Reference

Thinking methods

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Each method is a procedure you can follow today, with where it comes from, when to reach for it rather than another, and what it will not do. Naming the limit is what keeps a method honest.

Thinking Foundations

• Retrieval instead of rereading — Practising getting information out, rather than putting it in again.
• Deliberate practice — Practice aimed at a specific weakness, with immediate feedback, just past what you can do.
• Design a learning path — Planning what to learn from how you intend to use it, backwards.
• Explain it plainly — Finding the holes in your understanding by explaining without jargon.

Critical Thinking

• The six-question claim check — A fixed pass over any claim before you act on it.
• Methodical doubt — Temporarily setting aside everything that could be doubted, to see what remains.
• State what would refute it — Testing whether a claim is the kind of thing evidence could ever settle.

Problem Solving

• The four steps — A general procedure for any problem you do not immediately know how to solve.
• Work backwards — Start from the outcome you want and ask what would have to be true immediately before it.
• Decomposition that does not overlap — Splitting a problem into parts you can work on separately.
• Ask why until it is actionable — Following a symptom back to something you could actually change.
• First principles — Rebuilding from what you actually know rather than from how it is currently done.

Creative Thinking

• Inversion — Asking how to guarantee the bad outcome, then not doing those things.
• Six directions of thinking — Doing one kind of thinking at a time instead of all at once.
• Deliberate provocation — Introducing a deliberately unreasonable statement to break a pattern.
• Separate generating from judging — Running idea generation and evaluation as two activities, not one.

Logical Thinking

• Ask how common it is first — Putting the background frequency before the vivid detail.
• Updating by degrees — Moving a belief a proportionate amount when new evidence arrives, instead of all or nothing.

Decision Thinking

• The outside view — Estimating from what usually happens in cases like this, before reasoning from your own.
• Premortem — Imagining the failure has already happened, so the reasons become sayable.
• Separate the decision from the outcome — Judging a choice by what you knew at the time, not by how it turned out.
• Widen, test, distance, prepare — Four counters to the four ways decisions usually go wrong.
• Sort by cost of reversal — Spending your deliberation where undoing would be expensive.
• Know your walk-away — Deciding what you will do if there is no agreement, before you negotiate.

Systems Thinking

• Find the constraint first — Locating the one point that limits the whole, before improving anything.
• Find the loop — Seeing where an effect feeds back into its own cause.
• Look for the leverage point — Finding where a small change moves a lot — usually not where the noise is.
• And then what? — Following consequences past the one you intended.
• Check what the measure will do — Predicting how a target will be met in ways you did not intend.

Reflective Thinking

• The scout question — A check on whether you are trying to see clearly or trying to win.
• The three conversations — Untangling the three separate arguments hiding inside one difficult conversation.
• Sort by what is up to you — Separating the part of a situation you control from the part you do not.
• Change the frame of the problem — Deliberately widening the time and scale you are viewing a problem at.
• Find the excess and the deficiency — Locating a good judgement between two failure modes rather than on a scale of more and less.
• Mark the edge of what you know — Naming where your competence ends, so you can behave differently outside it.

Strategic Thinking

• Diagnosis, policy, action — The three parts a real strategy has, and whose absence makes one a list of hopes.
• Position before conflict — Improving your position so the contest is easier, rather than fighting harder.
• Three futures, one move — Stress-testing a plan against several futures instead of predicting one.

Argumentation

• Take an argument apart — Separating an argument into its working parts so you can see which one is weak.
• Build the strongest opposing case — Stating the other position so well that someone who holds it would agree with your version.
• Positions and interests — Getting underneath what each side is demanding to what each side needs.
• Find the crux — Locating the one belief that, if it flipped, would change both your minds.
• Answer first, then support it — Structuring an explanation so the conclusion comes before the reasoning.
• Make an idea stick — Six properties that make an idea survive being retold.
• Character, emotion, logic — The three appeals, and noticing which one is actually doing the work on you.

Questioning

• Observation, feeling, need, request — Saying a difficult thing in a way that can be heard.
• Make it safe first — Noticing when a conversation has stopped being safe, and repairing it before continuing.
• Socratic questioning — Testing a definition or belief by following its consequences until something breaks.