Is Tech Killing Critical and Creative Thinking?

Your company's quarterly results come in. Revenue is up 15%. The leadership team is thrilled. The CEO sends a company-wide email celebrating the growth. People are high-fiving in the hallway.

Before you read on, ask yourself: what would you do with this information?

Hold your answer. We will come back to it.

I am two episodes into a three-part ABC documentary series called The Matter of Facts, hosted by Hamish Macdonald...and loving it! It ultimately asks whether anyone knows what is real anymore, or whether we have all retreated into our own version of it. It has covered how social media algorithms feed us more of the same, narrowing what we see and believe. How disinformation spreads through digital ecosystems. How governments and bad actors use social media to manipulate public opinion, spread propaganda, and destabilise other countries. It is confronting viewing, and the geopolitical implications go well beyond anything I am qualified to write about.

Heavy stuff. But one theme that is in my lane to talk about is that our ability to think critically about any of it is measurably weakening. The series led me to a statistic that stopped me cold: 97% of Australians have very limited skills to verify information online.

Ninety-seven percent.

So I dusted off the old critical thinking hat and wanted to know more. What is driving the decline? And what does the research actually say?

This blog is what I found. It covers two interconnected skills: critical thinking and creative thinking. What they are, why they matter, what they look like at work, why they are under threat, and how to build them.

Fair warning: this one asks something of you. A blog about critical and creative thinking that requires neither would be a contradiction.

What Critical Thinking Actually Is

Critical thinking is not about being negative or finding fault. It is the ability to analyse information objectively, evaluate evidence, consider multiple perspectives, and form a reasoned judgement.

It involves:

• Questioning assumptions rather than accepting them at face value
• Evaluating the quality and source of information before acting on it
• Identifying bias in your own reasoning and in what you consume
• Weighing evidence from different viewpoints before reaching a conclusion
• Separating fact from opinion, correlation from causation

It also involves inferential reasoning: the ability to take two or more pieces of information, recognise the relationship between them, and draw a logical conclusion.

Here is an example. One of your long-term clients has quietly reduced their spend with you over the past two quarters. No complaints. No negative feedback. They are still buying, they are still polite, but the orders are getting smaller. Your account manager assumes the relationship is cooling and starts offering discounts to win the volume back.

A critical thinker connects a different set of facts. Interest rates rose six months ago. This client operates in property development. New project approvals in their sector have slowed by 20% in the past quarter. Their spend is not declining because of you. Their pipeline has contracted and they are tightening discretionary budgets across the board. The fix is not discounts. Discounts erode your margin on a client who is not leaving. The fix is a conversation about how your offering fits their current reality, and possibly restructuring the engagement to match a leaner period. That kind of thinking requires business acumen as much as it requires critical thinking.

Two people looking at the same situation. One sees a relationship problem. The other connects the dots to an economic one. Same data, different conclusion, completely different response.

Many people do not do this. Not because they lack intelligence. Because nobody taught them to, and nothing in their daily routine demands it.

What Creative Thinking Actually Is

Creative thinking is not limited to artists, designers, or people with "creative" in their job title. It is the ability to approach problems from new angles, generate original ideas, and find connections between seemingly unrelated concepts.

It involves:

• Looking at a problem from multiple directions rather than the obvious one
• Generating alternatives when the standard approach is not working
• Connecting ideas across different domains to produce something new
• Challenging the status quo and imagining what does not yet exist
• Tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty while working towards a solution

A creative thinker does not accept "this is how we have always done it" as a valid reason to keep doing it. They ask: what if we tried this differently? What would happen if we combined these two ideas? What would this look like if we started from scratch?

If you have ever sat in a meeting where everyone agrees with the first idea proposed and moves straight to implementation, you have seen what the absence of creative thinking looks like. It is polite. It is efficient. And it is often how organisations end up spending money on the wrong solution.

Why These Skills Are Interconnected

Critical thinking without creativity is rigid analysis. You identify problems with precision but struggle to imagine new solutions. Creative thinking without critical evaluation produces ideas with no grounding. You generate options but lack the discipline to assess which ones hold weight.

The strongest professionals use both together. They analyse a situation with rigour, then imagine new possibilities. They generate ideas freely, then evaluate them against evidence and constraints. This combination is what drives innovation, improves decision-making, and produces work other people trust.

