In Episode 133 of “The Trusted Advisor,” RSPA CEO Jim Roddy shares his insights on Critical Thinking, both as an important leadership concept as well as the six-step Critical Thinking execution process.
Critical Thinking is the process of determining what you want to accomplish (the outcomes), evaluating what you know, and determining what actions must be taken to achieve that outcome:
- Fully understand the philosophy and process of the best practices.
- Fully understand the situation.
- Clearly define the desired outcomes – business outcomes and emotional outcomes.
- Detail your action plan.
- Evaluate your plan.
- Develop a contingency plan.
“The Trusted Advisor,” powered by the Retail Solutions Providers Association (RSPA), is an award-winning content series designed specifically for retail IT VARs and software providers. Our goal is to educate you on the topics of leadership, management, hiring, sales, and other small business best practices. For more insights, visit the RSPA blog at www.GoRSPA.org.
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Full episode transcript via Apple Podcasts:
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Roddy: Welcome to another episode of The Trusted Advisor podcast and video series, powered by the Retail Solutions Providers Association.
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Roddy: Our goal on the pod is to accelerate the success of today’s and tomorrow’s leaders in the retail IT industry.
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Roddy: I’m Jim Roddy back with you again.
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Roddy: Thank you so much for joining us.
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Roddy: Now, as always, the focus of our podcast is leadership, and today’s the second episode of a new format we’re integrating into our pod lineup.
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Roddy: So the unofficial name for these solo episodes where it’s just you and me talking is a Roddy rant, but what’s different about these rants are three elements.
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Roddy: First, they’re no longer than 15 minutes.
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Roddy: Second, I’m going to share with you a character trade or leadership trade or some of the do’s and don’ts from my book, The Walk-On Method to Career and Business Success.
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Roddy: Then finally, they’re unscripted, so I’m going to detail the character trade or leadership action.
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Roddy: Then we’re going to share my perspective just like I do when an RSPA VAR or ISV leader reaches out to meet for advice.
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Roddy: Now, our other episodes are going to continue to feature leaders discussing their leadership journeys and what they’ve learned along the way.
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Roddy: These solo episodes, these Roddy Rants, they’re going to focus on the key principles that form the foundation of successful leadership.
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Roddy: Now, before I reveal today’s topic, just a couple commercial breaks that we have to share with you.
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Roddy: First, we have to thank our annual RSPA sponsors who support our community and make this podcast and video series possible.
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Roddy: Our Platinum sponsor is Bluestar.
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Roddy: Our gold sponsors are Cocard, Epson, Heartland and ScanSource.
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Roddy: Also, we want to make sure we remind you that registration is now open for RetailNOW 2025, the Retail IT channel’s number one trade show, education conference and networking event.
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Roddy: This year’s event is set for July 27th through 29th at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
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Roddy: For more information, visit gorsp.org/retail now.
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Roddy: Again, that’s gorsp.org/retail now.
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Roddy: RetailNOW is where the industry meets.
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Roddy: All right, today’s topic is critical thinking, and that builds upon our prior episode where we talked about the character trait of prudence, and prudence is very much rooted in critical thinking.
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Roddy: So I have a document, I’m going to share a couple highlights with you.
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Roddy: If you want a copy of this six step process for critical thinking, just email me at my first letter J, last name Roddy, jroddy at gorspa.org.
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Roddy: I’d be more than happy to share it with you and talk with you about it.
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Roddy: So critical thinking, to me, this is the most important foundational element that you can have inside your organization for organization health, for making the right decision.
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Roddy: So what is critical thinking?
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Roddy: It’s the process of determining what you want to accomplish, the outcomes, evaluating what you know, and determining what actions must be taken to achieve that outcome.
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Roddy: So when you apply critical thinking, your organization, your company is guided by reasonableness.
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Roddy: It’s not guided by who has more tenure, who has the loudest voice, who’s the owner, who has the most senior title, anything like that.
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Roddy: We should be guided by the principle of it’s not who’s right, it’s what’s right.
