So starting with two models is better than starting with one, but it is also better than starting with ten models. Seeking to deeply understand ten models would be an almost overwhelming task. Choosing two models instead provides a manageable starting place. It is a way to navigate the complexity of the situation that isn’t paralyzing right off the bat.
We use opposing models rather than any two models to produce helpful tension. We learned from Roger’s early interviews with integrative thinkers that the tension between ideas often helped spur creative thinking. It was only when engaged in the constraining consideration of opposites—each of which had value but could not be adopted at the same time as the other—that the highly successful leaders found helpful insights. So to keep you in a state of consideration rather than evaluation (considering what each model is all about rather than evaluating whether each model is good or bad), make the models as opposing as you can. This state of consideration can provide the time and space to challenge assumptions and provoke new thinking.
Try This
Creating opposition between your models can take practice. For a head start on generating models in tension, explore the list in figure 5-1, which captures some of the opposing models we often encounter. Ask yourself, How do these tensions play out in my context?
We make the opposing models extreme because we find that starting with extreme models helps depersonalize the models and separate people from ideas. Often, the models are even more extreme than those supported by individuals in the room. By pushing the models away from the “realistic” options already on the table, we make it easier for the group to consider the models as ideas rather than as a threat to the status quo.
Figure 5-1. Common Opposing Models in Organizations
Pushing the models to extremes means that, by definition, you eliminate consideration of compromises—answers that already contain elements of multiple models. In our sales force example, for instance, we wouldn’t start by considering a sales model that serves some customers directly and other customers via dealers, with individual leaders deciding which path to follow on a case-by-case basis. Such a compromise might be on the table for the organization, but it isn’t very helpful in creating an integrative answer. Integrative thinking isn’t about “doing both” but rather about finding an answer that takes the best of both to produce outcomes that are preferable to existing ones. Compromises are less helpful to the process of creating a better answer, because they are very hard to parse. The effects of different models are meshed together, and they become even more muddled as we seek to go deeper into how each model works. In practice, we’ve found there simply isn’t as much to learn from compromises; there isn’t enough tension between the ideas to give us room to create (see figure 5-2).
In some cases, there will be a third choice that is fundamentally different from the first two—an alternative extreme option. For instance, the third choice for the wire-mesh company might be to shift to an entirely online sales model. If you really have three opposing models, and if folks around the table are committed to exploring them, by all means consider all three models. But keep in mind that this approach will increase the complexity of the exercise and likely will increase the time it will take to think through the problem. Take care to ensure that the third extreme and opposing model isn’t a compromise in disguise.
As with framing the problem, don’t spend a lot of time obsessing about finding just the right opposing models. For your purposes, these are prototype models, just as your problem framing is a provisional one. Your opposing models are a starting place for the process of creating new answers. So rather than seek perfection, just check this: Are the opposing models an answer to the problem as framed? Sometimes, you can default to answers that are tangential to the problem or don’t really speak to the core of the issue.
Figure 5-2. Extremes Rather Than Compromises
What does this look like? For a number of years, the decline of the Canadian tech firm BlackBerry was so much in the news that we had a slew of student projects on how to save the company. The most successful homed in on a central strategic choice—such as whether to reinvest to win in hardware, or shift to become a software company, or whether to go after the enterprise market or target the consumer market. Less successful were the projects that defined the problem broadly (how to address declining sales in an intensely competitive market) and then sought to tackle it via opposing models that addressed a small sliver of that problem (such as whether to do app development internally or create a more open application platform).
To avoid this disconnect, you need to work to tie the choices directly to the problem to be solved; the opposing models should be extremely distinct ways to go about solving that particular problem. Once you have identified your extreme and opposing models, you can move to the next step and begin to sketch them.
Try This
Pick one of the problems worth solving from your list. Turn that problem into a two-sided dilemma by defining two opposing models for solving the problem. Push the two models to the greatest extreme that you can imagine.
SKETCH THE MODELS
Have you ever had a discussion with a colleague, come to agreement, and subsequently discovered that you didn’t actually agree at all, because you were using the same word to mean different things? That’s why it is important to sketch the opposing models under consideration. Sketching the models means describing them in enough detail that an observer could quickly understand the essence of each one. It is taking the time to explain—in a few sentences, bullet points, or even pictures—what each model would look like in practice. Sketching the models helps a group ensure that all the participants are talking about the same thing; it teases out and articulates the tension between the ideas, and it helps make the choice concrete for the group.
