---
title: "Critical Thinking: articles"
url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Critical%2BThinking.md"
canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Critical+Thinking"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Three posts on clear thinking as a team leader, on critical team thinking, questions to ask about leadership advice, and what to do when you want to quit."
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Critical Thinking: articles

Three posts on clear thinking as a team leader, on critical team thinking, questions to ask about leadership advice, and what to do when you want to quit.

HTML: https://www.5whys.com/articles/category/Critical+Thinking · 3 linked entries (each is plain Markdown) · Site index: [llms.txt](https://www.5whys.com/llms.txt)

- [When I Want to Give Up](https://www.5whys.com/articles/when-i-want-to-give-up.md) (2015-06-11): Roy Osherove shares the gumption traps picture he keeps on his office door and how naming his feelings helps him move on when he wants to give up at work.
- [Developing Critical Team Thinking](https://www.5whys.com/articles/developing-critical-team-thinking.md) (2013-02-25): How the effectiveness, novelty and self-direction of critical thinking map onto growing a self-organizing team that keeps experimenting.
- [Five Questions to ask yourself when getting advice about team leadership](https://www.5whys.com/articles/five-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-getting-advice-about-tea.md) (2011-09-13): Questions for testing any team leadership advice against the three team maturity stages, plus bonus questions about the author's hidden assumptions.


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

### Social

- X: https://x.com/royosherove
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/

### Contact

- Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7

### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/