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Roddy: And so I’m very overt about critical thinking inside of our organization.
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Roddy: So here at the RSPA, when I was named RSPA CEO a little bit over three years ago, this document that I’m going to give a highlight of right now, this is the first thing that I shared with our leadership team and first thing that I shared with the rest of our organization.
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Roddy: When I first came on board, gosh, it’s so six years now at this point, I started working with Chris Arnold, who’s now our Director of Member Services and Marketing.
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Roddy: And we started off with this document because I want to make it very clear.
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Roddy: It’s not just me calling the shots or me saying, here’s my opinion or I’ve been involved in this industry since 1998.
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Roddy: So sit back, listen to me and start taking notes.
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Roddy: Critical thinking is the guide.
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Roddy: Whether somebody’s on their first day on the job or their third decade on the job, it’s critical thinking that should be guiding your organization.
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Roddy: Now, critical thinking, the process is most important when the answer isn’t clear, when your processes, your procedures don’t say exactly what you should do.
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Roddy: And this is a lot of, if you’re a leader, if you’re an aspiring leader, these are the tough challenges that hit your desk.
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Roddy: If they weren’t difficult, they’d have been solved long before they reached you.
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Roddy: So there are six basic steps of the critical thinking that we’re going to talk about today.
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Roddy: So step number one is fully understand the philosophy and process of the best practice.
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Roddy: The philosophy and the process of the best practice.
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Roddy: You have to zoom all the way out and say, how does the world work?
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Roddy: How does this industry work?
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Roddy: How does the company work?
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Roddy: So you can gather this information from a lot of different sources, whether it’s company documents, your general experience, your colleagues’ general experience, researching, right?
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Roddy: Whether it’s from books or magazines or websites or conversations you’re having, your own life experience and the experience of your coworkers, right?
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Roddy: Before you start forging ahead and saying, here’s step number one, what we should do, you got to zoom all the way out and say, what are the best practices?
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Roddy: Now, this is where if you have experience in the industry, this can really come into play, right?
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Roddy: If you have somebody who’s not familiar with the channel, it’s really hard for them to determine what should be the right action plan because they don’t understand the inner workings of this channel.
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Roddy: But make sure you don’t just go with what you know and say, oh, I’m good, I can start building the action plan.
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Roddy: That’s where step number two is hugely important, fully understand the situation.
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Roddy: You cannot make good decisions while you’re existing in a vacuum.
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Roddy: Even though you might have the experience and understand what the best practices and how you’ve done this 100 times before, this situation is going to have some nuances to it.
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Roddy: It could be radically different or it might be slightly different and you have to make sure you fully understand this situation.
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Roddy: Get all the information that you need, put it out on the table, go and sort through it, and then it’s going to make your decision-making process much, much easier.
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Roddy: The more information you have, I think you realize the less of an actual decision that needs to be made, the less of gut feel that has to come into it.
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Roddy: If you’re unsure of what you should do and how you should move forward, it’s probably a sign that you need to fully understand the situation more.
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Roddy: You need to gather more data, talk to more people, get more information.
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Roddy: So this is the step that most people fall short with in the critical thinking process, right?
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Roddy: They go with what they know, they think they have a full understanding of the situation, but they don’t do the actual work to ask questions, to listen, to get more of that data on the table.
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Roddy: All right.
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Roddy: So step number three is clearly define the desired outcomes, and there are two types of outcomes.
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Roddy: There’s business outcomes and then there’s emotional outcomes.
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Roddy: Oftentimes, we think about the business outcomes.
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Roddy: How am I going to solve this problem?
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Roddy: How are we going to get this thing done?
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Roddy: How am I going to close a sale?
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Roddy: How am I going to make the money?
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Roddy: But you have to understand there’s an emotional outcome as well.
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Roddy: How are you treating your colleagues?
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Roddy: How are you treating that client?
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Roddy: When this decision is made, when it’s implemented on the other end of it, how are people going to feel about it?
