Learning Skills: Counterfeit Thinking versus Critical Thinking

Back in the mid 1990s, I contributed regularly at an annual conference on the teaching of problem-solving and thinking skills with the moniker, Problem Solving Across the Curriculum (PSAC) that was the brainchild of a friend of mine Dr. Daniel K. Apple, the President of Pacific Crest. The concept of the conference, which attracted mostly educators along with a few business executives and consultants, was that there is a common set of learning skills required to solve problems that is applicable across and independent of the specific subject matter being taught.


At the time, I was heavily engaged in corporate consulting and training. We were teaching problem-solving under the umbrella of Total Quality Management and World Class Manufacturing methods, the precursor to today's Lean and Six Sigma methods for problem solving and process improvement.

At the third PSAC Conference, I was a panelist at the plenary session on the topic of thinking skills along with Dr. Donald Bishko and Dr. Gary A. Woditsch co-author of The Thoughtful Teacher's Guide to Teaching Thinking Skills.

One of the topics we grappled with was whether or not you could in fact teach thinking skills. Dr. Woditsch contended that with few exceptions, individuals were capable of further development of their thinking skills. He countered the premise of the question by pointing out that we have “always” been teaching thinking skills as a byproduct of teaching subject matter.

Furthermore, Dr. Woditsch offered that two things that confused the issue. They were the lack of assessment around the effectiveness of the development of thinking skills -and- the ability of individual learners to develop coping strategies in place of thinking skills to produce "counterfeit" results. For example, rather than actually learning a skill, one can simply memorize a pattern and as long as the circumstances do not change significantly the pattern would yield a similar result.

My son Will was developing these coping strategies in 1st grade when it came to math. His teacher handed out worksheets where you first did the math in a “box” and then based upon the answers, colored the “box” to produce a pattern. William simply, figured out the pattern and skipped nearly all the math, as evidenced by the high percentage of incorrect answers in his work that was colored flawlessly.

There are many examples of counterfeit thinking and its limitations. Have you ever worked for someone who was promoted to being a manager because they were the best at following orders or getting tasks done? They often make dismal managers because the underlying pattern for success has changed. Even successful managers and businesses fail when the pattern of the marketplace or regulatory environment changes.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." Counterfeit thinking, the attempt to follow patterns that worked in previous and similar situations, is exactly what Einstein is speaking of.

The episode of the Simpson’s where a lobbyist suggests to Mayor Quimby and the community leaders that all Springfield needs to cure its problems is a “Monorail”, mocks the counterfeit thinking so often employed by politicians in their “pork barrel” funding of projects that have zero possibility of producing the results promised but follow the pattern of similar projects done elsewhere.

To read more about Seattle's Monorail, Check out Transit Miracle or Urban Toy.


As opposed to “counterfeit” thinking, the term "critical thinking" takes thinking in a focused and diagnostic direction as it means "thinking" directed at finding and examining that which is fundamental to understanding something. Critical thinking is about finding patterns not following patterns. The leap from thinking about something -to- developing an understanding of something is the same as the difference between standing on a pool deck and looking at an object on the bottom -and- diving into the pool, swimming to the bottom and examining the object down there.

The primary tool in critical thinking is "asking questions". When you work at developing "content rich" questions about something, you must examine and inventory that which you already know or assume that you know. In working out which questions need to be asked you seek questions that when answered will further your understanding.

Counterfeit thinking will lead you to dead ends and cliff faces but critical thinking will open doors and minds.

Avoiding the Truth Undermines Your Ability to Create

A key ingredient to creating something of enduring value is accepting the truth.

Enduring value is undermined when required things are not done, when things are done incorrectly and when there is dishonesty about either current reality or the desired result.

What definition of truth will best guide the person who wishes to create?

The language that lawyers use to describe the truth in court is inadequate to describe truth in the world. There is a famous story of King Canute ordering the tide not come in. He was the giver of laws and issued an absurd law. In the legal system, the truth is subjected to both the King and the King's law.

In other words, both laws and interpreters of law can easily differ from the reality of the world. This is why the legal system can never find one innocent but rather it finds them guilty or not guilty. The legal system can not find the truth but it can find what is false or not false.

The best working definition for creating is that truth is "what works in the world over time". If you want to know whether your creation is beautiful or functional you must take it into the world and test it.

Many institutions focus so much effort upon their self-interest that they lose the ability to tell the truth over time. They act like a sports team that is defending a lead instead of playing the game. They forget the very things that led to their success and attempt to manage success as if it can be manipulated.

When you create a new medicine, there is a protocol called double-blind testing, that allows a researcher to see the truth when comparing the new medicine to alternatives. The major concept in double-blind is that parties involved in creating and those with vested interests in the results tend to have biases that prevent them from seeing the objective truth.

There is also a great difference between a "long-term" and "short-term" study as the most significant effects (positive or negative) may not appear for decades in a medical study. I am not proposing that the creative person must wait decades but rather that when testing whether your creation is working in the world, one must continue to pay attention to the object created and all its consequences, intended and unintended.

Being honest about the good and bad of current reality and being as clear as possible about the qualities of the desired result are key to empowering the creative process. The "world" is available for testing your creation in many ways but do not expect it to either embrace or reject your creation outright.

Creation is iterative, and your early failures may in fact be the most important lessons in teaching yourself to create. When looking at a difficult task, I like to estimate the number of mistakes (lessons) to be encountered along the way. A long-term difficult project may be a 1000 mistake project. The goal is to make your mistakes early and keep them small but remember that your ultimate success requires the learning in your early mistaken efforts.

The truth does set you free. Free to let go of what does not work and that prevents you from failing in the end.

A Set of Skills for Life-Long Learning

I taught a course at the State University of New York, Empire State College entitled "Math for Decision Making" for almost ten years. It was the college math course for people who were either afraid of math or had done poorly at math through their lives.



The course began with two primary activities: self-assessment so that students could understand what they knew and what they didn't know and a journal to support the student's development of critical thinking skills.



The self-diagnosis allowed the student and myself to focus our efforts where learning needed to occur and the journal became a shared dialogue between the student and the class that supported engaging learning in a sometimes playful, often creative way. Asking questions and taking risks are two essential elements to learning and yet most of our formal education has discouraged or worse punished this behavior.

We worked on going from asking data and opinion questions to asking critical thinking questions. Critical thinking questions are those which examine the assumptions and "frames" through which we view the world.

For example, several years ago ethanol became a "cheaper" alternative to petroleum for a variety of reasons. A government funded industry grew up around producing ethanol from food products (mostly corn) and as the price of petroleum raced to its peak in 2008, from a distance ethanol seemed to be a solution.
As a fuel, how does ethanol compare to petroleum? It is a less powerful fuel per unit of fuel.
How much energy does it take to produce ethanol from corn? It takes more energy to produce ethanol from corn (when you include the entire cycle of corn production) than it delivers to the vehicles burning it. The entire cycle is grossly inefficient.
Why was ethanol so cheap several years ago? Corn ethanol was cheap because there was a surplus of corn.
What has the use of food for ethanol production done to food costs? As food was diverted to ethanol production, the price of corn, wheat & rice and many other food staples was driven up globally, deepening the woes of the most impoverished people.

If you read or listened to any media stories promoting corn ethanol did they focus on this when congress was setting money aside for this activity and entrepreneurs were seeking investors for new ethanol production plants?

Engaging in dialogue or journal writing and asking critical thinking questions are extremely useful in developing a broad set of learning skills.