Here's  an excerpt from Dilip Mukerjea's new book, CONQUERING CRITICAL THINKING! Breaking Through from HOW to WOW!

YOUR BRAIN IS YOUR BUSINESS!

DO YOU HAVE A 6 SIGMA BRAIN?

• Counterargumenting Skills
• Collaborating Skills
• Critiquing Skills 
• Creative Originality Skills
• Cooperativeness Skills
• Communication Skills
• Comprehension Skills
• Contextualising Skills

Six Sigma is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1986.

What is Sigma? 

In statistics, Sigma is the Greek letter representing standard deviation. Standard deviation measures the amount of variation within a set of data. If the data set is “normal”, meaning that the values within the data set are split above and below the data set’s average, the standard deviation is helpful in describing how spread out the data are.

What Does “Six” Represent? 

In a normal data set, a variation of one standard deviation above the mean will include 84.1% of the total population below that value. Expanding that to two standard deviations increases that to 97.7% of the population. Going one standard deviation further increases the data points included to 99.85% of the population. 

Taking this scenario out to 6 standard deviations above the average yields a calculated value of 99.9999998% or 2 parts per billion. In simple terms, this means that a process functioning at this level will yield only two defects for every billion items produced.

Examples of Critical Thinking Skills

* COMMUNICATION: being clear, relevant, to the point, and succint in your thoughts;

REFLEXIVITY: being able to reflect on your own thinking. How well are you communicating and expressing yourself? How are your ides being received?

* COMPREHENSION: being able to spot the core ideas in complex texts and in rambling and disjointed presentations. Here we start with deep listening to what is being said, and staying open to diverse points of view.

* CONTEXTUALISATION: your facility at considering breadth and depth of view, being able to see beyond traditional boundaries, and yet remain objective, whilst operating from first principles. Then being able to see ahead to practical applications, in the process of making new connections.

* CREATIVE ORIGINALITY: placing emphasis on independence of thought, flexibility of approach, and inventiveness; the ability to emerge with fresh, stimulating examples and counter-examples.

* COOPERATIVENESS & COLLABORATION: being able to empathetically work productively with others, in multifarious contexts, especially in cross-cultural scenarios. Being able to address conflicts so as to solve, resolve, absolve, or dissolve them.