I work for a fortune 100 and critical thinking is highly valued on my team. One thing that I've observed is that expressing critical thinking without communication skill comes across as being argumentative. If you find yourself frequently arguing a point but no one is convinced, assuming you are actually correct on the issue, then you probably just have weak communication skills.
Another thing I've noticed is that no matter how compelling the argument it's also near impossible to get people to take action to change things that are deeply entrenched even if they agree with you.
Most organizations only recognize negative intercessions as praiseworthy, and categorize positive intercession as "business as usual" to be expected, even if sometimes the positive intercession is much harder.
"No!" moments are much valued in corporate culture these days.
People think this promotes the propagation of critical thinking across an organization. Perhaps ironically, the opposite is true. By tuning everyone to say, "No!" and rewarding them as such, it actually limits the impact of the actual important "No!" moments because everyone is competing for these accolades.
Most corporate culture does not reward people for following orders or improving upon someone else's idea. It's a legacy of the strict hierarchy all our organizations descend from (or a consequence of the apathy that more modern "matrixed" organizations breeds in its mid-grade baseline employees, who are taught not to overly invest in a given project).
My experience is mostly in the other direction. While C-level executives out of their depth (which seems to be most of the time when it comes to technology) tend to have quite a few 'No!' moments, maybe because it gives them a sense of control, they don't like hearing No from anyone else.
In fact, expressing doubts about the wisdom of pushing ahead with a project, even one already failing, is seen as very poor behaviour, like you have just farted in front of everyone. Likewise, identifying risks is often seen as negativity, rather than a foundation principle of review.
People who subsequently roll out one of these failed ideas are often publicly rewarded. In contrast, the people who develop the alternate system that is actually used tend to be ignored.
My observation is not applicable to C-levels and other people in positions of extreme power. It really only occurs when an org develops a middle-strata of management and executors with finely-cut responsibilities. Truly big companies.
It's interesting the title of the article assumes that critical thinking is a "soft skill". However I don't that's necessarily a great assumption. I think of soft skills as more along the lines of people skills, like communication, integrity, work ethic, etc. If you look at wikipedia article it cites several definitions, none of
which include critical thinking or "problem solving". They are all more long the lines of communication skills, cutesy, and work ethics.
There is also no breakdown of which industries were surveyed. It maybe the firms that hire lots of engineers or other professions that require solving new and different problem frequently were not well represented in the survey.
It just seems to me the premise of the article isn't that well thought out.
