Analytical Thinking: The Soft Skill That Drives Better Decisions

“Let’s analyze the situation.” It’s not just a call for order. It’s the moment when you decide which side to look at. 8:45 a.m., improvised war room in the headquarters of a multinational pharmaceutical company. Faces are tense, coffee cups are steaming. The marketing campaign has already started, but logistics are struggling and regulatory constraints are becoming more complicated. The imminent launch of a new product risks derailing. Each department has its own version but there’s no synthesis, there’s no direction. And the data, without a gaze that can truly read them, is silent. Someone will have to break down the chaos and decipher the details. And to do that, something more than experience is needed: it’s the moment when a skill often overlooked on resumes emerges – clear and powerful: analytical thinking.

In the language of neuroscience, analytical thinking is an advanced function of the mind that allows us to examine a complex problem by breaking it down into simpler and more comprehensible components. One of the most well-known theoretical references is the “two systems” model developed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. We have already talked about it on this blog. According to the Nobel Prize winner, the efficiency of our mind depends on the interaction between the fast System 1, intuitive and automatic, and the slower System 2, which presides over deliberate and reflective activities.

It is precisely System 2 that is activated when we need to reason logically, evaluate contradictory data, make thoughtful decisions. This type of thinking does not occur automatically: it requires conscious attention, control, and a cognitive effort that our brain often tries to avoid.

Numerous studies (Evans & Stanovich, 2013; Diamond, 2016) demonstrate that this ability is directly related to skills such as working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control. In simple words: Thinking analytically means pausing instinct, holding back initial conclusions, and looking deeply at the data at hand.
For those who work in human resources, understanding how capable a candidate or employee is of activating this type of thinking can make the difference between reacting and acting strategically.

Analytical thinking is not a trend born with big data. It has roots as deep and penetrating as the daggers of ancient generals. Do you remember Publius Cornelius Scipio, known as Africanus? The man who defeated Hannibal and changed the fate of Rome in the Second Punic War. Scipio did not win with force but with analysis. He was the first to understand that the enemy is faced where he is least comfortable. He studied maps, interpreted troop movements, but above all he picked up on weak signals (logistical, political, cultural) that others overlooked. Like the strategic potential of a young pretender to the throne of Numidia, Massinissa, who he transformed from an unstable ally to a decisive resource in the victory against Carthage.

Scipio was an analytical thinker ante litteram and his victory at Zama was a lesson in multilevel thinking: seeing beyond the troops, beyond the battles, beyond the immediate. A lesson that is still valid today. Because that lucid gaze, capable of reading complexity, is the same one we are looking for in today's decision makers, those professionals who know how to move in VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) scenarios with ease and without getting lost.

In increasingly interconnected and information-intensive organizational contexts, analytical thinking proves to be a high-impact soft skill. This is determined by the fact that it allows you to:

• Understanding the root of problems rather than just the symptoms.
• Evaluate multiple scenarios, simulate consequences, make informed decisions.
• Work effectively with data, dashboards, KPIs, without getting lost in the details.

In HR, analytical thinking is not only useful, it is crucial. Knowing how to read patterns in engagement, turnover or performance data allows you to prevent critical issues and direct targeted training investments. Furthermore, in selection and assessment processes, it helps to distinguish those who know how to deal with complexity from those who suffer from it.

Skills in Sync: Analytical Thinking in the Problem Solving System
Analytical thinking is a strategic cog, but it cannot work in isolation. Only when it moves together with other key skills does it set the problem-solving mechanism in motion. Critical thinking is the closest cog, it evaluates what has just been broken down, tests its coherence and discards weak hypotheses. Decision-making corresponds to that part of transmission that converts analysis into action: it selects a direction and gives the system a concrete push. Around it, other soft skills – such as communication, collaboration and cognitive flexibility – act as a lubricant, allowing the system not to jam, even under pressure.
To better understand, just think of a project manager who, during a meeting, discovers that the delay is not due to production but to an overlap in the approval chain. Without accusing, he proposes a reorganization of the workflow and an intermediate verification system. Now, this is analytical thinking that translates into leadership.

It is not a skill that is easily intercepted, especially during an interview. Analytical thinking is revealed more in behaviors than in words, through signals that, for a careful eye, function as markers. It is detected when a person asks questions that dig deep (“What are the critical variables in this process?”), mentally structures information, segments, prioritizes, makes their reasoning explicit (“If A, then B. But if C intervenes, the sequence changes”). Those who think analytically show rigor even in uncertainty: they do not immediately look for the answer but first for the context in which a possible answer makes sense.
All this cannot be read in a resume. But it can emerge in simulated scenarios, where complexity does not remain still on the theoretical level but becomes action. This is why moments of experiential evaluation are a necessity.

Everyone knows that engaged employees produce better results. But measuring how and to what extent engagement actually impacts performance is a different story and requires analytical thinking, applied on a large scale. This is exactly what Clarks, the historic British footwear brand, has done with a retail network distributed across the world.

The company conducted a massive people analytics operation, analyzing over 450 variables for each store. Among the data collected: engagement levels, sales performance, team composition, seniority of the manager, staff turnover. The goal was ambitious: to identify the factors that really determine the differences between high- and low-performing stores.

The results left no doubt: an increase of 1% in average employee engagement generated, on average, an increase of 0.4% in point of sale performance. A strong correlation, statistically significant, and above all translatable into strategy.
From this analytical insight, Clarks has developed a support toolkit for managers (a collection of practical tools and guidelines) designed to help them:

• correctly read your team's engagement data;
• intervene in critical areas with practical and measurable actions (e.g. optimizing team composition, improving internal communication, simplifying decision-making processes);
• replicate the most effective practices of high-efficiency teams in underperforming stores.

This case demonstrates unequivocally that the analytical thinking, if rooted in HR culture, can become a transformative lever. It is not just about reading data, but about relating qualitative and quantitative information to guide strategic actions. In a sector in which one often acts by experience (or habit), seeing with analytical eyes has produced a real, measurable, replicable competitive advantage.

Evaluating (and developing) analytical thinking requires dynamic environments, where the candidate or internal resource can interact with complex variables, make choices, analyze data. This is where the managerial simulation tools that we develop at Artémat come into play.

In our Business Games, players must manage a virtual company in a competitive market. Each round involves strategic decisions that affect financial, production and reputational KPIs. At each cycle, “unexpected events” emerge that require an analytical recalibration of the strategy.

This high fidelity playground It allows HR to observe analytical thinking in action (what data is being read? how is it being interpreted?) and team members to train it. In this way, participants learn to isolate relevant variables in uncertain environments, simulate scenarios (“what-if”) and adapt their decision-making model based on feedback from the system. A traditional assessment could not provide the same level of depth. This is why tools of this kind are essential in the most advanced HR strategies.

Returning to the war room of the pharmaceutical company, unblocking a stalemate like the one imagined in the incipit is not a question of job title, nor of seniority. Not necessarily. It takes the ability to read the context analytically. And for this you do not need a different lens, but eyes that see differently.

The situation described is imaginary but up to a certain point: similar cases have actually occurred (and occur) in large pharmaceutical companies, as demonstrated by an analysis conducted by Indegene and Everest Group (2023). It has highlighted how factors such as the supply chain, regulatory constraints and marketing choices can undermine (or save) the success of a launch, making analytical thinking a decisive resource. In short, in times when complexity is the norm, those who know how to read beneath the surface are not only useful. They are necessary.