Critical Thinking and Environmental Scans 3


How to Get Your MBA in Life


The next phase requires synthesizing material and drawing together diverse facts and events to show patterns and relationships. This shows systems thinking at its finest. Once you take a part out to completely examine it, sometimes it no longer acts the same. This is a take off on the old saw of not seeing the forest for the trees. If the details take up all your time, you are missing the larger picture.

 

We can also look at cumulative impacts, which is a common application of an environmental concept. The construction of a road, the blocking of a waterway, the fragmentation of a parcel habitat, may have small incremental impacts. But taken together and you suddenly have reached a tipping point and the entire ecosystem could then collapse. So we begin to understand that we can look at certain decisions or facts in isolation, and they we can look at them in context of the larger picture to determine the full extent of their impact.

 

If you see your own life as part of a larger ecosystem, then you can sense what the nature of the relationships here. But for the purposes of critical thinking, we are more interested to make sure that we maintain the necessary context of any particular fact or decision. Problems arising from three concurrent factors may not simply have a simple direct correlation. Instead, there could be a correlation on an order of logarithmic magnitude. So for example, when you were younger, your alcohol intake was possibly lower than it is now, but your metabolism was higher along with your level of activity. Today, perhaps 20 years later, your alcohol level is higher; your metabolism is lower along with your activity level. Changes in one of these factors may not have been a great concern, changes in two may have only impacted your waistline, but all three impacts the ability of your heart to continue beating. Dying from a heart attach due to obesity constitutes a problem an infinite number of magnitudes in excess of merely being overweight.

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