To help facilitate hard thinking, Heindl has come up with exercises he calls "thinklets." "They alter scripted thinking patterns," he says. "They are designed as small bursts of mental stimuli that can be as simple as one question."

"Thinklets can be viewed as 'thought switches' that activate patterns that are not commonly used, leading to new associations, relationships and ultimately new ways of thinking," Heindl says.

A simple example: Heindl tells of working with an IT manager who couldn't decide between two final candidates for a job. Heindl told him to flip a coin. When the manager saw the outcome, he said, "How about two out of three?" He had already made his decision; he just didn't know it yet.

4. Question assumptions. Peter Stockhausen sharpens his critical thinking with a decision-making tool called sensitivity analysis. It's an exercise that looks at a proposal with the assumption that the actual cost or time will overrun to a certain degree. "It's a way to take a look at what that does to the benefits," says the former CIO of Manpower Inc., who is currently a principal at Wauwatosa, Wis.-based Silver Bullet Consultants LLC.

"How sensitive is the decision to all the parameters that were put into it?" he asks. "Adjust each of those and make them worse by 20%." If the benefits remain, then you probably have a winning idea, he says.