We are entering a world where people are pushing critical thinking aside as negativity. After all if you can’t say positive things then keep your mouth shut.

This is very dangerous. I have sat around many leadership teams over my 40 years of working life, the most recent just over a year ago of a very large energy company.

Over that period I have witnessed critical thinking die a death of a thousand cuts.

In the corporate world we call it “group think” where people who go against the group wisdom are slowly marginalised no matter the validity or otherwise of their argument.

I have seen cases where data demonstrates the group think is not well grounded, yet it is ignored and the group think maintained. In one case it sowed the seeds of the collapse of a large corporation. But it doesn’t matter as long as the group think is saved!

In some of my own recent posts people say you are not being positive, and LinkedIn is no place for such posts.

I must admit I didn’t realise that LinkedIn was a community of people sitting around singing kumbaya. I thought is was a network of thought leaders and critical thinkers that debate and throw all sorts of things on the table and discuss.

I have even had people suggest I self censor. I mean really.

The only way to get to good solutions is to debate and disagree, go to source data, analyse and apply critical thinking. It is not about sitting around a table and having positive thoughts.

On many occasions I have had CEOs and Board Directors say that I am the only one on the leadership team that challenges and questions and they need more of that on their team.

We can debate with respect, use our gift called a brain and critically analyse a situation rather than not thinking and coming up with only positive things. Sometimes the best solutions require delving into unpleasant realities and shining a light on those realities.

We often hear the expression black swan events and grey Rhinos etc etc. I have been though exercises where companies have identified grey rhinos and then when it comes to the conversation about what we do about them it ends up something like “its ok” we will keep doing what we are doing as addressing the rhinos takes critical thinking which may lead to negative conversations.

We have to maintain the discipline of questioning, reasoning and debating if we are going to evolve. We have to learn to offend again, otherwise we will end up in a world of nodding heads going backwards.