How would an effective critical thinker evaluate evidence when making
a business decision?

There are lots of techniques for this. The simplest is the positive
points and negative points list and see which is longer or to give
each point a weighting from 1 to 5 and count the points in each list.

Most business decisions are made on the basis of not knowing all of
the facts simply because the competition won?t tell you what they are
up to, so you are left with second guessing the situation and going
with your gut feeling influenced by what information you have.
Sometimes it is comfortable to put off the decision until you have a
clearer understanding of the total situation but procrastination just
means that you will never go in any direction.

Decisions generally come in two sorts; those that will influence
future outcome and those that won?t. Shall we buy ten new aircraft or
shall we paint the tailfins red or blue? Getting the first one more
right than wrong is the difficult guessing game. By the same token,
your rivals don?t know what you are about to do. How you see your own
place in the industry; whether you are proactive or reactive and
whether it is a buyers or sellers market is of vital importance. Often
the bold move can win the day. Sometimes friendly relations can exist
between business rivals whereby it may be possible to gauge each
others views on future trends in your particular sector which can be
built into the equation but they won?t tell you they have just
invented DVD?s when you are thinking of putting in extra VHS capacity.

Mostly, however, making a decision with uncertain outcome is better
than not making any decision at all.

Norman