# What Is Critical Thinking? The Six Skills It Breaks Into Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making/whatis-critical-thinking/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making/whatis-critical-thinking.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving decision-making at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Critical thinking is reasoned judgment: analyzing evidence, testing assumptions, and drawing conclusions you can defend. Here are its six core skills at work. ## Key facts - Title: What Is Critical Thinking? The Six Skills It Breaks Into - Category: Decision Making - Primary skill: Decision-Making - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Communication - Primary keyword: whatis critical thinking - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making/whatis-critical-thinking/ ## What this page covers - Critical thinking is reasoned judgment: analyzing evidence, testing assumptions, and drawing conclusions you can defend. Here are its six core skills at work. - Practical guidance for whatis critical thinking - How this topic connects to Decision-Making ## Detailed explanation Critical thinking is the disciplined process of working out what to believe: analyzing the evidence in front of you, [checking the assumptions underneath it](/knowledge/decision-making/challenging-assumptions/), weighing the arguments on each side, and reaching a conclusion you could defend if someone pushed back. It is judgment you can show your work for. If you are asking what is critical thinking because the phrase turned up in a job ad, an assignment rubric, or a line of feedback, that definition is accurate but not yet usable. What makes it usable is knowing what it breaks into — and the experts who defined it settled on six specific moves, every one of which can be practiced. ## The six core skills that make up critical thinking In 1990, a panel of experts convened by the American Philosophical Association set out to reach consensus on what the term actually means. Their conclusion, published as the Delphi Report and led by Peter Facione, defined critical thinking as "purposeful, self-regulatory judgment" and broke it into six core cognitive skills, each with its own sub-skills. They are not a sequence you march through in order; they are overlapping capacities you bring to bear together. Seeing them separately is still useful, because it is the fastest way to find out which one you are actually weak at. ### 1. Interpretation Working out what something means before you react to it. The Delphi Report lists three sub-skills here: categorizing, decoding significance, and clarifying meaning. At work this is the brief that says "make it more commercial," the client email that could be a complaint or a nudge, the metric that moved eight percent without explanation. A large share of workplace friction that feels like disagreement is really two people who interpreted the same request differently and never checked. What makes interpretation distinctive is that the correct move is often to ask rather than to think harder — clarifying meaning is a question you put to someone else, not a deduction you perform alone. ### 2. Analysis Breaking a claim or a situation into its parts and seeing how they connect. The sub-skills are examining ideas, detecting arguments, and analyzing arguments. Detecting an argument means noticing when someone is making a case rather than stating a fact: "we should drop this feature because usage is down" is a claim plus a reason, and the two can be judged separately. The detail people miss is that analysis is deliberately neutral. You are not deciding whether the conclusion is right yet — you are establishing what is actually being asserted, which is a different job and needs to happen first. ### 3. Evaluation Judging how much weight a claim or an argument deserves. It covers [assessing the credibility](/knowledge/decision-making/data-driven-decisions/) of what is being claimed and assessing the strength of the reasoning that supports it. In practice: does this number come from a controlled test or from one enthusiastic customer? And separately — does the logic hold even if the source is solid? Those are two different tests, and a claim can pass one while failing the other. The most common workplace version is a trusted colleague making a weak argument, which tends to get waved through on the strength of the person rather than the case. ### 4. Inference Drawing a conclusion from evidence that does not spell it out. The sub-skills are querying the evidence, conjecturing alternatives, and drawing conclusions. This is the step where you fill gaps, and you will always be filling gaps, because complete information almost never arrives before a decision is due. The sub-skill most people skip is conjecturing alternatives — generating more than one plausible explanation before settling on one. The discipline is not concluding less. It is making sure the conclusion you land on is the best of several you considered, rather than the first one that showed up. ### 5. Explanation Stating your reasoning so that someone else can check it: describing your method and results, justifying why you went about it that way, presenting the argument, and stating what you found. This is the skill that makes all the others visible. Reasoning that stays inside your head is indistinguishable, from the outside, from a lucky hunch — and when a manager says someone "shows good judgment," they are usually describing explanation rather than the private thinking behind it. ### 6. Self-regulation Turning the other five back on yourself. Its sub-skills are self-examination and self-correction, and it is the reason the Delphi definition calls critical thinking *self-regulatory*: you are monitoring your own reasoning while it happens and correcting it mid-course. It is also the hardest of the six to practice alone, because the errors you are looking for are the ones that feel like clarity from the inside. An [outside read](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-ask-for-feedback/) tends to help more than extra effort does, which is why it is worth a