This course is a core course to become a Professional Certified Strategic Marketer.

Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices- William James

Workshop Outline

In a world drowning in data and awash with bullshit, critical thinking just might be the most important skill marketers need.

In this workshop Carl Davidson will draw from behavioural science and cognitive psychology to demonstrate some of the flaws in our everyday ways of thinking, and provide some tools to sharpen your critical thinking and problem solving mindset.

In the process, you’ll see why critical thinking is rare (it’s much harder than you’d expect) and why most organisations make it much harder still.

You’ll learn why we’re all wired to think like lawyers rather than scientists, and why David Ogilvy was right about how evidence gets misused.

The workshop will then introduce a range of tools to unleash your critical thinking, nurture your scepticism, and supercharge your decision-making acumen.

It will benefit anyone with an interest in improving their thinking and decision-making skills, or in improving those skills among the people they work with. If you work with knowledge on a daily basis then this is the workshop for you.

Workshop Topics

Part One: The Bad News - You’re Not as Smart as You Think You Are (No Matter How Smart You Are!)

• Heuristics, shortcuts, and why everyone is smart in hindsight
• Why your unconscious biases are invisible to you (but no-one else)
• The better educated you are, the less thinking you’ve probably been doing

Part Two: Why Learning Organisations Aren’t Real

• The inertia of the status quo and compliance
• How evolution has made deference a survival skill
• The special problem of thinking in groups

Part Three: Why Everyone Can be a More Critical Thinker

• Fixed and growth mindsets
• Thinking about your thinking
• Shining a light on your own thinking processes

Part Four: Channeling Socrates - and Borrowing His Critical Thinking Toolkit

• Scientific thinking, hypotheses, and falsification
• How to build a compelling argument by thinking about counterfactuals
• Making sure you’ve identified the right problem
• How to ask the right question
• Establishing the burden of proof