Think tools

Many people see this as a product development strategy. You make something that just barely works to see if anyone wants it. The essence of this thinking tool is that you go out and try a bunch of things, without waiting around for a perfect answer. It also requires listening carefully for feedback, so you can get hints as to what to do next.

Speed and volume make up for making decisions in a noisy environment full of uncertainty. From there, you need to act like a detective to deduce the most likely disease and create a plan to cure it. During this, a wrong move might kill your patient, so you have to choose wisely. A good thinking tool from medicine is the idea of using symptoms to deduce a disease, and comparing with base rates to make highly-accurate decisions.

Your car is making a funny noise. Your business has stopped making money. The first thing to do is see what all the possible causes could be.

This requires study and knowledge. Next, you need to rule out as many as possible based on the symptoms you observe. Finally, of the options that are left, which are rare afflictions and which are fairly common? Knowing this can help you settle on a most likely diagnosis. Journalists rely on a ton of different thinking tools which allow them to write compelling stories that report the news fairly and accurately.

One of these thinking tools is fact-checking. Fact-checking may be time consuming, but it results in a much more accurate world-view than simply blindly following a stray comment.

Imagine if you had to report what you know in the New York Times. Would it need to be retracted later? A basic thinking tool of science is the controlled experiment. Keep all the variables the same, except the one you want to test, and see what happens. This requires meticulous preparation and design to prevent outside contamination from breaking your results. They have many conflicting variables that make drawing conclusions about their experiences much more difficult.

What if you approached your diets like a scientist? Your working routines? Would you still believe them after? How many of your beliefs about work and life withstand such scrutiny? Undergo such testing? Maybe you could benefit from a little more scientific thinking tools in your life.

The thinking tools of a mathematician depend on having a much higher standard of what constitutes a proof of something. One way you can see this thinking tool influence non-mathematical domains is in an adjacent field such as programming. Mathematical thinking tools help you be more rigorous, and spot mistakes which may turn out to be relevant. Programming encompasses a lot of thinking tools, but the most basic one is the algorithm.

Algorithms are a set of steps that can be defined precisely, so that they require no intelligence to perform each one, yet the net result is a useful product. A useful application of this is to look at the things you do and see which could be automated, simplified or refactored. Programmers can spot repeated code and try to abstract out the essence of what is redundant into something that can do what you need automatically.

Beyond just being able to write code yourself, you can think more like a programmer in many other domains of life. What things do you repeat often in your work which could be automated? What ambiguous process could you convert into a foolproof set of steps? Architects need to design buildings. These are large structures which may take years to build, and nonetheless meet all the criteria of clients, contractors, city planners and building codes. Oh, and they should also be beautiful.

To do this, architects need a suite of thinking tools and software to take an idea, and envision what it will be like, exactly, on a large scale, after millions of dollars have been spent. One of those tools is simply making a model. Selling often gets a bad rap. Although this is the stereotype, the actual reality is rarely like this.

Instead, salespeople work to deeply understand what the customer actually needs, and then match them with products and services that fill that void. What language do they use? How do their actions differ from their stated intentions? What can you infer about this? This is a tool you can apply far beyond making an extra commission. What about your friends? Your boss? The discipline embodied by military personnel is a very useful thinking tool, even outside of combat situations.

Discipline and routine become a safeguard against careless mistakes which could cost lives. By demanding conformity to those protocols, even when there is no danger, there is much less room for slip-ups. This kind of discipline is also present in another live-endangering field: medicine.

The Checklist Manifesto takes this idea of military routine and applies it to mundane things like hand-washing, which save lives by avoiding infection. Once you know the best way to do something, do it precisely and exactly, without sloppiness or somebody might get hurt. A common trick of grandmasters is playing blindfolded games. While this amazes spectators, it actually reinforces a useful practice—being able to see the game in your head, so you can calculate future moves your opponent makes.

This is often helpful in other domains outside of chess. Trying to visualize what might happen, and then compare that prediction to reality. One of my favorite books is The Design of Everyday Things. While this book is meant for designers, it is really a book of thinking tools designers should cultivate. A useful tool here is how something is made suggests how to use it. This set of questions can be used when consuming content to practice critical thinking and to think better.

These are particularly helpful when you instinctively agree or disagree with a piece of information, as it may be a sign of subjective thinking. Five Whys is an iterative interrogative technique. Think-Pair-Share is a simple collaborative thinking tool to use with a thinking buddy to debug a problem together, then share back what you found with the team.

These thinking tools were mostly designed by educators to help students learn better. Behavior Integration means ensuring that the behaviors required to achieve your goal — for example, a reduction in maternal and child deaths — are at the center of program planning and implementation. Focusing on behaviors helps programs achieve more rapid results and make better use of resources as behaviors are the element closest to outcomes we can change.

By focusing on behaviors, programs improve effectiveness by clarifying drivers of outcomes, facilitating design, and establishing meaningful markers of progress and impact. Focusing on behaviors also improves efficiency by prioritizing investments, creating a unifying program framework, identifying redundancies, and facilitating activity coordination. Think BIG Behavioral Integration Guidance helps organizations integrate behaviors into their programming to make the best use of available resources and achieve rapid results.