The What? So What? Now What? This prediction model is a structured reflective framework used to analyze situations, make sense of their implications, and determine future actions. It is commonly applied in business strategy, education, and leadership development.

Breakdown of the Model:

1. What?
   • This stage focuses on objective observation and data collection.
   • Questions to ask:
     • What happened?
     • What are the facts?
     • What is the situation or trend?
2. So What?
   • This stage emphasizes interpretation and significance of the observations.
   • Questions to ask:
     • Why does this matter?
     • What are the implications?
     • How does this connect to larger trends or business goals?
3. Now What?
   • This stage is about decision-making and action planning based on the insights gained.
   • Questions to ask:
     • What should be done next?
     • What are the potential future outcomes?
     • How can we adjust our strategy based on these insights?

Application in Prediction Modeling:

In a predictive analytics or business forecasting context, this model can be adapted to structure data-driven decision-making:

• What? → Identify patterns and trends in historical data.
• So What? → Analyze the potential impact of these trends on business performance.
• Now What? → Develop strategies to capitalize on opportunities or mitigate risks.

Would you like a specific example of this applied in a business or education setting?

How can you use this prediction model in your life?

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Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model

Bronfenbrenner’s model consists of five interrelated systems that shape an individual’s development:

1. Microsystem: Immediate environments such as family, school, and peers.
2. Mesosystem: Interactions between different microsystems (e.g., relationships between family and school).
3. Exosystem: External environments that indirectly influence development (e.g., parents’ workplaces).
4. Macrosystem: Broader cultural and societal influences.
5. Chronosystem: Changes over time that affect development (e.g., life transitions, historical events).

Association with Critical Thinking Skills

The University of Louisville indicates that critical thinking involves analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing information to make reasoned judgments. Here’s how each system in Bronfenbrenner’s model can contribute to the development of these skills:

1. Microsystem:
   • Family: Parents and siblings can encourage questioning and problem-solving, fostering an environment where critical thinking is valued.
   • School: Teachers and peers play a crucial role in developing critical thinking through discussions, debates, and collaborative projects.
2. Mesosystem:
   • Interconnections: Positive interactions between family and school can reinforce critical thinking skills. For example, parental involvement in school activities can enhance a child’s learning experiences and promote critical thinking.
3. Exosystem:
   • Indirect Influences: Factors such as parents’ work environments can impact the resources and time available for fostering critical thinking at home. Supportive work policies can enable parents to be more involved in their children’s education.
4. Macrosystem:
   • Cultural Values: Societal attitudes towards education and critical thinking can shape how these skills are taught and valued. Cultures that emphasize inquiry and open-mindedness are likely to promote stronger critical thinking skills.
5. Chronosystem:
   • Temporal Changes: Life events and historical contexts can influence the development of critical thinking. For instance, exposure to diverse perspectives over time can enhance one’s ability to think critically.

Practical Implications

Understanding the association between Bronfenbrenner’s model and critical thinking can help educators, parents, and policymakers create environments that nurture these skills. For example:

• Educators can design curricula that integrate critical thinking exercises across subjects.
• Parents can engage in activities that promote questioning and exploration.
• Policymakers can support educational reforms that emphasize critical thinking.
• Citizens can choose policies that support their cultural values.

Tell me what you think when you get a chance!

Adrian

Sio et al. (2012)’s work adds to this body of work. Specifically participants in the sleep group in their experiments demonstrated that performance on problem solving improves after a period of sleep. The sleep group out performed participants who remained awake while they slept. The sleep group solved a greater number of difficult problems than did the other groups. The researchers concluded that sleep facilitates problem solving, most likely via spreading activation. This effect was not remarkable for easy problems.

This means that taking a nap will likely increase your performance with problem solving at school or work. Of course, sometimes we do not have the option of taking a nap and must employ other strategies to solve our problems. Collaborative problem solving, which is working with others to solve your problems, is a viable option in circumstances like these.

Information processing comprises three different types of components used to plan, monitor, and evaluate problems that require solving. Second are performance processes that one uses to implement planning, monitoring, and evaluation components. The final component of information processing is knowledge acquisition and people use these processes to gather resources to solve problems that they face. Examples of these components include goal setting for planning activities, self-evaluation as a form of monitoring, and seeking help as a method for obtaining additional resources to succeed.

Sternberg’s theory of intelligence assumes that we apply our intelligence in three ways to manage our environment. First, we must adapt ourselves to our existing environments. Second, we must shape our existing environment to create new sustainable environments. Third, we must select new environments as necessary to achieve our goals. For instance when you first start a new job, you probably try to figure out the implicit and explicit rules of your corporate culture. You then try to use these rules to succeed in your new company. You can also shape your new company by creating a social club or users group for after work activities. Finally, if you are unable to adapt yourself or shape your new work environment to suit you needs, you might consider selecting a new job where you can better achieve your goals.

Our level of experience affects how well we perform each task that we perform. Each of us faces tasks in conditions with which we have varying levels of experience. As tasks become progressively more familiar, many parts of the tasks may become automatic. They need little conscious effort for determining what steps to take next and how to accomplish the next step.  New and unfamiliar tasks can make demands on intelligence that are different from those of tasks from which one has developed automatic procedures.

In the end your goal should be to increase your familiarly with the skills required in each of the three dimensions of intelligence. For example these skills include problem solving, planning, logic, and word comprehension among others. Continue to read this blog for more information on how to get smarter.

