What Is Beneath The Surface?

What is beneath the surface of your decisions?  Do you even consider what the motivators might be for deciding and acting the way you do?  While “critical thinking” is a fairly common term and practice, what about “critical awareness”? Critical thinking involves looking into data, etc. when pursuing a decision or outcome.  Critical awareness takes the critical thinking process and additional step.

Critical awareness is looking at data and forming decisions/pursuing outcomes with the knowledge of social, community and overall societal factors as part of the consideration. Example, John makes a critical thinking decision based on raw ROI data and it ends up blowing up. Why?  Because community and societal factors (critical awareness) were not considered, i.e. the consumer was not engaged.  Critical awareness provides a larger canvas of possible outcomes.  It provides the ‘why’ that drives the ‘what.’

While critical awareness can be an individual tool, it can also be applied to examining and demystifying the mass market. Critical awareness can best be explained by the following:  critical awareness=determining who benefits from each potential decision path’s outcome.