Why These Skills Set You Apart

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 surveyed more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers. Analytical thinking remains the number one core skill. Seven out of ten companies consider it essential. Creative thinking sits alongside resilience and technological literacy as one of the skills rising fastest in importance through to 2030.

In Australia, a Foundation for Young Australians analysis of 4.2 million job advertisements found demand for critical thinking in job ads increased by 158%. Demand for creativity increased by 65%. Jobs requiring these skills offered significantly higher pay than those without them.

And yet, according to Gallup research, only 29% of workers strongly agree they are expected to be creative or think of new ways to do things at work. The demand is high. The supply is low. If you build these skills deliberately, you are already ahead of most of the room.

What These Skills Look Like at Work

Let's go back to the revenue scenario from the opening. Revenue is up 15%. Everyone is celebrating.

Many people accept this at face value. Revenue is up. Growth is good. Move on.

A critical thinker pauses. They ask: where is the growth coming from? Is it new customers, existing customers spending more, or something else? They dig into the data and find something uncomfortable. Customer numbers are actually down 20% on the same quarter last year. The revenue increase is entirely driven by a price rise implemented two months ago. The company is not growing. It is shrinking and charging more while it does it.

A creative thinker goes further. They ask: if we are losing customers at this rate, what happens in two quarters when the price rise is absorbed and there are fewer people paying it? What if instead of celebrating, we redirected some of this quarter's revenue into understanding why customers are leaving and testing retention strategies now, while the numbers still look good on paper?

The celebration might be warranted. Or it might be masking a problem that gets harder to fix every month it goes unnoticed. The difference between those two outcomes is critical and creative thinking. And the reason the second one is harder is because nobody questions good news.

Here are three more situations. Before reading the second paragraph in each, pause and consider what you would do.

Situation: The quiet team member

Your team has a member who rarely speaks in meetings. Their manager flags it as a performance issue and recommends putting them on a development plan for communication skills.

Many people accept this assessment. A critical thinker asks: does this person contribute in other ways? Do they send detailed follow-up emails after meetings? Do they perform well in one-on-one conversations? Is the meeting format the issue, or is the person? A creative thinker asks: what if we restructured meetings to include written input before discussion? What if silence is not the problem, and the meeting design is?

Situation: The process everyone follows

Your organisation has a weekly reporting process. Every department spends roughly three hours each week compiling data into a slide deck for a leadership meeting. The meeting consistently runs 15 minutes. Nobody questions it.

We have all been in this meeting. We have all sat there knowing it is a waste of time. The difference is whether you say something.

The critical thinker wonders: does anyone read these reports in advance? Does the meeting change any decisions? What is the actual cost of 30+ hours of collective effort for 15 minutes of airtime? The creative thinker asks: what if the report was a one-page dashboard updated automatically? What if the meeting only happened when a metric moved outside an agreed range?

Situation: The social media statistic

You see a post shared widely claiming "85% of employees say their manager is the reason they quit." It has 4,000 likes and 600 shares.

Before you repost it or drop it into a presentation, a critical thinker asks: who conducted this research? What was the sample size? When was it published? Is 85% the actual finding, or has it been rounded, paraphrased, or taken out of context? A creative thinker asks: even if the number is inflated, what is the useful truth underneath it? How would I test whether this is true in my own organisation?

For the record, that 85% stat is one of the most misquoted, unverified numbers on LinkedIn. Did you catch yourself wanting to believe it? That is exactly how unchecked information spreads. It sounds true, it feels true, so we skip the step of checking whether it is true.

Beyond Work

These skills do not stay at the office. Critical thinking leads to better decisions across every part of your life: financial, health, career, relationships. Creative thinking makes you more adaptable when things change. Both make you harder to manipulate. In an era of deepfakes, AI-generated misinformation, and algorithmically curated content, the ability to evaluate what you are consuming is not a nice-to-have. It is self-defence.

The impact goes further than individual careers. Democracy only works when people evaluate information rather than swallow it whole. Public conversations get better when people engage with views they disagree with instead of blocking them. Families, teams, and communities make better decisions when the people in them are willing to pause, question, and think creatively about what is in front of them.

