How To Practice Critical Thinking In Business

In ecommerce, critical thinking can make or break a business. How you approach decision-making and business strategy depends on thoughtful analysis and challenging accepted industry norms.

When Andy Pearson joined Liquid Death as vice president of creative, critical thinking guided the company’s approach. Liquid Death’s marketing, sales, and even its sense of humor were driven by thoughtful research and a questioning of assumptions that helped the brand carve out new spaces in the beverage industry.

This article explores the critical thinking process in business and how to use it to strengthen decision-making and strategy.

What is critical thinking in business?

Critical thinking is the ability to step back and reflect on a subject or dilemma. Unlike short-term thinking or jumping to conclusions, critical thinking is a more deliberate and analytical approach to problem-solving that requires questioning your assumptions, vetting relevant information, and weighing multiple perspectives, whether at work or in everyday life. 

In business, critical thinking is an essential skill that leaders and managers use to anticipate emerging risks and opportunities and improve project management. Strong critical thinking skills can help identify weak points in decision-making—recognizing biases and flawed assumptions—and develop a long-term strategy that informs major decisions. At its best, critical thinking draws on experience, real-world outcomes, and diverse perspectives to shape and drive strategically sound business decisions.

According to the 2025 Future of Jobs report by the World Economic Forum, critical and analytical thinking are the most sought-after skills for employers today, and will become more essential as AI and automation reshape the workplace. These trends, the report continues, “highlight the increasing complexity of decision-making and the need for critical problem solving in a data-driven world.” The report emphasizes that human judgment, interpretation, and critical thinking are the skills that ensure machines serve human goals rather than replace human insight.

Real-world example: How Liquid Death changed the rulebook on bottled water

Liquid Death’s approach of selling water in aluminum cans—not plastic bottles—defied decades of marketing convention and widely followed assumptions. Packaging spring water this way was considered a gamble. 

“We’d been trained for literally decades that you only drink water out of plastic bottles,” Andy says on the Shopify Masters podcast. “It’s all because water had been marketed based on purity, and no one had decided: What if it wasn’t marketed on purity?”

Andy recalls the experience of people scoffing at his team’s business plan and saying, “No one’s going to drink water out of a can.”

In spite of this resistance, Liquid Death relied on a fundamental principle of critical thinking: Question your assumptions. The brand’s research and experience led them to conclude that spring water didn’t have to be sold in translucent, unengaging bottles to earn consumer trust. Its packaging could be exciting.

Liquid Death engaged customers through edgy social media campaigns and earned media. The company aired a Super Bowl ad full of humor, echoing the energy of a beer commercial. Its audience grew, and so did its sales.

Today, Liquid Death continues to benefit from applying critical thinking and challenging conventional wisdom. The company is built firmly within a branding space that marketing experts once insisted wasn’t viable: provocative spring water in a can.

Over the years, Andy has heard less and less about how Liquid Death’s packaging approach is misguided. Instead—and with a sense of vindication—he recalls a new refrain he hears from his peers: “God, water in a can. It’s so obvious. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

How to practice critical thinking in business

1. Question your assumptions
2. Identify your biases
3. Use reliable data
4. Focus through prioritization
5. Test your ideas
6. Foster a candid and dynamic workspace

Critical thinking is one of your most effective tools for strategizing your business’s future. How you approach it, however, is vital to your success. Unfounded assumptions, over-reliance on faulty conventional wisdom, or misunderstanding consumer behavior can lead to flawed strategies and derail your mission. 

Here’s how to foster strong critical thinking skills as a business leader:

1. Question your assumptions

Critical thinking starts with questioning assumptions and refusing to accept industry standards as gospel. Start with your basic truths—what do you know, and what do you assume to be true? By deconstructing what you believe and why you believe it, you can identify weak points in your business strategy or locate new opportunities.

Andy describes a culture at Liquid Death dedicated to questioning the norms and standards of its competitors. Although bottled water brands emphasized simple packaging and conventional customer outreach, Liquid Death instead embraced bold packaging and an edgy brand voice. Since then, the company has grown exponentially—reaching a $1.4 billion valuation in 2024—engaging new customers and setting the brand apart in a crowded marketplace.

2. Identify your biases

A bias is a prejudice in favor of or against something. Good critical thinkers are mindful of their own cognitive biases and how these affect intuition and strategic thinking. These biases can include recency bias (overweighting recent information), cultural bias (judging through your own culture), or other biases, like aversions to automation or other rapid technological advancements. You can also be biased toward your own perspectives and ignore the advice of others.

Before launching the cookware brand HexClad, CEO Danny Winer first tried selling juicers. When the influx of juice store openings led him to shutter the idea, he found out several close friends and advisers had always doubted it. The problem? Danny hadn’t asked for their opinions. “They’re like, ‘You didn’t ask for any hard criticism or advice on this,’” Danny says on Shopify Masters. 

“People look for the reasons [they] weren’t successful, or something underperformed. Somebody will scour the room looking for the answer, and the last place they look is in the mirror,” Danny says.

3. Use reliable data

Don’t rely on intuition and instinct alone. Ground your decision-making process in sound, reliable data and evidence-based results. A data-driven approach is especially important for problem-solving and testing hypotheses that run counter to conventional wisdom, giving you ammunition to bolster your arguments and strategies. 

Debbie Wei Mullin, founder of Copper Cow Coffee, described this approach on a recent episode of Shopify Masters. Noting high customer loyalty scores and low purchase rates, Debbie gathered customer feedback that ran counter to her core assumptions: Her business’s high-quality coffee was often considered “special occasion coffee.” This new data fueled a period of introspection and a drive to rebrand the product as an “everyday coffee” that felt more accessible. 

4. Focus through prioritization

Critical thinking requires focus, and pursuing too many agendas at once can create a distracted, haphazard way of working. Prioritize your workload by gauging the impact and effort required for each agenda item. This may mean deprioritizing or rejecting some good ideas based on your resources and competing priorities.

Maggie Sellers, the angel investor and founder of Hot Smart Rich Media, describes her approach to prioritization on the Shopify Masters podcast. 

“You can really only do three essential things,” Maggie says. Otherwise, “you’re going to get into analysis paralysis. And it’s hard to even know where to start, because it just seems so overwhelming.”

5. Test your ideas

Testing your ideas is a core part of the critical thinking process and helps transform a hypothesis into a viable strategy. Rather than assume an idea will work, critical thinkers find low-cost, low-impact ways to conduct real-world tests. This can include running small pilot programs, experiments, or prototypes before committing greater time or resources.

Fishwife cofounder and CEO Becca Millstein relied heavily on a small test launch to determine the demand for her new product—premium tinned fish sourced from micro-canneries. 

“We did this tiny little micro-launch of 100 beta boxes, which sold out in less than an hour,” she says. Only then did she feel confident about fully investing in the inventory.

6. Foster a candid and dynamic workspace

A workspace that values critical and creative thinking treats candor and the respectful expression of ideas as an asset. Build an environment that fosters teamwork, encourages open-ended questions, and allows for constructive criticism. There’s no better way to encourage new ideas and better outcomes than to draw on the strengths and diverse perspectives of your team.

Suri cofounders Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore found themselves in this dilemma as their sustainable oral‑care brand expanded. Their solution: weekly Friday meetings, where team members could freely express themselves and practice active listening. These sessions equipped employees with new tools for collaboration and dialogue, strengthening team unity and encouraging greater employee buy-in.