I believe that human being is initially not rational, instead emotional. But human being is also social animals. Usually we can connect each other by our emotion in social network. But doing business or work is more rational. How to train our brain working in a rational way is mostly critical to success.

I think below is more important while you are making decisions.

  1. Delay to make the conclusion avoiding instant conclusion driven by your wild brain.
  2. Collect more information from different angels, then form broader views
  3. Listen and incorporate others arguments to balance your conclusion especially during the communications
  4. leverage the reasoning and inference approaches to make the decisions

Back to the title “structured ways of thinking” essentially it could include below parts

  1. Critical thinking
    • evaluating information in a systematic and logical manner
    • assessing validity of arguments
    • identifying biases
    • making well-reasoned judgments
  2. Systems thinking
    • considering the interrelationships and interactions within complex systems
    • understanding influence between different components
  3. Design thinking
    • Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation and problem-solving. It emphasizes empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing as a means to understand and address user needs
  4. Scientific thinking
    • formulating hypotheses
    • conducting experiments
    • drawing conclusion based on empirical evidence
      It emphasizes objectivity, skepticism, and the scientific method
  5. Creative thinking
    Creative thinking involves generating new ideas, perspectives, and solutions. It often requires breaking away from conventional thought patterns and exploring unconventional approaches

In our daily life, problem-solving and making decisions happen frequently, we must have some efficient thinking framework to formulate our habits and actions, therefore it can increase our success rate. But it’s just theoretical, sometimes we should also break out of box and not follow any conventions. In that way you could get a surprise.