• Increasing your alertness. This is an important factor for many people for example astronauts, stock-car drivers, bus drivers, telemarketers, healthcare workers and others interacting with public. NASA space studies have demonstrated that alertness increases by as much as 100% after a nap.
• Improving your accuracy. Making mistakes costs us time, money, and energy. Making a mistake can sometimes destroy people’s lives. While working with greater speed usually causes more errors, napping offers a valuable exception. So whether you throw pitches or darts, play chess or checkers, cut grass or precious stones, a nap helps you get it right.
• Helping you better decisions. Where are you going to eat dinner? Should you propose today or wait a while. What car should you buy? Should you sell your car? Every second, every minute, every day, we make decisions both trivial and small. Research indicates that pilots who took a nap in the cockpit made fewer judgment errors on take-off and landings and those who did not.
• Improving your perception. We depend upon our eyes, our ears and, to a lesser extent taste, touch and smell to live a successful life. Science has demonstrated that we can enhance our driving, cooking, appreciating art forms, reading, quality control and even bird-watching after a nap.
• Boosts your creativity. Many of history’s great artists and inventors, for example Mozart and Einstein, have said that napping allows the brain to create associations necessary for creative insight and opens the way for new ideas.
• Helps your memory. Our memory consolidation, bringing information together to form knowledge, cannot occur in any significant way without sleep. We can improve everything from learning a new programming language to remembering human anatomy by taking a short nap between study periods.

Mednick’s book demonstrates that taking a nap has many selling points. It also helps you plan the optimum nap: when to take it, how long to sleep, and how not to wake up groggy. Taking a nap is a way to improve many of the thinking abilities that make you smarter.

Scientists have investigated the effects of self-efficacy in numerous domains and many people have assumed it is a significant influence on human performance.  Self-efficacy beliefs affect our choice of activities and effort expended upon personal actions. It also influences our perseverance in the face of obstacles; how we feel and the goals that we choose.

The best methods to improve your Self-Efficacy

You have three ways to increase our self-efficacy. First are mastery experiences that result from the desire to develop a competency. Researchers tend to regard mastery experiences as the most influential source of self-efficacy. Although mastery experiences imply proficiency, futile attempts will undermine self-efficacy beliefs. Vicarious experiences encompass viewing a comparable other’s performance on given tasks. This source of self-efficacy is particularly powerful when people are unsure of their own abilities or when they have modest prior knowledge of the pertinent activity. Discussions and other forms of persuasive communication can also raise self-efficacy. These are most successful when expressed by parties who are capable and honest. Click here to receive your guide to self-efficacy development.

Goals and feedback on performance are also required for self-evaluation.  They can be internal or external factors. This means that both personal and social matters are relevant to self-evaluation. One example could be the goal of losing five pounds and feedback would pertain to self-measurements of weight. A similar scenario would concern a supervisor’s assigned goal to exceed weekly sales quota and feedback comes from a company sales reports.

Individuals assess whether they have successfully fulfilled their expectations as part of self-evaluation. This results in changes in effort, perceptions of performance, and goal commitment.  Negative feelings often present if progress is slower than expected towards goals.  Low performers react negatively to this type of self-evaluation.  They are unlikely to try to improve their performance because they attribute their errors to internal, stable factors, such as low ability. They also attribute their performance to circumstances that they cannot change. It is not surprising that a person may change their goals due to negative self-evaluation.

Did you know self-evaluation is a precursor to high performance?

People who achieve high performance continue to pursue their goals following negative self-evaluation. They tend to attribute their failure to low effort and poor use of learning strategies. If progress is not sufficient, one may increase effort or change strategies to increase the likelihood of goal attainment and improving performance. High performers focus their attention on circumstances they can change. High performers are persistent.

Self-evaluations have both indirect and direct consequences. They have important implications for how we feel about ourselves and how we respond to challenges. Self-evaluation influences whether we pursue our goals. In the end, our self-evaluations will be negative at some point in our life; you must be persistent, increase your effort and try new strategies for great performance.

Did you know there are three types of learning strategies?

1. Goal setting is a generic strategy because one can use goal setting in a variety of domains. A domain is a specified sphere of activity or knowledge. Another generic strategy is rehearsal that is the recycling of information in short term memory. We perform rehearsal when we are trying to retain a phone number just long enough to dial the number.
2. The second type of strategy is domain specific. Using a cooking recipe for beef stew is a domain specific strategy because a cooking recipe has little use outside a kitchen. Applying a depreciation formula to a rental property is also a domain specific strategy because it has limited value outside of accounting practices. Likewise, computer-programming procedures have little use outside computer languages.
3. Metacognitive strategies are the third type of strategy. People engage in these strategies to adapt to and manage strategies while thinking. Metacognition refers to thinking about one’s thinking. It concerns two types of knowledge: facts and steps to perform a task, in other words procedural knowledge. Metacognition helps us monitor and control our strategies. One example of metacognition occurs when a person uses multiple comprehension strategies while reading because they know they will comprehend more efficiently.

 Do you want to become a good learning strategy user?

Good strategy users have a broad repertoire of strategies. They use such strategies in an automatic manner with little conscious effort. Moreover, they perform all types of strategies in this manner. Being an automated strategy user is best because it allows you to allocate your limited thinking resources to constructing meaning and overseeing your learning processes. Which type of strategy user are you? For more information on strategies, download your free primer on learning strategies.