Learning to Think
More from Roger Martin about how successful leaders think. He argues that when faced with a problem or challenge, leaders work through four steps:
- Determining salience
- Analyzing causality
- Envisioning the decision architecture
- Achieving resolution.
Conventional thinkers try to over-simplify each step. They focus only on the obvious issues in determining salience, they consider more linear cause-effect relationships in the second step, they break problems into pieces and work on them separately or sequentially, and they make simple choices among options in the end.
Integrative thinkers welcome more complexity into the process (often to the dismay of bosses, who tell you to stop trying to “complicate” things). Looking at less obvious (but possibly relevant) factors. Examining nonlinear relationships. Coming up with creative solutions. But I am particularly interested in the decision architecture piece.
Integrative thinkers see problems as a whole and understand that decisions on particular parts will affect other parts. So as you’re working through a particular part, the other parts are still in your head. As Martin says,
They don’t parcel out the elements for others to work on piecemeal or let one element temporarily drop out of sight, only to be taken up again for consideration after everything else has been decided. An architect doesn’t ask his subordinates to design a perfect bathroom and a perfect living room and a perfect kitchen and then hope that the pieces of the house will fit nicely together.
It seems clear to me, though, that in general we are not taught to think this way (maybe we should all study architecture?). I was disappointed that Martin’s closing said, basically, that they still want to raise awareness about the concept of integrative thinking, and that they were working on ways to teach it in business schools.
I don’t want to wait that long! I will do some thinking (integrative, I hope) about ways to develop this “habit of mind,” as Martin calls it, but I welcome suggestions from others as well. How have you developed this way of thinking?
4 Comments
Ben Martin
Interesting stuff. I often find myself making decisions on the next step without much regard for the effects that could be felt 2-3 steps down the road. I’ve been thinking I should take up chess to train my brain to consider the results of my decisions on more than just the immediate need.
Virgil Carter
Jamie, the comments about thinking are thought provoking :-)! Many thanks.
As an architect, I always designed thinking of opposites. Early design solutions were always based on whatever the two most extreme (yet achieveable) alternatives that I could conceive. Subsequent design studies, as they became more detailed, would incorporate more aspects of one of the opposites and less aspects of the other opposite. Early identification of the “opposites” helped to integrate (and give a rationale for) my design search process. A process of discovery, synthesis and evaluation then guided my subsequent problem solving.
Of course, there were always instances of new data that caused the “opposites” to be rethought.
This is a lot of “shop talk”, but it is a leadership process I have found useful through four very different career fields and not just architecture. We’re all different, but it works for me 🙂
Other’s milage will surely vary.
Graham Douglas
As the originator of Integrative Thinking™ and Integrative Governance™ I believe training in and practice of integrative thinking is necessary for all in our interconnected world. There is more involved than Roger Martin has indicated but it is within the capacity of most people to learn the fundamentals, remember them and apply them.
For further information please see my website and the paper at
http://topics.developmentgateway.org/businessenvironment/rc/ItemDetail.do?itemId=1091332
I would value comments from those who have considered the tools I offer.
Kind regards,
Graham
GRAHAM DOUGLAS
FOUNDER, INTEGRATIVE FEDERATION
Achieving Sustainable Development
http://www.integrative-thinking.com
integrative@optusnet.com.au
Topic Editor, Sustainable Development, Encyclopedia of Earth
http://www.eoearth.org/
P
David Notter
Hi Jamie. It is possible that participation in certain team sports might help develop the kind of ‘habit of mind’ that you are talking about. Although you seem to be talking about an essentially cognitive process, the decision-making process in (certain) sports requires something like the ‘integrative thinking’ that you describe, though my sense is that it is more of an intuitive process. Modern team sports originated in the elite public schools (such as Eton and Harrow) in England in the nineteenth century where future leaders were educated. Graduates of those schools firmly believed that the skills they needed to run the empire were forged on the playing fields (‘The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’ and so forth). It would be extremely naive to buy wholeheartedly into the ideology of athleticism that developed at those schools, but it is possible that hours and hours of playing rugby and soccer at Eton and Harrow did foster certain ‘habits of mind’ in the boys that went beyond team spirit and aggressiveness and fair play and other moral/social qualities commonly associated with sport. It is possible that they were gaining some kind of training in decision-making/problem-solving processes. Don’t quote me on that, but it’s a thought.