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Roddy: How are they going to think about you?
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Roddy: How are they going to think about the organization?
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Roddy: You can’t just say, here’s my one business outcome and my one emotional outcome.
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Roddy: There might be a longer list of business outcomes and emotional outcomes that go along with this.
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Roddy: Again, this is critical thinking.
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Roddy: You don’t actually start with the outcome.
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Roddy: You fully understand the situation first, and only then can you say, okay, now I think I know where the target is for what I’m going to do.
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Roddy: And then once you have that target, then you can start getting into detailing your action plan.
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Roddy: The what, the who, and the when.
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Roddy: All three elements of it.
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Roddy: And so I suggest a lot of times people start with the who.
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Roddy: They say who, what, when.
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Roddy: I suggest you start with the what, because the what might determine who actually executes on that.
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Roddy: If the what is something that falls more on the sales side of the business, well, you should probably have somebody in sales do that.
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Roddy: If the what falls more on operations, then you should have somebody do that.
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Roddy: If the what is way more complex and it requires somebody with experience to do it, you might have two people doing it.
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Roddy: So when you’re talking about your action plan, it’s the what, then who, and you also have to talk about when.
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Roddy: You can’t say whenever you get around to it or soon or at your convenience.
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Roddy: Start putting in some sort of milestones, some sort of deadlines, so everybody is on the same page in terms of the action plan.
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Roddy: If you simply say this needs to be done soon, soon for you might mean by the end of the day or the end of the week, but soon for the person you’re giving the direction to or you’re working with to determine the action plan, they might think it’s the end of the month.
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Roddy: So the more specific you can get on your action plan with the what, the who, and the when, the better off you’re going to be.
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Roddy: Now I say that with a caveat.
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Roddy: You want to make sure you give guidance, that somebody doesn’t have to write out a 100 page battle plan in order to move forward.
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Roddy: I still remember when I supervise an employee, they do a good job of communicating this.
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Roddy: I asked them to put together an action plan for moving forward on a couple of things that they had to improve on in their organization.
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Roddy: So we talked about on a Friday, he said, I’ll have it ready for you on Monday.
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Roddy: I thought, no problem at all.
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Roddy: This is an exercise that should only take a handful of minutes.
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Roddy: We meet Monday morning, he’s bleary-eyed, he’s like, management is so difficult to sleep trying to put this whole thing together.
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Roddy: I’m like, I can’t believe, why would it take you so long in order to do that?
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Roddy: Well, he came back with a document, I think it was about 17 pages long.
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Roddy: I was like, oh my gosh, this is not what we were looking for, is every single nuance.
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Roddy: Step number one, turn on computers.
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Roddy: Step number two, login.
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Roddy: It was way too detailed.
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Roddy: So make sure when you were working on the action plan, if you’re delegating elements of it or you’re delegating the action plan to somebody, you talk through about the length that it should be.
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Roddy: I tell people a lot of times, I’m not looking for an action plan that covers A through Z.
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Roddy: Let’s talk about ABCD and then we can go and figure out what happens after we get through the first four steps.
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Roddy: And that ties in with the fifth step of critical thinking.
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Roddy: Evaluate your plan.
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Roddy: And then step number six is develop a contingency plan.
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Roddy: So I’ll take two of those together.
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Roddy: So one, evaluating your plan.
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Roddy: Oftentimes, we have rose-colored glasses when we look at our own action plans, our own work, and then we’re way more critical when we look at somebody else’s.
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Roddy: So if you’re the one task, if you’re putting together an action plan, I suggest you talk it through with somebody else, because you’re going to look at your plan and go, genius, this is going to work 100 percent.
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Roddy: Absolutely.
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Roddy: You want to make sure you go to somebody skeptical, somebody who can ask you questions, who can stress test your plan.
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Roddy: Evaluate itself, evaluation, have somebody evaluated as well.
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Roddy: Is this going to achieve the outcomes that we outlined earlier?
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Roddy: Then the last step again, it dies in, it’s develop a contingency plan.
