, and evaluate. Sound familiar? Analyze, interpret, evaluate. Analyze, evaluate, create. And make a judgment about what you read, hear, say, or write. Critical thinking is a thinking in which you question, analyze, interpret, and evaluate. Make a judgment about what you read, hear, say, or write. Now, great writing requires observation, reflection, analysis, and an artful presentation of information and editing. Critical thinking is the discipline of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing information gathered from or generated by observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication as a guide to belief and action. That's what you're responsible for teaching others as a leader.
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That's part of leadership development. By improving your writing, you can improve your thinking. It's wonderfully simple, but misunderstood relationship. If you become a better writer, you become a better thinker. Writing takes time. Again, I know this is a long list, but critical thinking is the discipline of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing information gathered from or generated by observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication as a guide to belief and action. That's what you're responsible for teaching others as a leader. That's part of leadership development. And by improving your writing, you can improve your thinking. It's wonderfully simple, but misunderstood relationship. If you become a better writer, you become a better thinker. Writing takes time. And again, I know this was a long list, but critical thinking is the discipline of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing information gathered from or generated by observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication as a guide to belief and action. Takes time. Thinking and writing are connected. You become a better thinker by being a better writer and that leads us to the ability to analyze, evaluate, and create. Then we can perform the professional activity, perform in a state of distraction, free concentration that pushes your cognitive capabilities to the limit for the reasoning of creating new value, improving your skill, and creating things that are hard to replicate.
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If it was easy, everybody would do it. The question now is, how do you go about doing it? Do you? You don't have to. But understand, the more you write, the better you think. Because it forces you to put things on paper. It forces you to look at it objectively because we can... I'm sure you've all experienced this. I have thought things that in my head made perfect sense until I spoke them. I actually sit in meetings and it's an amazing thing for people to vocalize their thoughts. You don't know how many times I've heard somebody in a meeting say, That doesn't sound as good as it did when I was thinking it. Now, that's great if you have that opportunity. If you have a peer group, if you have people you can do that with, then you can talk things through as well. But writing them down forces you to organize your own thoughts. When you're talking, you're actually trying to force other people to organize your thoughts for you. That's a different activity. If you want to do that, fine, but you're beholden to them to make sense of what you're saying, versus if you write it down, you're forcing yourself to deal with it.
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Imagine you go through the editing process. Now, I will tell you, I don't like it. I do it now because I write things out to share with people, and it is painful to do editing, but it's so easy to go back and go, Oh, that doesn't know. That's repetitive. I don't need to say that. That's not the point I was trying to make. That doesn't sound good. I f you think if you do that on a routine basis, you get into that practice, that writing and thinking practice. Imagine how much more effective and efficient you might be in all stages of your leadership. As always, I'm going to take you out of this session with three quotes to consider. The first by one of my favorites, Alvin Toffler, who said, The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn unlearn and relearn. John F. Kennedy said, and he said it in the 60s, and it's still more true today, Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. And finally, Soren Kierkegaard, an existential philosopher, said, People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
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Well, remember, all can, most won, and few do. And will you be one of those relentless few who explore, experiment, and evolve so that you can have a positive impact on the cognitive, emotional, and psychological states of those you care about? If your answer is yes, then you are leading and I thank you because the world needs what you have to offer and we need it now. Please take care of yourself, take care of each other, and I hope to see you back in the lab soon. And will you be one of those relentless for you to explore, experiment, and evolve? So you have a positive impact on the cognitive, emotional, and psychological state of those you care about. If your answer is yes, then you are leading and I thank you because the world needs what you have to offer, and we need it now. Take care of yourself, take care of each other, and I hope to see you back in the lab soon.
