Testing For Critical Thinking: A New Approach To Case Interviews in Strategy and Operations
The ability to think critically and relentlessly interrogate data from all perspectives is systematically being hammered out of many students these days.?
Anyone who has been following the?Stanford Law incident recently?or saw the video of the new 1984-esque?Hippocratic oath taken at Columbia’s School of Medicine?should be aware that the job of many professional schools (and colleges) these days is to teach students what to think versus the process of thinking itself.
At top universities in 2023, the notion of teaching “how to think '' (e.g., through using the Socratic Method) is about as common as fully stocked bread shelves in the former Soviet Union.
This includes my own alma mater (The University of Pennsylvania), which was recently ranked 202 out of 203 universities for free speech on campus and in the classroom.?
At Penn and beyond, in an environment where the majority of job candidates have explicitly been taught not to think for themselves, it is critical that the interviewing approach we take in strategy and operations evolve to identify those anomalous job seekers which still can.
But to understand what must change (with examples provided below on how to test for critical thinking skills today), let's first provide a history lesson in case interviews.
The Case Study Interview: History and Examples?
When I came up through the ranks in management consulting and at FreeMarkets twenty-five years ago, we would use case study interviews that tested general problem-solving skills to identify job candidates that would never fluster and know how to attack a problem from all angles.?
In other words: the candidate could identify a process to solve a complex problem (without an instant answer) and then attempt to solve it using a logical framework and approach.
As an interviewer, I always believed that how a candidate got to an answer to mattered more than the answer itself.?
Some case study interviews would provide charts and graphs (or, in one case, a bag of parts!) to test how the candidate would interrogate information, while others were simple prompts:?
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These are some examples of case study interview questions with procurement and operations angles:
The Declining Relevance of Traditional Case Study Interview Approaches
Analytical case study interviews still have their place today with job candidates in strategy and operations (including procurement), although increasingly students in undergraduate and graduate programs (especially business) are prepped for them just like the SAT, spending dozens or even hundreds of hours of training.?
This sort of defeats the purpose if you ask me.
I actually think (for qualified candidates these days) a more useful interviewing approach given the decline of teaching critical thinking skills in academia involves a modified case interview that looks to see if candidates can form multiple arguments from a similar data set.?
For example:
In an academic environment where critical thinking skills and the ability to debate all sides of a topic are increasingly being hammered out of students, executive teams that seek a competitive advantage in strategy and operations (including procurement and supply chain) should seek explicitly to find candidates which can argue all sides of a topic based on data.
And to do so, we must shift our case interviewing approach to identify those job seekers that combine the requisite analytical skills necessary for the role (just as we did in the past) to those that also have the ability to interrogate information from all available angles to arrive at different conclusions -- or even coming up with a "third-way" in the process.
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2 年This is very interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing this, Jason.
Procurement Geek & co-founder at Oro — Hiring engineers, product managers
2 年Jason Busch The money sentence "You will be judged on the quality of your lesser argument and case" ?? Evil genius.. I think i would have loved to have been interviewed by you
Strategic Advisor/Analyst Specializing in Emerging AI Tech, Sales and Marketing (Procurement) - A Trusted Voice in procurement and supply chain
2 年When you talked about "an academic environment where critical thinking skills and the ability to debate all sides of a topic are increasingly being hammered out of students," you nailed it, Jason! I have always enjoyed and respected our dialogue over these many years because we weren't seeking consensus but understanding. Some of my best exchanges have been with you because it wasn't based on simple opinions but hard-earned experience and research where being right wasn't as important as getting it right. My biggest concern is that we will lose the ability to discuss based on critical thinking and be indoctrinated into an exchange based on convenience through "tools" such as ChatGPT AI and Jasper. Don't get me wrong, I love tech and enjoy the potential of leveraging AI algorithms to augment discussions versus replacing them. That said, here is a link to the results of an experiment I did: https://bit.ly/3lsW8vq What happens when many people pose the same question to an AI platform? Will they all get the same or close to the same answer and accept it as gospel? Is AI teaching or indoctrinating minds? What I find interesting is that a growing number of universities are either monitoring or banning ChatGPT.
Such a great technique. To ask this generation of students to argue both sides of an issue might induce a panic attack. I imagine the first response is "issues only have one side!" Do you give a trigger warning before this, recognizing that intelligent questions might cause harm?
Senior Medical Informatician at MCG Health
2 年Those are genius questions. I'm not convinced there ever was a time that a significant number of people engaged in critical thinking. I find most who espouse it mostly use it to convince themselves that they are already correct. This sort of problem finding appropriate people for the job is ancient and any system that becomes prominent will eventually be gamed. I'm a fan of Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord's officer classification scheme.