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Roddy: As you’re talking through, as you’re doing the skeptical approach to it, you’re saying, okay, every single element that is planned might not work.
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Roddy: What’s going to happen?
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Roddy: How are we going to adjust if things don’t fit in perfectly?
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Roddy: So you should always be walking into it with some sort of a backup plan.
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Roddy: Think about a football coach.
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Roddy: They don’t script out the first 10 plays of the game and go, this is what we’re going to do come heck or high water.
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Roddy: Because the first play of the game, the snap could go over the quarterback’s head, and suddenly you’ve lost 15 yards and you’re facing, what would it be, second and 25.
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Roddy: Well, if your second plan in your script was, we’re going to run to the left off tackle, that might not get you closer to the first down.
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Roddy: So you have to have that contingency plan.
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Roddy: Here’s something that’s really important.
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Roddy: This, I just went through the six step process for critical thinking, but it’s not that you get to six and you’re done.
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Roddy: You have to then go back to step number one all over again.
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Roddy: Do I understand the best practices?
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Roddy: I’ve started to execute this action plan.
00:12:36.135 –> 00:12:38.595
Roddy: Now I have a better understanding of the situation.
00:12:38.595 –> 00:12:40.175
Roddy: Do I have to adjust my outcomes?
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Roddy: Or then do I have to adjust my action plan based on what I’ve learned?
00:12:44.915 –> 00:12:48.955
Roddy: Then you’re evaluating your plan, you’re doing the critical thinking that goes along with it.
00:12:48.955 –> 00:12:50.255
Roddy: This is where it’s so important.
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Roddy: The folks who I always say, try, test, measure, adapt, that is fully rooted in critical thinking.
00:12:56.835 –> 00:13:07.695
Roddy: Start with the first four steps of your plan, learn something, go back, you’ve gathered more data, evaluate your outcomes, evaluate your action plan, adjust, start doing it again.
00:13:07.695 –> 00:13:09.795
Roddy: You’re going to learn more and go back and do it.
00:13:09.875 –> 00:13:14.235
Roddy: It is a virtuous cycle when you run through critical thinking.
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Roddy: The last note is you’ll see on this critical thinking document, if you email it for me, it says, your opinion doesn’t matter.
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Roddy: And I know that sounds rude, but to me, it’s a funny and memorable way of saying, you can’t just say, I have an opinion and I think we should do this.
00:13:28.435 –> 00:13:31.555
Roddy: Your opinion should be rooted in critical thinking.
00:13:31.555 –> 00:13:36.015
Roddy: My opinion should be rooted in critical thinking, your colleague’s opinion should be rooted in critical thinking.
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Roddy: That’s why, to me, this is so foundational to your organization.
00:13:40.675 –> 00:13:40.955
Roddy: All right.
00:13:40.955 –> 00:13:46.775
Roddy: And again, if you want a copy of this critical thinking document, just shoot me an email at jroddy at gorsp.org.
00:13:46.775 –> 00:13:48.635
Roddy: I’m more than happy to share it with you.
00:13:48.635 –> 00:13:53.115
Roddy: Critical thinking, again, the foundation to a healthy organization.
00:13:53.115 –> 00:13:55.535
Roddy: That does it for this episode of The Trusted Advisor.
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Roddy: If you enjoyed our discussion, be sure to subscribe to the RSPA YouTube channel and The Trusted Advisor podcast so you never miss an episode.
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Roddy: Before we go, thanks again to the aforementioned RSPA Marketing Director, Chris Arnold, for his production work.
00:14:08.155 –> 00:14:09.955
Roddy: Thanks to Joseph McDade for our music.
00:14:09.955 –> 00:14:12.615
Roddy: And last but not least, thanks so much to you for listening.
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Roddy: Our goal at the RSPA is to accelerate the success of our members in the retail technology ecosystem by providing knowledge and connections.
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Roddy: For more information, please visit our website at gorspa.org.
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Roddy: Thanks for listening and goodbye everybody.
