What Is Open Thinking?

Open Thinking is the practice of concurrently dreaming, deciding, and doing: a continuous cycle of Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Applied Thinking. The model was introduced by Dan Pontefract in his 2018 book Open to Think: Slow Down, Think Creatively and Make Better Decisions, winner of the 2019 getAbstract International Book of the Year.

Open Thinking is comprised of three key phases:

• Creative Thinking: unleashed from constraints to generate new ideas. Do you reflect?
• Critical Thinking: thorough analysis of ideas to inform an ethical decision. How do you decide?
• Applied Thinking: commitment to execute a decision. Will you take thoughtful action?

Dream, Decide, Do

Dream, decide, do. The interplay of these three concepts sits at the heart of Open Thinking, and the three phases are meant to be continuously in motion. An Open Thinker is one who aspires to concurrently dream, decide, and do, rather than skipping reflection in the rush to act, or endlessly analyzing without ever committing.

Why We Stopped Thinking

There is a widespread cultural tendency toward quick decisions and quick action. It has produced many of society’s greatest successes, but even more of its failures, because we have begun to reward speed over quality. Busyness, distraction, and the pressure to do more with less have left many people unable to do the heightened thinking required to be sane, engaged, and happy. Some have outsourced both Creative and Critical Thinking altogether. Open Thinking is the type of thinking we need for a more humanistic society, and for better decisions at work.

Become an Open Thinker

Dan runs Mastering How to Be an Open Thinker as a half-day or full-day workshop and delivers Better Thinking in the Age of AI as a keynote, treating AI as a complement to judgment rather than a replacement for it. Face-to-face or virtual, worldwide.

Planning a leadership event? See the leadership keynote speaker and workshop page for formats, topics and how to check a date.

Planning an event on AI and thinking? See the AI keynote speaker page for the keynote, the workshops and how to check a date.

What Open Thinking Is

Open Thinking is a holistic approach of reflection, decision-making, and action to secure an ethical outcome.

Three Ways Thinking Gets Blocked

In Open to Think, Dan names three habits that prevent Open Thinking from taking hold.

• Indifferent Thinking: Skipping the dreaming and the decision-making because it takes too much effort, then rushing the action or dismissing it altogether.
• Indecisive Thinking: “Paralysis by analysis,” a phrase Dan attributes to H. Igor Ansoff.
• Inflexible Thinking: Jumping to action without reflecting.

Three Questions to Ask Yourself

• Do I spend enough time reflecting and dreaming?
• Do I make thorough decisions based on facts and evidence?
• Do I rush to complete an action?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Open Thinking?
A model of thinking that keeps Creative Thinking (dream), Critical Thinking (decide), and Applied Thinking (do) continuously in motion, so ideas are generated, examined ethically, and acted on.

Who coined Open Thinking?
Dan Pontefract, in Open to Think (2018), the 2019 getAbstract International Book of the Year and a 2019 Axiom Business Book Awards silver medallist.

What are the three types of thinking in Open to Think?
Creative Thinking, unleashed from constraints to generate new ideas; Critical Thinking, thorough analysis of ideas to inform an ethical decision; and Applied Thinking, commitment to execute a decision.

What does “dream, decide, do” mean?
It is the shorthand for the three phases: dream (creative), decide (critical), do (applied). Open Thinkers do all three concurrently rather than stalling in one.

How does Open Thinking apply to AI?
When people outsource creative and critical thinking to tools, the quality of decisions drops. Open Thinking treats AI as a complement to human judgment, not a substitute, which is the theme of Dan’s Better Thinking in the Age of AI keynote.

Dream, decide, do.

What is Open Thinking?
A holistic approach of reflection, decision-making, and action to secure an ethical outcome, made up of Creative Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Applied Thinking.

What blocks Open Thinking?
Three habits: Indifferent Thinking, Indecisive Thinking, and Inflexible Thinking.