Analytical thinking

FARIS HADDAD

Faris is a Systems Project Manager at Facebook in San Francisco. He works within cross functional teams to launch, scale, and support Facebook’s review platform systems. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering from UCT and a masters degree in quantitative management from Duke University.

Whether you’re an artist or an actuary, the ability to think analytically with a process oriented, methodical approach is a critical skill to have. It allows you to navigate and solve complex problems and in turn, make effective decisions. In this article, we explore 5 tips that can help you improve your analytical thinking abilities.

Be outcome focused

What is your end goal? Focus on that. It will guide your analytical thinking process around any deviations that may come up along the way. Write out the answer to the question: “What am I trying to solve?” when dealing with ambiguous problems. This may be challenging at first, but setting time aside to establish an outcome is critical to the process. It saves you both time and effort as you start to tackle the problem at hand. Your outcome should involve elements of minimising the complexity of the problem you’re solving and achieving impactful results. Being outcome focused is important in that it helps you to climb the mental barrier that is a natural reaction to solving ambiguous, complex problems.

Establish first principles

Establish a set of first principles that can be repurposed and scaled. These will form your baseline toolkit that you can tap into when solving problems. Your analytical thinking process should include the ability to make connections between whatever complex problem you’re tackling and your set of first principles. Look back on your experience, projects, and learnings among others to start filling that toolkit. Look at trends and overarching themes among the problems you’ve previously solved and use those to further confirm your first principles. Ask yourself, which sets of formulas, rules, and theorems may be applicable to the problems I’m trying to solve? Write them down somewhere accessible and get comfortable with using them.

Having a goto analytical process will ensure that you can maintain resilience and consistency in the face of increasing complexity. Understand biases

Understanding biases

Biases and fallacies are commonly found in many of our thought processes and, in turn, the decisions we make. Understanding these biases and how they impact your thought process and decision making is a key skill to master as you improve your analytical thinking abilities. The anchoring effect for example, is a cognitive bias where we fixate on the first piece of information provided. Confirmation bias is our tendency to search for information that reinforces our existing thought processes. Objectivity is key to methodical analytical thinking. When making decisions, ask yourself what biases could have impacted your analytical thinking process and as a result, the decisions that came out of it.

Establish a go-to analytical process

Get comfortable and familiar with an analytical process you can use when tackling complex problems. Analytical techniques vary in approaches, but commonly are blueprints to follow when tackling complex problems. The top-down approach, for example, involves starting at a high level, breaking down the problem into smaller, less ambiguous subsets, and deep-diving into each subset. Remember that one approach may not be applicable to every problem. However, having a go-to analytical process will ensure that you can maintain resilience and consistency in the face of increasing complexity. Analytical processes are effective in that they can be scaled up or down depending on the complexity of the problem at hand. Understand the different analytical processes and choose an approach that works for you.

Practice

Include analytical thinking in your everyday decisions. Continuously practicing analytical thinking will ensure that you remain sharp and focused. Incorporating methodical, process oriented analytical thinking into your everyday decisions is a great way of practicing for complex problems that will come up in your career. Read, learn and reiterate case studies that involve analytical thinking and are related to your career of interest. This has two effects; it provides a great avenue to practice your analytical thinking abilities and it diversifies your experiences. Practice solving problems with an element of creativity. This will make you stand out and allow you to find novel, useful solutions to any problem you solve. By continuously practicing to solve unique sets of problems, you will cultivate a repository of ideas that you can tap into at any time.