Insights From Best-Selling Author Ozan Varol

Developing critical thinking is an essential skill in a world that is in a constant state of disruption. The assumptions we hold today may not be relevant tomorrow or next week, let alone next quarter. Enhancing the quality of our thinking is a lifeline for our success. I sat down with best-selling author Ozan Varol to discuss his book, Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life. In particular, we focused on why a scientific mindset empowers us to achieve peak performance.

According to Varol, scientists don’t express opinions; instead, they use a working hypothesis, or better yet, multiple hypotheses, to approach a particular problem or opportunity. The reason for this strategy is simple: “to avoid looking to confirm what they already believe is true.” This tactic allows scientists to expand their thinking and improve their decision quality because they consider new possibilities.

Another core strategy used by scientists is “to constantly prove themselves wrong.” The beauty in this approach is that their ego is not tied to their final decision. Their ultimate goal “is to find what’s right, not to be right.” This mindset sets the stage for the best option to be selected.

There are other powerful strategies we can use to ensure we do not fall victim to some common decision-making traps, which can befall the best of us. For example, we can surround ourselves with people who disagree with us to avoid tunnel vision. By bringing in a team of contrarian thinkers, we are challenged to test the quality and limits of our analysis. We minimize the chances of myopic thinking. We approach our decision-making process much more attentively because we know we will have to defend our ideas to those who will challenge us. Extraordinarily accomplished individuals like Daniel Kahneman and Albert Einstein successfully employed this practice.

Varol also cautions against blindly adopting the Silicon Valley mantra of “fail fast, fail often.” He observes that “when we celebrate failure, we may not take the time to examine what went wrong. We cannot afford to miss the learning attached with failure through our celebrating it.”

Although we may assume failure provides the most valuable opportunity to learn, according to Varol, this is also misguided. Success can provide us with a false sense of security. Referring to the catastrophic 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia space shuttle disasters, Valor cites these as cautionary case studies.

“The technical flaws that led to the disasters were concealed because previous missions succeeded,” he says. “Small stealth failures that don’t immediately produce a catastrophe, end up accumulating over time and snowball into something that you can’t control.”

Varol advises asking two questions, regardless of the outcome achieved:

• What went right with this project/decision?
• What went wrong with this project/decision?

This type of critical thinking allows us to learn from our successes and our failures. “It’s possible to make some bad decisions and still succeed” and “It’s possible to make some good decisions, and still fail.”

When answering the question of what went right, it’s important to “isolate those inputs that were good and should be retained.” Reviewing what went wrong pushes you to “take action on the bad inputs that should be fixed, regardless of what the outcome is.”

Conclusion

As we move into a New Year, there is no doubt that change will be the only constant. Our world will continue to be disrupted in countless ways. To survive and thrive in this environment will require the quality of our thinking to be at its best.

Although we cannot all be rocket scientists, Varol provides us with a powerful roadmap of how to think like one. When we park our egos at the door and approach our personal and professional lives with a sense of curiosity and desire to learn, there is nothing holding us back from making 2022 our best year yet!