3 Types of Common Sense for the Best Strategic Thinking

From Pixabay

I’m always amused when people speak about the concept of common sense, especially when it seems that there is less and less of it around.

I had a discussion about this with someone who teaches about life lessons, mind talk, cognitive bias, and lifehacking. They told me, that as far as they were concerned, there are three common meanings to the term, “common sense” with each of these definitions shifting, morphing and changing, with time, and with environments.

The first and most common meaning of the term common sense is basically those things that “Everyone knows.”

Examples of this include things like avoiding salad bars at noon in the business district of any city unless you enjoy waiting in long lines, and never trying to flag down a taxi at rush hour. The challenge here is that those who use the term common sense in this way tend to grossly over-estimate what “everyone knows.” Their assumptions are usually based on a combination of confirmation bias, information bias, cultural elitism and memes they have been convinced are accurate. Ultimately, this is common sense based on what is promoted as common knowledge by the mass of the world’s common thinkers.

The second meaning of common sense is “things people should know!”