few minutes to [see where your judgment stands](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) rather than assuming. ## What critical thinking is not Two misconceptions do real damage. The first is treating it as a license to be argumentative. The University of Hong Kong's critical thinking guide is explicit that critical thinking should not be confused with [being critical of other people](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/), and points out that it plays just as central a role in cooperative reasoning and constructive work — building well on someone's idea requires the same evaluation as taking it apart. The second is mistaking it for raw intelligence. Monash University describes critical thinking as questioning, analyzing, interpreting, evaluating and judging what you read, hear, say or write. That is a list of actions, not a level of ability. Which is the genuinely good news buried in the definition: a set of actions is something you can get better at deliberately, whatever you started with. ## Why employers keep asking for critical thinking The World Economic Forum ranks critical thinking among the most important skills for the future of work, which is roughly why the phrase migrated out of philosophy departments and into job ads. Employers describe the payoff in plain terms — better decision quality, risk spotted earlier, fewer expensive reversals. There is a quieter reason too. Work almost never arrives as a well-posed question. Someone has to decide what the question even is, usually with partial information and a deadline, and usually in front of other people who will hear the answer before they see the reasoning. That is interpretation and inference performed under social pressure, and it is what makes the workplace version genuinely harder than the classroom one. ## The skills that turn clear thinking into decisions that stick Look again at what the six skills need in order to work. Interpretation runs on a brief somebody else wrote. Explanation only counts when someone hears it. Self-regulation depends on learning things about yourself you cannot see unaided. Very little of this happens alone at a desk — which is why the people who get credited with good judgment tend to be strong in a few specific, learnable habits sitting right next to the thinking itself. **Decision-Making** is where the six skills meet a real choice with your name on it. The practical moves are using data and hard facts rather than impressions, slowing down when you are rushed or emotional, getting another opinion — particularly from someone likely to disagree — and accepting a good-enough answer rather than stalling for a perfect one. The traps it names are the same failures the six skills exist to catch: confirmation bias, overconfidence, anchoring on the first number you heard, and the pull of a plan you have already sunk months into. **Building Self-Awareness** covers the assumptions that are hardest to detect because they are yours. That means recognizing your own biases about people, roles and backgrounds, and the deeper beliefs about achievement, acceptance or control that quietly drive how you react when a judgment of yours is challenged. Its correction mechanism is external: asking for specific feedback and using it to find the blind spots in how your reasoning actually lands. It is self-regulation with somebody else's eyes attached. **Communication** decides whether any of it counts. Reasoning nobody hears changes nothing, so the relevant moves are wanting to genuinely understand before you judge, listening properly, stating your main point first, being clear and direct, and disagreeing without making it personal. Early in a career this is usually the whole gap between having had the right concern and being credited with it. Each of those three is one of twelve work skills that this framework treats as learnable rather than innate — and most people reach work having picked up a few by accident and missed others entirely. A short assessment will tell you [which ones you already have](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), which is a far better starting point than guessing. ## What this means for you Some of this probably already describes how you work: pausing before answering a loaded email, or noticing that you had made up your mind before you finished reading. That is worth knowing, because none of the six is a fixed trait. They are habits, so the ones you are weaker at are simply ones you have not practiced yet, and you can build them without becoming a different person at work. It also matters more as you go — the further you get, the more of your work is judgment nobody else is positioned to check, and the fewer people there are above you to catch an error before it costs something. You have already done the part most people skip: you looked up what the term actually means instead of nodding along to it. ## See where your own judgment stands You know what critical thinking is made of now. The only thing left is an honest read on the skills that carry it. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of your work skills: it shows you where you stand across all twelve, including the decision-making, self-awareness and communication habits that good judgment runs on, and points you to the ones that would make the biggest difference to you right now. **[Discover my skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and it takes about 7 minutes — your results appear the moment you finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Critical thinking is reasoned judgment: analyzing evidence, testing assumptions, and drawing conclusions you can defend. Here are its six core skills at work. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Decision-Making. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Communication. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making/whatis-critical-thinking/ Preferred summary: "Critical thinking is reasoned judgment: analyzing evidence, testing assumptions, and drawing conclusions you can defend. Here are its six core skills at work." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.