4 Types of Thinking Leaders Need to Use - and Teach (part 1)

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Well, hello. In this edition of The Manager Lab, we're going to be reviewing the digital article, The Four Types of Thinking Leaders Need to Practice and Teach, How and When to Use Expert, Critical, Strategic, and Systems Thinking. It's by Heidi Grant and Sean McCann, published in February of 2025. All right. How do you add value? How do we add value? That is a really good question. I think a question that we need to ask ourselves periodically throughout the year.

It usually means that someone has gone above and beyond what was asked or expected of them. When someone really adds value, they're doing something different, right? They're going they're going beyond what's expected. For example, imagine that your manager asks you to source three vendors that can deliver a particular service.

So you come back and you provide those lists of three vendors and you provide all of their respective pros and cons and a potential solution that you can find in-house rather than outsourcing it. That is adding value. That is going above and beyond. And this example really illustrates how adding value arises not just from solving the problem, but by solving the right problem in ways that no one really expected to arrive at an even better outcome.

Now, these solutions do not come from our everyday ways of thinking. They are a higher level thought process, if you will. They come from the four types of thinking that this article reviews. Expert thinking, critical thinking, strategic thinking, and systems thinking. Now, these four types of thinking aren't simply synonyms for good thinking. They each have unique features. They're designed to deal with very specific kinds of challenges.

They're usually appropriate in very select situations under certain conditions, and they have very different end states in mind, different outcomes, if you will. And so for managers effectively teaching people how to hone these skills, you have to begin with a very foundational understanding of them. Now, these ways of thinking are not natural. The article is quick to point out that we have to be very deliberate when we engage in them.

In other words, they're not what our brains will normally do on autopilot. So we're going to explore these four distinct types of thinking in depth, what they mean and when they should be used, and maybe even some tips on how to use our AI friends, our AI tools as a different thinking partner during our discussion. Okay, number one, and we will probably only get through a couple of these in this cast and then we'll go, we'll finish up in the next one. But number one is expert thinking.

It's rooted in very deep, deep knowledge in a particular field. It's usually accompanied by years of experience, lots of training, very consistent practice over a long period of time. Experts are types of people that can recognize patterns. They engage in habits that are fine-tuned. They're very nuanced, if you will. They rely on assumptions that enable them to really see a situation with such speed and accuracy that, you know, novices are just not able to do.

Now, if you're an expert and you want to use artificial intelligence, AI, it's the expert who can immediately distinguish fact from fiction, right? So if you've ever, you know, did some AI work on a subject that you're very familiar with, with AI, you can immediately recognize truth from fiction, right? I mean, you know that what the AI platform is telling you is not true. So I've been there. I'm sure you've been there as well. Now, when do you use expert thinking?

Well, when a situation requires a very quick, automatic response based on a well-defined set of rules. So just to use kind of like an engineering analogy, your refrigerator is not working. You need an expert in refrigeration to come in and get your refrigerator working. You don't need a lot of systems thinking. You don't need a lot of critical thinking. You just need it done.

That's expert thinking. The other time to really use expert thinking is when prior experience and knowledge can offer a very clear solution. Obviously, someone who's been in a certain field for a very long period of time, you're going to rely on that person, that person's experience and their knowledge to help you solve a problem.

Okay, so that's expert thinking. Now, how do we distinguish that from the second type of thinking in this article, critical thinking? Well, critical thinking requires us to push pause on an otherwise automatic stream of expert thinking. I love that. So you're using expert thinking up to a certain point. You're not finding the solution, and now you have to switch into critical thinking.

So it involves stopping to first surface and then question the underlying assumptions upon which our expert conclusions rest. When we engage in critical thinking, we evaluate the quality of the information at our disposal. Is it current? Is it accurate? Is it comprehensive? Is there something that we're missing? Do we need to go outside and seek alternative perspectives, multiple viewpoints, perhaps?

Critical thinking is about asking why and not simply accepting even long-held truths at face value. Now, a well-known critical thinking technique, and I used to use this a lot back in my former coaching, executive coaching days, is called reframing. It's useful for generating more innovative solutions to existing challenges. And so as a coach trying to help your client really see things from multiple different perspectives, it was very useful to use reframing as a tool.

So, for instance, city planners looking to reduce traffic congestion might first think of adding more roads or more lanes. But when they ask a different question, how can we reduce the number of cars on the road? Both of those things would reduce congestion, right? But suddenly, the solution incentivizing public transportation and remote work become more salient, more important. So through reframing, a whole host of solutions may present themselves that were overlooked before.

And, of course, you can use AI to help you research, to help you surface assumptions here that you might be making to let the AI tool, you know. Give you multiple perspectives, even ask it to reframe the problem for you and see what happens. So, when should we use critical thinking? Well, number one, when experts disagree on a solution, we need another higher level form of thinking. or when traditional approaches fail to solve the problem.

And the last way we use critical thinking is when the symptoms of a problem just keep recurring.

So that's the first two types of thinking that this article addresses, expert thinking and critical thinking. And in our next cast, we'll look at the next two strategic thinking and we'll finish with systems thinking. So until the next time we meet in the Manager Lab, do good work. Music.