Krista Vardabash

After 20+ years of working as a business consultant for strategic planning and a few years to develop executive education programs at RIT’s Saunders College of Business, I landed at ESL Federal Credit Union as a member of the Corporate Strategy Team. This has been a dream-come-true role for me because ESL has maintained incredible discipline in strategy planning. I work routinely with senior managers and their teams to discover and define our paths to growth and measure our progress along those paths. I have also been teaching in RIT’s Executive MBA program since 2022, currently teaching Strategy I and II.

1.  How do you use Applied Critical Thinking in your professional practice, teaching, or research, and what are your favorite resources?
There’s a quote from Miyamoto Musashi (Japanese philosopher) that I have framed in my office: “Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things”. I think this captures why applied critical thinking is essential to my role. Our team is always asking questions that require a short-term and long-term view of the business.

2. Why do you think Applied Critical Thinking is important in your domain or role?
See above!

3. Can you share a story where quality Applied Critical Thinking was key to your success?
Every year, our team facilitates the senior team in a review of our corporate strategic plan. This past year, we added a critical objective to our strategy map for AI. Applying critical thinking frameworks enabled us to clearly define the scope of this objective and align resources for the next few years. 

4. How do you use Applied Critical Thinking in other areas of your life outside of your profession?
As a planner at heart, I use applied critical thinking very naturally. I’ve never been accused of not thinking enough about something. I enjoy thinking about all the possibilities that I have to be disciplined to stop, execute, measure, and assess, which is also exciting.

5. Any last critical thoughts you wish to share?
Probably to that last point, I think it’s important for each person to understand where their natural tendencies are when it comes to applied critical thinking. Know which parts you enjoy and which ones you need to be more disciplined about. Especially with AI providing more possibilities than ever before…the notion of endless possibilities may indeed be here. When I teach strategy, we discuss how to move executive groups past hurdles that impede execution and everything that follows. This is a core aspect of applied critical thinking: execute, measure, and assess next moves.