Why We Need Critical Thinking: 3 Anecdotes from an IT Veteran

First off, for the “knee jerk critics” among you, I am in no way implicating I am the “all-knowing” and/or arrogant, patronizing, semi-young professional, you on occasion may run into…

There, free ride ticket :-)

Rather, I want to share a few anecdotal experiences with you, that hopefully keep you thinking critically about…well frankly… anything you choose, but maybe spark a behavior of considering multiple angles of perception and thinking.

What’s Critical Thinking?

If you look up “Critical Thinking” in google, the first definition you will find is this:

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

Yep, a mouthful of… ”fill in blanks”

When I was a young(er) student, I asked a lot of questions to my teachers, not purely to help me with grasping the teachings they were giving, but rather to gain a true understanding of what they were trying to make me absorb. As you can imagine, this was not an easy time for me…or my teachers.

As I eventually made it into the professional world, I did not let go of my “question, before blindly accepting” part of me. Some anecdotes to illustrate:

Anecdote # 1: The RAID ‘Levels’

In the mid 90’s of the previous century, I found myself in a heated IT technology debate between engineers on what was meant with storage RAID 51 vs RAID 15 vs RAID 53, etc. It was one of those debates where everyone has an opinion, but no one really knows why or what those numbers mean or even where they originate from.

So to help resolve the debate, and bold as I was at the time, I took it onto myself to contact Professor Randy Katz (considered the inventor of RAID) via email, hoping for him to resolve the debate once and for all.

Now at the time email was not so prevalent as a means of communication, and as I eventually discovered the professor’s email address and sent my question, I never expected him to reply… To my surprise, he did. His answer for clarification of different storage RAID levels was quite short, but nevertheless illuminating for me at the time:

“Thanks Yves for asking your question about the difference between the RAID levels you mentioned, but we never specified those RAID levels and to me these are more marketing terms than anything else”

In my excitement of having an answer from “the inventor of RAID”, I returned to my fellow engineers and shared this news with them. 10 minutes later, we had additional engineering discussions around possible RAID levels 45, 60, 61, 36 :-) Some of these even made it into engineering and industry-recognized specifications. Go figure.

Anecdote # 2: The ISO Standards

Around 2010’ish, I was working for a large Financial Services group, me being responsible for Global Technology Architecture on several technical domains, one of which was Storage. At a certain moment, our security organization started to put in place compliance policies based on ISO standards/best practices for storage. One of those was the “emerging” ISO 27002 and 27040.

I and the wider internal technology community were questioning the sometimes “over the top” security-specific requirements they wanted us to implement. I tried to go into a conversation with our global security, risk, and compliance colleagues, but unfortunately, all I got was “ISO is ISO”. Hmm…what is one to do?

I investigated how ISO standards and best practices were established, and after a long story short, found the way to become an influencing country member to contribute and vote on the eventual standards and best practices. It required a certain amount of money, and some specifics qualifications, which I met.

As I investigated the current member list responsible for defining the content of ISO standards and best practices, I noticed that most of the content that was part of those ISO parts we were confronted with within our technology domain, were created by vendors.

No surprise that a lot of what our security org was asking us to implement, had a specific commercial vendor product that could fit that “gap”.

To avoid conflict of interest I chose not to pursue the ISO membership, however, I did share my findings within the company, and specifically the security organization. It changed the conversation for the better of all.

Anecdote # 3: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’

This week, to make a point, I used a commonly known quote “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” in some of my meetings. In that same week, I met a bright person, who in his presentation to me, used the same quote, but he showed a picture where Peter Drucker is referenced as the quote originator.

Obviously noticing a connection in similar thought, I pointed out that I discovered the common misconception that Peter Drucker made that statement - it seems to have morphed from many different people’s statements-, he was surprised by my comment. Not sure if he agreed, he added that he got the quote from a professor at a well know university, so it “must” be true. This triggered me to respond, “not everyone is supposed to be right on everything, and the professor may be wrong”. Arrogance (or worse) alert I know, but…

As much as I admire our academics, scientists, industry thought leaders, social influencers, etc…most of them much much smarter than me, still does not mean all of them are always right. These are some anecdotal illustrations where I keep advocating “critical thinking” for everyone.

Lastly, take great care in voicing your thinking, not all may think like you.

Thanks,

Yves.