Every team already has a way of thinking. Usually one it never chose.
A way of thinking decides what counts as the problem before anyone starts solving it. Leave it unexamined and a team will solve the problem its habits hand it, very well, and wonder later why nothing changed.
Why it matters
Most failed school initiatives were solved correctly. The team did the analysis, wrote the plan and delivered it. What went wrong happened earlier, when the situation was first described. A falling attendance figure became a behaviour problem, or a data problem, or a communications problem, and from that moment every sensible step made the wrong thing better.
Donald Schön called this problem setting and argued that it is where professional judgement lives. Problems arrive as messy situations, and someone names the things that will be attended to and frames the context they sit in. Whoever does the naming has already done most of the deciding.
Ways of thinking are the practised versions of that naming. Systems thinking describes a situation as structure producing behaviour. Design thinking describes it as a gap between what is and what is preferred. Critical thinking describes it as a set of claims to be tested. Computational thinking describes it as a process that can be broken down and stated precisely. Each one makes different things visible. Each one hides something the others would have caught.
What I have come to believe
The ways are habits of attention, and the literature on thinking dispositions puts the bottleneck in an unexpected place. Perkins, Jay and Tishman argue that people often have the ability to think well and simply fail to notice the moment that calls for it. Teaching the method without teaching when to reach for it produces people who can pass a test on systems thinking and never once draw a loop at work.
The names are also doing more work than they should. "Design thinking" in a school usually means a five-stage workshop with sticky notes. "Critical thinking" usually means a general skill that Willingham argues does not exist apart from knowledge of the subject being thought about. Neither label is wrong. Both have been worn smooth. I use them because they are the words people arrive with, and then spend a while taking them apart.
Switching between ways is worth more than mastering one. A team fluent in one way of thinking is efficient and blind in a predictable direction. A team that can name which one it is using, and deliberately try another for twenty minutes, catches the error before it becomes a plan. That switch is the move this strand contributes to the framework.
How I approach it
I start by asking the group to state the problem in one sentence, and then I ask which way of thinking wrote that sentence. The answer is almost always one nobody chose. It came from the last initiative, or the funder, or whoever spoke first.
Then I restate the same situation in each of the other ways, briefly and badly, to show that the restatements are possible. Quality comes later. The first job is to break the sense that there was only ever one way to describe it.
And I try to leave behind a routine instead of a vocabulary. Ritchhart, Church and Morrison make the case that thinking becomes teachable when it becomes visible, through short, repeatable routines a class can run on any content. The same applies to staff. A named question the team asks every time a plan is proposed will outlast any staff learning day on the four ways.
The moves
Four things a way of thinking can actually do
None of them needs a workshop. Each one is a question a team can ask in the first ten minutes of any planning meeting, and each gets better with practice.
Naming the frame
Ask which way of thinking produced the problem statement on the table. Naming it turns an invisible habit into a choice. Once a frame has a name, a group can decide to keep it, which is a different thing from never noticing it was there.
In practiceSwitching the frame
Restate the situation in a different way of thinking and see what the new statement asks you to do. Dorst calls this frame creation and treats it as the core of expert design practice. It is the cheapest move in the strand and the one most likely to change a decision.
In practiceHolding two at once
Run two ways of thinking on the same situation and put the results side by side. Where they agree, the finding is probably sound. Where they disagree, you have found the part of the situation nobody understands yet, which is where the attention should go.
In practiceMaking it routine
Turn the frame into a short routine with a name: a question asked at the start of every planning meeting, a loop drawn before any intervention is agreed. Routines survive staff turnover. Workshops do not.
In practiceLimits
Where it stops being useful
Every method in the framework has a failure mode, and teaching the tool without its failure mode is how a method becomes a ritual. These are the ones for ways of thinking.
- When the frame is not the problem. Sometimes the situation is exactly what everyone thinks it is and the barrier is money, time or will. Reframing a funding gap is a way of avoiding it.
- When a way of thinking becomes an identity. A team that calls itself a design-thinking team will reach for the design process whether or not the situation needs one.
- When the vocabulary arrives without the knowledge. Every one of the four depends on knowing the domain. Systems thinking about a school timetable needs someone who understands timetables.
- When it is run as a workshop format. A method stripped to its stages and run in an afternoon produces the feeling of having thought differently, and very little of the thinking.
Worked example
Ways of thinking, running
The strand taken out and used. Four ways of thinking, chosen on stated grounds, each followed through one school day as the same school weighs the same proposal. Everything here is general and open. The people are illustrative.
Choosing the four
There are dozens of named ways of thinking, and every one has a literature arguing it matters. A set of four is only useful if the discarding was done on stated grounds. These are the grounds.
The four ways
Two distinctions, crossed, give four ways of describing the same situation. They are different enough that switching between them changes what you see, and none ranks above the others.
Compare the ways
Hold one thing steady (the drawing, a dimension, a person) and let the four ways vary.
One problem, four ways of seeing it
The framework’s worked situation, framed by each strand in turn. The ways-of-thinking framing asks whether the problem is the right one.
Unsettled
What I would still argue about
The part of this page I would defend least confidently.
- Whether the four ways are really four, or two pairs that the literature has named separately. Critical and computational thinking share a lot of machinery, and so do systems and design thinking.
- Whether switching frames can be taught directly, or only picked up by watching someone do it. Every good example I can think of involved a person, not a course.
- How to stop a way of thinking being flattened into its workshop format without making it so demanding that nobody tries it.
- Whether ethical thinking belongs in the set as a fifth way, or whether it is better treated as a question every way has to answer. I have gone with the second for now and I am not sure it is right.