Critical reflective thinking questions

How did you choose what to focus on and what to ignore?

Were you looking for something specific or just observing what happened?

How did your intentions, assumptions and point of view shape your observations?

What alternative viewpoints could you have taken?

How much did you zoom in for detail or zoom out for context?

How did your emotional state influence what you noticed?

How confident are you in the accuracy and completeness of your perceptions?

Did you pay equal attention to what was new and what was familiar?

Did you notice what remained constant and what shifted?

Which cognitive bias is most likely to have affected your perceptions?

How did you represent this information?

How did your choice relate to your intended audience?

What nuances might have been lost in translation?

How might someone else have expressed or interpreted this differently?

What reasoning lay behind your choice of labels or terms?

Did your choice of language introduce any assumptions or associations?

What elements of your representation were precise and what was ambiguous?

Did you maintain consistency throughout?

What criteria did you use to judge information, and what other criteria could you have used?

Would other people have chosen different criteria, scales or ranges of judgement?

Did you explore whether you had chosen the wrong criteria?

Did you establish your criteria in advance and apply them consistently or did they change?

How did you weigh different factors in your assessment?

How willing were you to revise your judgement based on new information?

Did you seek out evidence to validate or disprove your assessment?

How did your personal beliefs or values influence your evaluation?

What principles guided your organisation of this information into categories?

Did you consider alternative ways of arranging this information?

How did you decide on the number of categories to use?

What did you do with information that was harder to categorise?

What nuances did you sacrifice to group your information?

What similarities and differences did your categorisation emphasise and what alternatives did it downplay?

Are your categories really distinct or do they overlap?

Did your groupings introduce any implied hierarchies or black-and-white thinking?

What connections did you identify, and what was your basis for making those links?

What connections were you looking for and what unexpected ones did you find?

Did you explore alternative possible connections?

How strong or weak were the connections you focused on compared to the ones you ignored?

Did you consider the possibility of random coincidences?

How did you determine the importance or significance of the patterns you found?

Did you examine potential links across different scales or timeframes?

Did you question or challenge any commonly accepted relationships?

Did you leap from correlation to causation? 

What alternative explanations might there be for the phenomenon and what were your reasons for choosing this explanation?

Could you have assumed the wrong causal relationships?

To what extent were you choosing facts to fit existing explanations?

How far ahead (or backward) did you project, and what would happen if you go further?

How sensitive are your projections to small changes in the starting conditions?

What predictions are you making that are testable?

What circumstances or outcomes would prove your explanations or predictions to be wrong?

Did you consider a range of alternative future developments?

How did you factor in the inherent uncertainty when making your extrapolations?

Have you been overly optimistic or pessimistic in your explanation or predictions?

What gaps are there in your explanations and projections?