Adaptive thinking is changing your usual behaviour quickly in response to an unexpected situation.

A simple strategy to follow:

• Understand the complexity of the problem you are facing
• Be attentive so you can recognize immediately a change in the environment
• Implem...

The US Navy fighter pilots were taking significant losses during the Vietnam War. This inspired the creation of the now-famous Top Gun school, which focused extensively on failing and learning from that failure. The Top Gun school taught fighters to act fast in a dangerous environment wit...

We have always been told that good thinking is the result of reading books.

However, you can't only rely on what you know in unexpected situations. You need adaptive thinking to survive.

Adaptive thinking is the ability to recognize unexpected situations, quickly consider va...

The best form of planning is having a plan if things fail. But, more importantly, have a backup plan on your backup plan.

Prepare for the things that can possibly go wrong to reduce the chances of failure and increase the likelihood of survival.

Regardless of how carefully you plan for things that could go wrong, things will inevitably go wrong.

There is something called emotional hijacking: It means that your emotions block your ability to think.

Anger, fear, even positive sensation disable our ability to think clearly.

Developing adaptive thinking is not improving it. We also need a plan to further foster our adaptive thinking skills.

The Top Gun academy turned out to be a great success because they built a library of case studies. Their air training sessions were recorded and later obser...