The Matter of Facts makes this case at a global scale. But it starts with individuals. Every person who builds the habit of thinking critically and creatively raises the standard for the people around them: their team, their family, their community. It is a ripple effect. And it starts with a choice to stop scrolling and start thinking.

Why These Skills Are Declining

At a time when critical and creative thinking have never been more important, the evidence suggests both are weakening. And there is no single cause. It is a combination of forces, all reinforcing each other.

The shift from deep consumption to shallow consumption

Professor Patricia Greenfield's research at UCLA, published in the journal Science, analysed more than 50 studies on learning and technology. Her conclusion: as technology plays a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis decline. We have shifted from print-based, reflective information processing to visual, real-time, surface-level consumption. Reading for pleasure, which has declined significantly, builds the specific cognitive skills critical thinking depends on: sustained attention, reflection, analytical reasoning, and imagination. In Australia, reading rates dropped from 92% in 2017 to 75% by 2021. Around 30% of Australians did not read or listen to a single book in the past year. Less reading does not automatically mean less critical thinking. But reading is one of the most effective ways to build the skills critical thinking relies on. When it declines, those skills decline with it.

Social media and algorithmic echo chambers

Social media has genuine benefits for connection, learning, and access to information. This is not about demonising it. But the research on its impact on critical thinking is hard to ignore. Algorithms reduce your exposure to opposing viewpoints. Content is designed to trigger emotional rather than analytical responses. The format trains shallow scanning over deep engagement. When your feed shows you only what you already agree with, you stop practising the skill of evaluating both sides. You do not even notice it happening. That is the part that gets you.

AI and cognitive offloading

Research from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft found greater trust in AI systems correlates with lower levels of measured critical thinking. People with higher confidence in their own analytical abilities retain stronger reasoning skills. When people do not know how to assess or improve what AI gives them, they stop questioning it altogether. Creative thinking faces a similar threat. When the first answer is always generated for you, the muscle for generating your own ideas atrophies. AI is an extraordinary tool. But there is a difference between using it to support your thinking and using it to replace it. (If you want to understand how AI agents are reshaping the workplace, that is worth reading alongside this.)

Education system changes

Standardised testing, curriculum narrowing, and teaching to the test have reduced the space for open-ended inquiry and debate in classrooms. A University of Melbourne report noted many students show no significant improvement in critical thinking abilities after completing a university degree. The irony is not lost: the institutions designed to build these skills are struggling to deliver them.

The elimination of boredom

Constant digital stimulation removes the unstimulated moments where reflective and creative thinking historically occurred. Boredom used to be where ideas showed up. Where you worked through a problem without realising it. Where your brain did the background processing it needed. We have essentially optimised boredom out of existence, and we have lost something in the process.

What This Means for Workplaces

These are not abstract trends. They show up in how people work every day.

Teams default to the first solution proposed rather than generating alternatives. Managers accept data at face value without questioning methodology or source. Employees follow processes nobody has challenged in years. Proposals get approved because they sound confident, not because the evidence holds up.

The cost is not always visible. It shows up in poor decisions, missed opportunities, wasted investment, and a culture where the loudest voice wins over the most reasoned one.

Organisations wanting to address this need to go beyond telling people to "think critically." You do not build critical thinking by putting it on a poster in the kitchen. You build it by creating the conditions for it: time for reflection, psychological safety to challenge ideas, reward systems that value quality of thinking over speed of output, and development programs that build these skills deliberately rather than assuming people already have them.

How to Build Critical Thinking

Ask better questions

Get into the habit of asking more of the information you receive. Sometimes that means clarifying: what exactly do you mean by that? Sometimes it means digging deeper: what is the evidence behind this? Sometimes it means broadening: what is the alternative view, and have we considered it? The quality of your thinking is directly linked to the quality of the questions you ask.

Write it down

Once you start asking better questions, capture what comes back. When faced with a decision, write down the options, the evidence for and against each one, and the assumptions you are making. Thinking feels rigorous in your head. On paper, you quickly see where the holes are.

