Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking

Live Online

Virtual classes –
tailored for your staff

Face-to-face

At your office –
tailored for your staff

There is a wealth of wonderful experimentation and research in the last few decades about our psychology and how we make decisions. This programme extracts some of the very best insights and puts them into practical professional settings.

This critical thinking course has been researched and devised to help lawyers understand how to think critically and make the best possible decisions.

Critical Thinking website image

Course Information

Getting a better understanding of how our brains work helps us to challenge our assumptions and evaluate information and data more accurately.  It also helps us to understand other people’s actions and decisions and develop strategies to influence them.

This online course can be delivered as three separate modules or as a one day course.

Module 1 – The impact hour

1 hour

This module explains and reviews some of the key psychological ideas that help us improve our workplace behaviours.

  • The basic construct of the mind’s thinking processes (thinking ‘fast and slow’)
  • Anchoring
  • Prominence
  • Social proof
  • Reciprocity
  • Control and choice

Module 2 – Ourselves, our work, our outcomes

2 hours
  • Thinking traps, cognitive weaknesses and mental shortcuts
    • Fact checking
    • Hunting the ‘outside view’
    • Changing anchors and reframing
    • Criteria weighting
  • Critical thinking about planning work
    • Use of base rates
  • Focusing on outcomes
    • Purpose and outcome statements

Module 3 – Information, data and narratives

2 hours
  • What I see (and what I don’t see)

    • The ‘argument and evidence’ technique
    • Pre-Mortems
  • Statistics, chance, and the illusion of expertise
    We have a number of important weaknesses when dealing with data and narratives.

    We are poor statisticians, finding it hard to assess the importance of the sample size (for example). We are poor at accepting that some things are just the products of pure chance

  • Understanding narratives
    We understand the world better when we understand ‘cognitive dissonance’ and how people are driven to behave by reference to their values and how those values links to their actions.

Outcomes

As a result of completing this course you will:

  • Better understand the basic construct of the mind’s thinking processes
  • Understand common thinking traps
  • Always consider whether you need more information before making a decision
  • Be aware of the risks when dealing with data and statistics
  • Better understand the psychology behind influencing others

Format

Workshops with practical exercises tutor
feedback.

Delegates

All lawyers who want to make better decisions, avoid thinking traps and better understand how to influence others.

Max 15 delegates.

Critical Thinking for Lawyers Live Online Course

5 hours

All lawyers

Face-to-Face

See Live Online

Critical Thinking for Lawyers Face-to-face Course

5 hours

All lawyers

Tutors

James Welsh website image
James Welsh

Testimonials

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We think our training is the ‘bee’s knees’ but don’t just take our word for it. Read what our clients have to say about us on our testimonials page.

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Article Writing

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Outstanding. Everyone should go on this course. Great speaker. Really useful and practical.
Stephen Ross
Withers
30 April 2013
A very helpful session. Peter was an engaging speaker and I will definitely put his advice into practice. Although it felt like hard word to read articles/submit articles beforehand, it was very useful on the day.
Emma Flower
Withers
30 April 2013
Good course length. I feel I have learnt things I can use straight away (not just in writing articles but writing generally). Very good idea to have specific articles to work on.
Julian McFall
Withers
30 April 2013