Supporting Ingredient 14

Attributes and Thinking Skills

The Need for Attributes and Thinking Skills

Applying the action methods and procedural principles must be done by using proper personal attributes and thinking skills to achieve success. Doing this is one of the main reasons scientists using the scientific method over the centuries have originated and solved so many problems, thus achieving such phenomenal benefits for society. There is some overlap between personal attributes and thinking skills. The need for certain ones may also vary according to the domains and sub-domains in which a person works.

Personal Attributes Needed Along with Thinking Skills

A definition of personal attributes also includes character traits, aptitudes, skills, values, attitudes, collaborative communications skills, etc. There are a great number of desirable attributes mentioned in problem solving literature. The most frequently recommended include:

Develop Your Problem Solving Team Abilities

Problem solving and decision making are becoming more and more a matter of team problem solving work, as projects are large, complicated, and expensive, while usually requiring specialists as well. Problem psychology has become important. You should:

• Enroll in problem solving team training, group problem solving management classes, and risk management
• Recognize personality styles you must be able to blend with
• Contribute to building problem solving team spirit
• Carry your share or more of the load
• Remember that your standards are not always those of others
• Develop your thinking skills

Communication Skills

Educators and employers increasingly stress the importance of verbal, written, and collaborative communication skills for problem solution.

• Develop your reading, writing, editing, and speaking skills.
• Group problem solving depends on good communication skills.
• Hone your problem communication skills so that you will be able to excel in a problem solving team environment.
• Submit reports in the format of SM-14’s steps or stages.

Thinking Skills

Here are just some of the terms being applied to thinking skills:

The leading term today is critical thinking. This term started to be used more often in the early 1940s and increasingly as the years passed. Unfortunately, it is now being widely used instead of problem solving thinking.

Warning About Trying to Learn or Teach "Critical Thinking"

This term is a misnomer. While hundreds of definitions are given for it, the only practical one is problem solving thinking. So my advice is to learn the thinking skills that are mentioned on my websites that are required to be used at the various stages of SM-14 and for the supporting ingredients. Those who have time to further develop their thinking skills after practicing problem solving might want to study thinking skills as a separate subject.

Remember Before Leaving Attributes and Thinking Skills

Although you have reached the last ingredient of SM-14, remember that you are not done. It has been predicted that by the year 2020 knowledge will double every 70 days. Because of the internet, the availability of problem solving websites, information, and knowledge is changing, doubling, and becoming more complex at an explosive pace. But what doesn’t change are the basic problem solving steps or stages of SM-14, the natural method that has existed and been unwittingly used by us in some form since the dawn of humans. So learn and practice using SM-14 . . . you can do it! Using it will make you happier, more successful, a better risktaker, a problem preventer, and a better judge of other people’s problem solving thinking skills and problem solving team skills.