How does that work? Let’s consider a challenge presented to our MBA students a few years ago by the CEO of one of Canada’s largest banks. The CEO was struggling to break through in a structurally attractive but largely undifferentiated financial services marketplace. The big push in the organization for the previous five years had been efficiency: simplification and digitization to drive down costs and remove unnecessary complexity. Now he worried that the effort had produced an organization that was blind to its customers’ other needs. “We want to be the bank that defines great customer experience,” he explained. “And I worry that my people are constantly trading off between customer experience and efficiency.”
A Problem Worth Solving
We offered the challenge to our students. They were unimpressed with the opposing models as described (great service versus efficiency), and they told us so. How is this a problem, they asked, let alone one worth solving? Great service is efficient service, they argued. How hard is that to see?
Given that the CEO had identified this as one of his most pressing issues and that we know him to be a very smart guy, we pushed the students to take another look at the problem and the models. We asked them to think harder by taking the time to articulate two opposing models for the bank: one based on efficiency as the governing principle, and the other one based on customer experience as the most important value.
We asked the students to play out how a bank that was all about efficiency might look and feel different from one that was all about great experiences for customers. As they did so, the students came to realize that a bank that prioritizes efficiency would be as standardized as possible. Leading with technology (because computers are much more efficient than human beings), it would offer as few products as it could, making those products as simple as possible. It would have highly centralized and controlled processes, with no room for inefficient exceptions. See figure 5-3 for a simple sketch of this model, in the form of a storyboard.
Figure 5-3. All About Efficiency
Credit: Josie Fung, used with permission.
On the other hand, what would a bank built entirely around customer experience look like? It would look, the
students said, the way the customer wanted it to look. Most likely, it would be highly customized to each customer, with lots of personal interaction, or none, depending on what the customer desired. It would offer each customer the suite of products and services that would be just right for that customer, regardless of the complexity produced by such an approach for the bank’s back-end systems. Such a bank would offer lots of different kinds of service, different kinds of locations, and highly flexible hours (see figure 5-4).
The tension between the two banking models started to emerge as the sketches took shape. Beneath the efficiency and experience models the students found rich tensions between standardization and customization, between an internal focus and an external one, between reliability (getting the same answer every time) and validity (getting the right answer this time). The students who most impressed the CEO at the final presentations took direct aim at these tensions.
Figure 5-4. All About Customer Experience
Credit: Josie Fung, used with permission.
Important Implications
Sketching the models may seem like a small step, but this task can have implications for the way teams think long after the step is completed. After a particular training program, one of our participants wanted to apply the integrative thinking process with her team. She worked in regional government and was responsible for the provision of autism support services. Her community had seen a significant increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders but had not seen an equivalent increase in funding. For years, the team had struggled to do more with less, to compromise within constraints, and to make do. Now she wanted to see whether a better answer was possible.
Her starting place was to create a new framing of the problem as a distinct choice. Would the region take a broad approach, providing a little bit of support to every child diagnosed (the “spread out the peanut butter” model)? Or would it be more focused, recognizing that some children were in far greater need of support either because of the nature of their condition or because of social factors such as poverty (the “go where we are most needed” model)?
Sketching the models proved to be transformative for the team members, as they grappled to determine the kinds of services they could provide to all the children in the system, on the one hand, and with what it would look like to tell some families that no support would be available to them, on the other. Sketching the two models helped the team members express assumptions that had previously gone unspoken, to dig more deeply than they ever had into their own beliefs about the children they served, and to articulate sometimes-conflicting models of their duties as public servants. The discussion set up the team to explore its reason for existing and to define shared success criteria for new approaches.
Sketching the models needn’t be time intensive. The goal isn’t to create an exhaustive description but rather to gain general agreement about the core elements of each model. With the agreed-on elements defined for each model in turn, the group can move on to understanding more deeply how the two models work.
Try This
Going back to your two-sided dilemma, sketch the two models by describing the key features of each of them. Use written narrative and visuals to make each model as clear as possible.
DEFINE HOW THE MODELS WORK
After you have sketched the two opposing models, what is the best way to understand them? When we first started teaching integrative thinking, we defaulted to a tool we already knew well. As children, we were told what to do when facing a difficult either-or choice: get out a legal pad, draw a line down the middle of the page, and start to list the pros and cons. Unfortunately, again and again, we saw teams hit dead ends on their lists of pros and cons. They would struggle to engage with the models, get bogged down in the drawbacks, and dismiss one or both of the models early on. Looking at pros and cons didn’t seem to change the conversation, and it didn’t seem to set the stage for a productive generation of possibilities.
