In today’s rapidly changing digitized world technological shifts taking place in the blink of eye. Everything started shifting from ‘E’ (electronic) to ‘A’ (automation), natural intelligence getting replaced by artificial intelligence and instead of human beings the chatbots are responding to all your queries and clearing your doubts. This is a high time to enrich yourself with all six skills detailed in earlier articles and develop your analytical thinking abilities as the 7th most powerful and influential technical skill.
Why it is important to have good Analytical Thinking skills?
Highly developed analytical thinking abilities and thereby leveraging analytical skills at your workplace is a professional requirement of today.
By mastering analytical thinking skills, you breakdown the complex problems into smaller manageable parts, analyze them, think of them, and based on the facts, data, and information you come out with a conclusion and finally arrive at a solution.
Analytical thinking abilities are not only limited in the areas of a professional career but also equally useful in managing home or society problems, especially for the students. Acquiring this skill helps students to take rational and definitive decisions, make them future employable, and trigger entrepreneurship skills.
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10 Steps of Analytical Thinking –
- 1. Identifying a problem or an issue to be analyzed and solved.
- 2. Observing, listening, reading, and gathering relevant information to identify the possible causes of the problem.
- 3. Examining and extracting the data or information.
- 4. Using logic, reasons, and applying the ‘fish-bone technique’ wherever applicable.
- 5. Separating complex information into smaller parts.
- 6. Further sub-division of information into manageable components, may be by charts, diagrams, or graphs.
- 7. Eliminating extraneous information from the flow.
- 8. Finding out a pattern and understanding the trend, nature of the problem.
- 9. Organizing and identifying many possible solutions from the different evaluated options made.
- 10. Drawing logical and objective conclusions
Click and Learn about – ‘Fish Bone Technique’ of problem handling, management and solutions
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5 Best Tips to Develop Analytical Thinking –
Do Not Just Look, but Start Noticing
When you are at your home, daily commuting, or at your workplace use as many as of your senses. Observe deeply. Try to give attention to details. Observe the attire of your colleagues in the workplace, their gestures, gaits etc. Notice the names of the shops sequentially on a road and try to remember. When at home draw a mental sketch of your room with all furniture and electronic items and check what is missing! Remember to keep your mind actively engaged. This will slowly start sharpening your analytical abilities.
Be An Active Reader
“You must read to lead” – Dave Harvey
Read to Lead – Picture Courtesy by Anna Pou
Learn to be an active reader. Active reading includes understanding the purpose of the book, its relevance in the current context, its impact on socio-economic status, questioning, and applying comprehension in analyzing a situation.
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3. Play Brain Games –
Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist, University of California, San Francisco with evidence-based studies and research work proved that “Our brains are indeed plastic, they can grow, develop and change itself with proper nourishment, training and exercises”.
Brain training may help to improve your memory, increase focus, and faster response and surely improves your logical and analytical skills. Nowadays a lot of free and paid applications are available such as crosswords, Lumosity, braingle, peak, etc. to sharpen your brain activities for better alertness and higher analytical skillset.
Click Here, Understand and Learn How to Train Your Brain!
Ask Questions, Be Inquisitive
“I have no special talent, I am only passionately curious” – Albert Einstein. Remember asking the right questions at the right time make you smarter and a better problem solver. A curious mind develops your cognitive functions like attention, reasoning, awareness, judgment, and comprehension and consequently makes you an analytically skilled person.
Asking Right Questions are Crucial
Click and Read an Interesting Book on This Tip
Practice Deep Thoughts
Practicing deep thinking is one of the major keys if you plan to develop your analytical skill. A deep thinker is usually a faster problem solver with high analytical skills. A deep thinker is a person who stands out from the crowd and differentiates himself easily. Remember ‘deep thinking is not ‘overthinking.
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It can’t be changed without changing our thinking” – Albert Einstein
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Final Remarks – Analytical skills are extremely important for each one of us be it a student, a businessman, a corporate person, or for complex socioeconomic problems and family issues. In today’s fast-changing digitized world one must develop analytical skills to identify a problem, observe it, examine it, fragment the problem into smaller parts, extract data, apply logic and finally present a solution. Remember, in today’s data-rich, automation-driven, algorithm-based world developing analytical abilities to solve a complex problem is a major and essential skill. Are you ready to focus on it?
