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21 September 2026

Team Development

Leadership and Management Development

Better decisions, made on purpose.

Here is the uncomfortable thing about most bad decisions at work. Nobody was careless. The people in the room were experienced, capable and trying hard. The decision still went wrong, because nobody examined the thinking that produced it.

Insights has just added a Critical Thinking chapter to the Discovery family, and it lands at an interesting moment. Decisions are being made faster, with more information, under more pressure, and increasingly with AI sitting somewhere in the middle of the process. So in this blog we will look at what the evidence says about decision quality, how thinking actually works, where it reliably breaks, what the new chapter adds, and seven things you can do with it.

Decision quality is quietly expensive

McKinsey surveyed more than 1,200 managers across a range of global companies and found that 61% said at least half the time they spend making decisions is ineffective. They put a number on it: roughly 530,000 days of managers' time potentially squandered each year at a typical Fortune 500 company, equivalent to some $250 million in wages annually. That is not a rounding error. That is a whole department's worth of effort going into meetings that produce nothing.

The skills picture points the same way. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found analytical thinking remains the top core skill for employers, with seven out of ten companies treating it as essential, and employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030. Insights' own client survey sits alongside this: 73% of clients surveyed ranked critical thinking as A top missing skill, and 52% named it as THE top missing skill.

How thinking actually works.

Critical thinking gets talked about as though it were a personality trait. It is not. It is a process, and understanding the process is what makes it trainable.

Cognitive psychology has spent forty years describing human reasoning as two systems running alongside each other. Jonathan Evans set this out clearly back in 2003. System 1 is fast, automatic and parallel. It runs constantly, it draws on existing patterns and past experience, and only its final conclusion reaches your awareness. You do not decide to recognise a familiar face, or to feel uneasy about a supplier. That judgement arrives already formed based on an internal structure that has been formed over time through experiences and your perception. System 2 is slower, effortful and deliberate. It uses working memory; it can hold a theory in mind, and crucially, it can interrupt System 1 to analyse the detail when intuition and evidence pull in different directions.

Most of a working day runs on System 1, which is appropriate. You can't deliberate your way through four hundred micro-decisions before lunch. The only problem is that System 1 is just running and presenting a perception of what we believe to be true. It presents a conclusion with the same confidence, whether it is right or wrong, and the reasoning is built afterwards to justify it - this is where a person's reality of a situation can differ significantly from the truth of what actually happened.

So the chain looks something like this. You notice something. You interpret it, instantly, using what you already believe. A judgement forms. You act. Critical thinking is the deliberate act of inserting a pause between the interpretation and the judgement, and asking what else this could mean and what factors are steering my judgement. This is known as metacognition - thinking about thinking.

Where it reliably goes wrong

Four patterns show up in almost every team we work with.

1. Confirmation bias. People look first for data that confirms their thinking, and curiosity takes a back seat. Ask: what would we see if we were wrong?

2 Anchoring. The first number or proposal sets the range. In one classic study, a random spin of a wheel shifted people's estimates by 20 points. Get everyone to write their view down before anyone speaks.

3. Availability. A vivid recent example crowds out the duller data. Ask: is this typical, or just memorable?

4. Groupthink. Artificial harmony sets in and the wish to stay aligned removes the conflict that would have caught the flaw. Give someone the job of dissenter.

None of these are intelligence problems. Some people are arguably better at them, because they are better at building the justification afterwards. What breaks the pattern is structure: a shared process that makes the assumptions visible before the decision is made rather than after it has failed.

The AI question

This is where the timing of the chapter makes sense. Insights are framing it around the idea that critical thinking is human thinking, and there is real evidence behind the concern.

Researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon surveyed 319 knowledge workers about 936 real examples of using generative AI at work. The finding was uncomfortable and precise: higher confidence in the AI was associated with less critical thinking, while higher confidence in your own expertise was associated with more. The nature of the effort shifts too, from gathering information to verifying it, from solving the problem to integrating the AI's answer, from executing the task to stewarding it.

This isn't an argument against using the tool. It is an argument for being deliberate about where human judgement sits, and for making sure the people doing the verifying have actually been taught how.

