The concept of magical thinking is defined as the belief that our thoughts, desires, and wishes can influence the real world. For example, if I believe hard enough that there will be world peace tomorrow, this will come to fruition, or perhaps we can make the moon turn into blue cheese. If we wish it enough, it could be true. 

In businesses, this is characterized by the belief that unrealistic organizational strategies and tactics will succeed (Conbere & Heorhiadi, 2016). This often shows up in people thinking they can accomplish an unreasonable number of tasks on any given day (known as the TFW virus), for example. We all know we can only do so many things, that we have off days, or days when everything goes wrong and nothing goes as planned, yet we still insist on thinking we can get X number of things done day in and day out, and get demotivated and despondent when we fail.  

Creative thinking is an essential element of business and personal life. Without disruptive, creative ideas, businesses, people, and products stagnate and become increasingly irrelevant. This is particularly so in an era of rapid technological change and widespread societal disruption (by way of the ongoing pandemic).  The creative process often starts and ends with magical thinking, however, which results in ideas that cannot be implemented in the real world, let alone succeed. 

The creative process or creative thinking can be described as the exercise of deliberately seeking out and developing new insights and ideas through tapping into existing information (Betterup.com). This means that ensuring your creative thinking results in actionable ideas is an important part of your toolset, as a marketer and a manager.

Big ideas that are an output of magical thinking are pointless and wouldn’t take shape unless grounded in practical and critical thinking, in other words. The simplest definition of critical thinking is that it is space for thinking. A pause or a delay in decision-making to consider additional possibilities. 

Myself and my team always kick off our brainstorming sessions with magical thinking and through discussion work those ideas down into a series of concrete actions. As a business, PQE Group uses critical thinking in all of our brainstorms, and we set monthly strategic goals to ensure our critical thinking doesn’t become magical, and to hold ourselves to account.  

A critical aspect of this is the culture of learning that we try to foster throughout the business, underpinned by a flat organizational structure and dynamic way of working that empowers our people to voice their opinions, share their ideas, and learn from each other.

As part of our critical thinking process at PQE Group, we use pauses to ensure the company’s values are firmly embedded in our thinking, and that our ideas are appropriately aligned.

We find that including these tactics in our process helps embed critical thinking firmly into our creative thinking: 

• Start with big ideas, but use critical thinking to filter them, take the pauses, ask the hard questions and consider all the possibilities
• Encourage collective decision making by ensuring all of your team feel empowered to share their ideas in a constructive environment
• It’s all about balance – make sure there is a right balance of visionaries and pragmatics in the team to make your ideas work

At PQE Group we’ve learned that starting big is essential to getting workable ideas. Brainstorming starts out with huge, impossible ideas, but concrete actions start small. You do testing, pilot projects, proof of concept runs, and so on. The two are almost opposites. I think sometimes companies get stuck in some processes because they want to do everything, all at once, perfectly. Our approach is leaner. We start small, do a piece, get it right, build it out further. We add to the complexity as we go.  

This is why critical thinking is an essential element of innovation and problem-solving. Businesses striving to build great teams need to look to critical thinking as a means to help those teams turn thought into action, solve problems, overcome challenges and meet their (and the business’) goals. Developing a culture that values critical thinking will benefit your business as a whole and enable it to deliver better results and positive outcomes.