Critical Thinking Skills for Engaging Conversations

Critical thinking is essential for well-reasoned analysis, sound decision making, and productive contestability processes.

In this 1-hour masterclass, Ashley Barnett, Intelligence Training Lead covers two useful techniques for improving the quality of debates and deliberations.

• The Reasoning Stress Test - a method for efficiently evaluating analytic reasoning and identifying reasoning errors, developed with funding from the US Intelligence Community
• Hypothesis Trees - a method for generating hypotheses or alternative outcomes and formulating coherent estimates about their plausibility

Both techniques can be used to facilitate productive and collaborative discussions and to provide clear and helpful feedback about people’s reasoning and judgements.

The Masterclass is drawn from a course that teaches the essential elements of critical thinking and several skills and concepts that help us evaluate reasoning and grapple with uncertainty. Many of the techniques are used by intelligence agencies around the world.