So we implemented a new rule. At this stage of the process, as groups are seeking to understand the two models, to truly consider them, all talk of the negatives of the models is banned. The pro/con list becomes a pro/pro list, a name created by some clever students. Now, rather than list pros and cons, groups are asked to lay out the positives of each of the models. We ask teams to explore the benefits each model confers, determining why someone would choose it and what it ultimately produces that is worth having.
This approach—focusing only on the positives and not at all on the negatives—goes against conventional wisdom. But focusing on the positive effects of the models turns out to be important for three reasons.
Citing negatives can easily shut down consideration of a given model; if a particular drawback seems insurmountable at the outset, it is hard to continue to take that model seriously and to understand what might be valuable were that drawback to be overcome.
You want to understand what you could take from these models to create a great new choice. To create that new answer, it’s essential to understand the virtues, or what’s best, of each model. In that way you can later explore how those valuable elements might be incorporated into a new integrative model.
Focusing on the positives enables a more productive group process. Imagine your team is in a brainstorming session and your colleague Valeria comes up with a possible solution. The idea garners some support around the room and some momentum, until Julia, who has been silently sitting, arms crossed, leans forward and says, “Could I just, for a minute, play devil’s advocate?” Then she proceeds to explain why the idea could never work. In our experience, when that kind of thing happens there is an immediate physical shift in the room. All hope of generating new ideas dissipates. Why bother coming up with new ideas if Julia is just going to kill them?
Some of you may well be sitting with your metaphorical arms crossed right now, because you love playing the devil’s advocate. And didn’t we say that minority views need to be heard? Yes, but not before you’ve had a chance to explore what might be valuable in the models in front of you, and not while you’re seeking to generate new ideas. So the rule is that you don’t consider the drawbacks of the models at this early stage.
But there is good news if you’re the realist in the room—if you can’t imagine not including a discussion of the drawbacks of the models. If the models you’re considering are truly opposing, the negatives of one model should naturally be the positives of the other. For instance, if we note that decentralization provides agility, it isn’t necessary to say that centralized models are often bureaucratic and slow. In this way, you do get to include the negatives of each model, as long as you’re able to flip them around to be stated as positives of the opposing model. Now uncross your arms, and we’ll plow ahead.
When exploring the benefits of the models, you work in sequence and attempt to fall in love with each model. You consider, as deeply and thoughtfully as you can, what makes each model work well. You forget for the moment that other models exist. In this step, you do all you can to avoid judging or evaluating. The task isn’t to determine which model is best; rather, it’s to capture what a model offers that is worth having and how those valuable outcomes are produced.
The Key Players
Another key element of the pro/pro chart emerged early in our articulation of the integrative thinking process during a session Roger held with a category team at P&G. As it turns out, if we only think about how the organization benefits from each model, we are leaving out a great deal. Instead, we ask teams to look at each model from a few different perspectives—exercising empathy for the most important other players in the situation. To choose the perspectives, we ask, “Who matters to the decision? Who has to support the new answer? And who is most affected by the choice?”
For the P&G category team, it was important to consider not just how they would benefit, but also to consider the retailer and the end consumer. For the bank’s challenge with efficiency and custom
er service, we might consider customers, employees, and shareholders. For the autism services provider, we might consider the families it serves to be one player, the support workers to be another, and the broader community of taxpayers to be the third player. If we believe that models might work in very different ways for the children with autism as opposed to their parents, we could break “families” into two different players. Or if we feel that it is vital to include the government, the direct funder of all the services, we might add it as well.
When it comes to identifying the players, three isn’t necessarily the magic number, but it does provide a good balance between getting enough diversity and avoiding too much complexity. The goal here is to get multiple perspectives and to build empathy for the players as you consider how the models work for them.
So, for each of the players, we ask how the model works for them—what benefits they get from it and how those benefits are produced. Often, the first benefits that come to mind will be more obvious or superficial, so it’s important to dig deeper, asking why each benefit matters and how it is produced, in order to build a robust picture of all the reasoning behind a model. Explore, as deeply as you can, what makes each model work and what is valuable about it.
Creating Great Choices Page 9
