If you’re a professional in the public relations field, you might work on autopilot every day. You follow instructions and get work done, but you don’t use critical thinking. Instead, you might rely on Google, software programs, and applications to do a lot of your analytical work. However, using critical thinking allows you to see the bigger picture and provides more value to your clients and company.
Why Critical Thinking Is Important in PR
By definition, critical thinking is the act of objectively analyzing and evaluating an issue to make a decision or form a judgment. It’s an essential skill in the PR world because you must be able to interpret information for your clients and the media. This skill can help you see underlying connections between facts and ideas and logically assess the information to resolve complex issues.
How to Use Critical Thinking in PR
As a strategic thinker, you must look at how what you do fits into the larger picture. To do that, you must develop six habits:
- Prepare
Being a strategic thinker requires you to watch trends and anticipate what will happen next. Pay attention to big moves in your clients’ industries and the economy, and understand how changes can affect your plans. Then, you can prepare for those effects.
- Ask Questions
It’s common for people to take things at face value without asking questions. It’s the reason why some media outlets publish misleading or fake news. As a PR professional, becoming complacent like this weakens your competitive edge, so asking questions gives you an advantage.
- Analyze Information
In PR, jumping in and waiting to see what happens doesn’t always work. This habit can result in a communications crisis that can negatively impact your career and your clients’ brands. Because of that, it’s important to analyze the data that you have, gather other resources, and develop a viewpoint. Doing so lets you interpret how external and internal elements will change your strategy.
- Be Decisive
Although you need to analyze information, you have to be careful not to overanalyze. Getting wrapped up will keep you from moving forward. Limiting how much time you spend on analyzing data allows you to be decisive.
- Find Balance
It’s nearly impossible to make everyone in your team happy, so you shouldn’t try to have a complete consensus on a project. Instead, listen to everyone’s ideas, assess the risks, bring up difficult topics, and find a balance that your team can get behind.
- Learn From Failures
It’s OK to be disappointed about a failure. However, letting it get you down doesn’t help you grow as a PR professional. The alternative is to look at your failures as learning experiences, and implement what you learn into future projects.
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