Download Critical Thinking in Action and more Thesis Business Accounting in PDF only on Docsity! Running head: Critical thinking in action 1 Critical Thinking in Action Capella University Critical Thinking in Action The intent of this paper is to discuss how businesses use critical thinking skills to influence their overall business strategy. Developed by the U.S Army War College in the 1980s (Giles, 2018) to help military officers make decisions to address the uncertainty and complexity of the post-cold-war world. It is a critical thinking tool Since then it has been embraced by business strategists worldwide. VUCA is an acronym used to describe a framework for decision making designed for the modern world. VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It provides a departure from traditional linear thinking that assumes stability with predictable outcomes that are simpler and clearer to understand. Each element falls along a spectrum of how much is known about a situation and how well the results of decisions or actions can be predicted. (Bennett, 2014) While VUCA is often used to describe negative clouds on the horizon type scenario VUCA can be used to describe both positive and negative situations. Panera Bread’s Mosh Pit Problem In 2010 Panera Bread Co., a fast-casual restaurant chain had reached a turning point in its growth where its success in driving customers to their brand was starting to impede its future. Customer demand had increased beyond their capacity to serve them in a timely manner. Customers were having to wait in line for up to 8 minutes just to place their orders and then Critical thinking in action 2 navigate what Chief Executive Ron Shaich described as a “mosh pit” effect as customers crowded the pickup area trying to find their orders. (Jargon, 2017) In addition to this customer crush up to 10% of orders were incorrect. This drove customers away despite Panera’s strong menu offerings and led to lower year over year growth in sales. Panera Bread could have made the mistake of thinking they were operating in a stable business environment and implement decisions chain-wide based on traditional business strategy concepts. However, Panera Bread realized they were operating in the VUCA environment and opted to develop a prototype restaurant they dubbed Panera 2.0, so they could observe the problem and create a systematic solution. (Taylor, 2017). The solution was not one single thing but "hundreds of little things" (Jargon, 2017) that required adjustments. This indicates that the primary VUCA factor that was in play was complexity with many interconnected factors. Initially, they implemented an online/self-service kiosk ordering system (Giles, 2018) with the idea that by streamlining the order process would solve the primary problem of customer wait times. However, this implementation caused the bottleneck to be transferred from the front of house to the kitchen. Because the new ordering system allowed customers to make substitutions and customizations this increased the complexity of orders placing more stress upon the kitchen and the pickup area became even more crowded. This is the unpredictable VUCA factor which is also a characteristic of complexity. (Giles, 2018) The solution was to refine how orders were processed in the kitchen including simplifying kitchen displays to reduce errors and delivering dine-in orders to the customer's table to reduce congestion at the pickup area. The process took nearly 6 years of patiently observing,
