A working resource
What it is, why it fails in clever rooms, and the five moves that catch it.
This page collects the working core of my book, What Are We Missing? How to Think More Clearly Before You Decide, in one place: the definition it uses, the failure pattern it studies, and the method it teaches. It is free to read and free to share.
Critical thinking is the systematic process of analysing information, recognising assumptions, evaluating evidence, and drawing sound and concrete conclusions for the purpose of making effective decisions and solving complex problems.
Four parts carry the weight. It is a process, built on purpose - gut feel alone does not count. It digs out assumptions, the beliefs we never say out loud and so never check. It asks whether the evidence is any good, whether it bears on the question, and whether there is enough of it. And it ends in conclusions you can act on. Underneath all four sits epistemic humility: your view of any situation is partial, and your first instinct is wrong more often than it feels.
Nobody aboard Deepwater Horizon was stupid. That is what makes the case worth a chapter. The failures I study were never short of data - they were short of the missing question, asked in time. The evidence was in the room: a test result someone explained away, a dissenting engineer who was overruled, a warning filed where nobody would read it again. The pattern repeats from the Macondo well to Challenger to Theranos: information was available; the question that would have assembled it was not asked. The case articles are here.
The method the book teaches is five moves, run before any decision that matters. P, R, I and S run in sequence; M stands over all four.
P - Problem Framing. Define the problem before you touch it. Its question: Are we solving the right problem?
R - Research. Go looking for information that could change your mind, and trace every claim back to where it came from. Its question: What would prove me wrong?
I - Interpretation. Separate what the data says from the story you tell about it. Its question: What else could this mean?
S - Synthesis. Assemble the pieces into one picture. Its question: What do all the pieces say together?
M - Metacognition. Watch your own thinking while you think. Its question: How confident should I be, and what am I missing?
The PRISM pocket card (free PDF) keeps the five questions on one page. The PRISM decision audit scores your last real decision against the moves.
A skill. The research picture separates intelligence from thinking skill: they correlate only modestly, which is why clever rooms still fail. Skills train. The book builds each move from cases where its absence was expensive, then gives protocols you can run yourself.
The five moves above. PRISM is a synthesis, assembled from traditions that practised each move centuries before psychology named them, and from the failure record of the last fifty years. It is not presented as a separately validated model - the book says so on its face.
It is a book about thinking, written because a machine now answers questions you never asked, fluently and instantly. One chapter covers critical thinking in the AI era directly. If the AI question is the one that brings you here, my other book, The Cognitive Crisis in AI-Augmented Work (second edition, out now), is written for parents first.
Anyone whose decisions carry other people with them - engineers, managers, parents, teams. The cases are industrial disasters and public failures because that is where the cost of a missing question is written largest, but the mistakes are the same ones a software developer or a family makes at smaller stakes.
13 February 2027. Fifteen chapters examining real-world decisions, built on chapter bibliographies and claim-level source notes and 586 numbered chapter endnotes (none in A Note on Method). The full details live on the book page; the home page shows the structure.
Yes. The articles are drawn from the book's cases, the pocket card above is free, and the book page has a free sample: the preface and the opening of Chapter 1.
About the book