Notice what you are being fed

Pay attention to your feed for a day. Not what you engage with, but what keeps showing up. If every article, opinion, and comment reinforces what you already think, your algorithm is doing its job. That is not information. It is confirmation. Start deliberately adding sources that challenge your perspective. Follow one publication or commentator you regularly disagree with. You do not have to agree with them. You have to know what the other side of the argument looks like.

How to Build Creative Thinking

Get outside your bubble

Talk to people in different industries. Attend events on topics unrelated to your work. Listen to podcasts from fields you know nothing about. Ask the person at dinner who does a completely different job to yours how they solve problems. Creativity thrives at intersections. The best ideas rarely come from going deeper into what you already know. They come from colliding it with something unexpected.

Challenge "the way it's always been done"

When you notice a process, rule, or approach everyone follows without question, ask: why? What would happen if we changed this? What would a complete beginner do here? A word of caution: there is a difference between the person who asks a thoughtful question at the right moment and the person who challenges everything in every meeting. Pick your moments, ask with genuine curiosity, and come with an alternative, not a complaint.

Practise generating options

And to come with an alternative, you need the habit of generating them. When facing a problem, force yourself to come up with at least three possible solutions before choosing one. The first idea is rarely the best one. It is the most obvious one. Training yourself to look beyond it is where creative thinking lives.

Your Challenge

Critical and creative thinking are not one-time skills you tick off a development plan. They are ongoing practices. The more you use them, the stronger they get. The less you use them, the weaker they become.

The good news is, given the price of petrol, groceries, and basically everything else right now, none of us are going anywhere. So we might as well use the time.

Read a book.

Go full vintage. A whole book. Not a summary. Not an Instagram carousel of "key takeaways." An actual book with pages and everything. It does not matter what genre. The act of sustained reading builds the exact cognitive skills: reflection, analysis, imagination, sustained attention, that critical and creative thinking depend on. Thirty percent of Australians did not read a single book last year. The bar is on the ground. Step over it.

Cook something you do not have all the ingredients for.

Open the fridge. Look at what you have. Pick a recipe you are missing at least two things for. Now figure it out. Substitute, adapt, improvise. This is creative thinking in a kitchen. You have constraints, missing pieces, and no option to follow the instructions exactly as written. It is the same skill as solving a problem at work with limited resources: you assess what you have, imagine what else would work, and make a decision without perfect information. Plus, given the price of groceries right now, this is basically a survival skill.

Argue with AI.

If you use ChatGPT, Claude, or any other AI tool, stop accepting the first answer it gives you. Tell them to stop being so polite and agreeable. Tell them to stop saying "great idea" and "this is amazing work." Tell them to challenge you. Tell them to argue back and pick holes in your ideas. Get them to present the oppositional facts and opinions. Ask them to find the three biggest weaknesses in your proposal before you present it. Ask them to steelman the position you disagree with so you understand it properly. Ask them to give you five reasons your strategy will fail.

We spent a whole section of this blog talking about AI contributing to cognitive decline. So flip it. Turn it into the sparring partner you do not have at work. The one who is not worried about office politics, does not care about your feelings, and is available at 2am. Unlike your colleagues, it will not hold a grudge when you tell it its first idea was ordinary.

Think back to the revenue scenario at the top of this blog. When you first read it, did you celebrate with everyone else? Did you question it? Did you wonder what was underneath the number? Your answer tells you something about where your critical and creative thinking muscles are right now.

These are skills anyone at any level builds. You do not need a certain role, seniority, or educational background. You need the willingness to think harder, question more, and approach problems with both rigour and imagination.

In a world where algorithms decide what you see and AI generates answers on demand, your ability to think independently is not a bonus skill. It is the one thing nobody else and nothing else replicates for you.

If your organisation needs support building critical and creative thinking into the way your people work, we help teams develop these skills through practical, structured programs. Not theory. Not posters. Real capability that changes how your people think, question, and solve problems. Get in touch.

Sources:

• World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025

• Foundation for Young Australians, "The New Basics"

• UCLA, Professor Patricia Greenfield (published in Science)

• Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft, AI and critical thinking (2025)

• Australia Reads / Australian Publishers Association

• Macquarie University, Australian reading habits study

• Gallup, employee creativity research

• The Matter of Facts, ABC TV (presented by Hamish Macdonald)

• University of Melbourne, "Our Kids Are Missing Out on Critical Thinking"