What the Critical Thinking chapter adds.

The chapter extends the Discovery profile into how a person approaches decisions, and it sits inside a facilitated learning journey rather than being a standalone document. The structure runs from Stage 0 through to Stage 6.

Participants prepare by bringing a real workplace challenge. The session opens with why critical thinking matters, then moves into awareness and motivation, where people discover their default thinking pattern through the language of the colour energies. From there it goes into practising the core decision-making framework, then bias and assumption awareness, then real world application, where the framework meets the challenge each person brought with them. The final stage is reinforcement and measurement, with a commitment revisited at thirty days

Download a sample chapter

Making it personal with the colour energies

If your people have been through Insights Discovery, they already have the vocabulary. Each colour energy brings a genuine strength to a decision and a matching blind spot, and naming both is what makes the conversation useful.

 

Fiery Red energy has pace. Decisive, comfortable with risk, keeps things from drifting. The watch-out is deciding before the evidence has arrived, and mistaking speed for clarity.

 

Sunshine Yellow energy generates ideas. Options, possibilities, enthusiasm for what could work. The watch-out is optimism running ahead of the detail, and the plan that sounded brilliant in the room.

 

Earth Green energy considers options. Who this affects, whether it fits our values, what it will feel like on the receiving end. The watch-out is a decision quietly deferred because someone will not like it.

 

Cool Blue energy examines data. Past precedents, what the analysis actually supports. The watch-out is more analysis as a way of postponing the call.

When a team can name these patterns out loud, the conversation moves away from personalities and towards the decision itself, which is where it's most useful. It also makes it easier to notice whose perspective might be missing from the room.

Seven ways to make better decisions as a team

1. Bring a real decision, not a case study.
This is the single biggest lever. When you practise on a made-up scenario, what you learn stays made up. Ask everyone to arrive with a live challenge they're properly stuck on.

2. Map your team's default thinking on one page.
Put the four colour energies up and place each person using their profile. Then ask which perspective your team keeps under-weighting. Once they can see it, most teams answer that in about ninety seconds.

3. Appoint a rotating challenger.
For each significant decision, name one person whose job is to argue the other case. Rotate it, so it's seen as a role rather than a personality, and nobody gets stuck being the team cynic.

4. Separate generating ideas from judging them.
Come up with options first and don't evaluate any of them yet. Evaluate second. When the two get mixed up, the meeting settles on whoever spoke first.

5. Write down the assumption before you decide.
Use one sentence: "this only works if X is true". Then ask what would have to happen for X to be false. It takes two minutes and catches a surprising amount.

6. Put a check around AI output.
If a recommendation came partly from an AI model, name who checked it and what they checked it against. Make it a habit. It shouldn't feel like another form to fill in.

7. Revisit at thirty days.
Go back to the real decision each person brought and ask what actually happened. Reinforcement is where behaviour change either sticks or quietly fades.

Where this fits

Critical thinking is not a new fashion in leadership development. It is the thing underneath transformational leadership, underneath healthy conflict, underneath any team that can disagree well. What the chapter adds is a shared language and a repeatable process, which is exactly what most teams are missing.

We build it into executive leadership programmes, into training for new managers, and into Insights Discovery team workshops where a team already has the colour energy foundation to build on.

Let's talk.

If you would like to know more bout the critical thinking chapter and our associated workshops, please complete the form.

References and further reading

References and further reading

1. McKinsey, Three keys to faster, better decisions https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/three-keys-to-faster-better-decisions . The survey of 1,200 plus managers behind the 61% figure, plus a useful four-way model for matching decision type to decision process. Worth reading for the categories alone.


2. World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025, Skills Outlook https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/ . Where analytical thinking sits in employers' skills rankings, and how much of the workforce skill base is expected to shift by 2030. Free to read in full online.


3. [Lee et al. (2025), The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking, CHI 2025] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf .

The Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon survey of 319 knowledge workers. Balanced rather than alarmist, and the section on how the nature of critical thinking effort shifts is the most useful part.
 

James Hampton (He/Him)

James Hampton (He/Him)

Director

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