AxTenk Blog

Here are some techniques you can use to develop your critical thinking skills.

Technique 1 - Use of Analogy
?    Thinking by analogy, or analogizing, plays important part in imaginative thinking and creative thinking.
?    Nature suggests models and principles for the solutions of problems.
?    There are other models or analogies to be found in existing products and organizations. Why reinvent the principle of the wheel when it has already been discovered? Some simple research may save you the bother of thinking it out for yourself.
Technique 2 - Make the Strange Familiar and the Familiar Strange
?    The process of understanding anything or anyone unfamiliar, foreign, unnatural, unaccountable – what is not already known, heard or seen – is best begun by relating it by analogy to what we know already. But it should not end there.
?    The reverse process of making the familiar strange is equally important for creative thinking. We do not think about what we know. Artists can help us to become aware of the new within the old.
?    ‘No man really knows about other human beings,’ wrote John Steinbeck, ‘the best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.’
?    ‘Last night I thought over a thousand plans, but this morning I went my old way’, says the Chinese proverb. Settled habits of thought, over-addiction to the familiar, will smother the dreams and ideas of the night.
?    This morning you made a cup of tea or coffee and had your breakfast – the same as yesterday. But was it? You will never even brush your teeth in precisely the same way as yesterday. Every minute is unique.

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