The Pro/Pro Chart
One pro/pro chart (for the learning organization’s centralization versus decentralization dilemma) can be found in chapter 4 (figures 4-2 and 4-3). Here, figures 5-5 and 5-6 show what a pro/pro chart for the efficiency and customer experience banking dilemma might look like.
Here, you can see that in some cases, the initial benefit, such as the fact that customers will experience fewer errors under the efficiency model, is followed by a second point (in parentheses) that illustrates why that matters or how it works. In this case, fewer errors occur because the bank has reduced complexity and increased digitization, leading to fewer human errors. Ultimately, this could translate to greater confidence for the customer.
Figure 5-5. What’s Behind Efficiency?
As you lay out the reasoning behind the models, give yourself time to reflect on them. If the answers don’t come quickly, try to see the models from the perspective of each player. Why might each one like this model? Remember the traps of your cognitive biases, and push yourself to acknowledge that not everyone values the same things that you value. You might like a job with greater scope to shape your own work; others might value and benefit from more direction from above. Consider, too, that even though some outcomes may not appeal to you, they might well appeal to others.
Figure 5-6. What’s Behind Customer Experience?
The key is to put yourself in the shoes of those players and identify what each model gives to them. If you feel stuck—and have reached the limits of your empathy—then stop what you’re doing and go talk to that player. Find real people from the stakeholder group, and ask them to help you articulate what they would get from each of the two models. In fact, this may well be a step worth doing, whether or not you feel stuck.
Try This
Back to your own challenge, build the pro/pro chart. As you do, when you identify a benefit, ask yourself, How does it work? Why does it matter? Push yourself to understand the model from at least three perspectives and to dive deeply into benefits for all three of those players.
Working with a team, and including some helpful outsiders, can be useful in generating a robust list of the benefits for each player and the way the benefits work. Work on one model, player by player, pushing to get deeper into what is behind each model. Don’t stop working on that model until the team can genuinely muster enthusiasm for it. Even the health-care practitioners in Jennifer’s session on vaccines had to find a way to value what a model that does not mandate vaccinations might have to offer in terms of personal responsibility and informed choice. Once you feel the group has fallen in love, or at least in like, with the first model, move on to do the same task for the opposing model.
Remember, falling in love with the model doesn’t mean you will choose it. It just means you understand it deeply enough to see why someone would choose it. After you have reached that state for both of your opposing models, you can move on to the next stage (and the next chapter).
FOUR STEPS
To recap, this first phase of integrative thinking has four embedded steps.
Define the problem.
– Articulate a problem worth solving.
– Turn it into a “How might we?” question.
Identify two extreme and opposing answers to the problem.
– Turn the problem into a two-sided choice.
– Push the models to an extreme so that each represents a core idea.
Sketch the two opposing ideas.
– Get clear about what each model is and is not.
Lay out the benefits of each model and the way it works.
– Pick the most important players.
– Create a pro/pro chart that captures your understanding of how each model works for the players.
Ultimately, integrative thinking is about leveraging the tension between models to create something new. So after you’ve articulated and considered the opposing models separately, the next step is to look at the models together, explicitly holding them in tension. The way you go about examining the models is the subject of the next chapter.
TEMPLATES
On the next few pages are templates you can use to document your work in defining the problem, selecting two opposing models, and describing the essential components of those models (figure 5-7); visualizing the models (figure 5-8); and crafting a pro/pro chart for the models (figures 5-9 and 5-10).
Figure 5-7. Template: Sketching the Models
Figure 5-8. Template: Visualization
Figure 5-9. Template: Pro/Pro Chart, Model 1
Figure 5-10. Template: Pro/Pro Chart, Model 2
Chapter 6
Examining the Models
The year 1976 was a good one for film. It was the year of Rocky and Taxi Driver. It was the year when Peter Finch declared, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more,” Redford and Hoffman took down Richard Nixon, Sissy Spacek was doused in pig’s blood at the prom, and Jodie Foster switched bodies with Barbara Harris on a particularly freaky Friday. It was also the first year of a small, upstart film festival in Toronto, Canada.
The Festival of Festivals, as it was then called, was created to give Torontonians access to the best films from around the world. Back then, most of us still saw movies exclusively at our local theaters—in dedicated venues, typically with a single screen. Almost all of a film’s revenue was generated from its initial theatrical run, as widespread adoption of VCRs was still more than a decade away. To maximize its potential box office, a popular film would stay in theaters for months on end. Star Wars, for instance, played on the big screen for forty-four weeks after its May 1977 release.1 (In contrast, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens debuted in theaters in mid-December 2015 and was released on DVD and Blu-ray less than four months later.)
The staying power of Hollywood blockbusters in movie theaters meant there was little room for artsier fare. To see a movie from Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, or François Truffaut, a budding cinephile needed to find a small art house or seek out the film at a festival. And even then, a film fan would have access to only a tiny portion of the films released around the world in a given year.
In a provincial town like 1970s Toronto, this was especially true. There was no easy way for Torontonians to see high-quality, non-Hollywood films. So Bill Marshall, Henk Van der Kolk, and Dusty Cohl launched their Festival of Festivals (literally, a collection of films that had appeared at festivals around the world). That first year, the festival attracted 35,000 moviegoers and 145 journalists. It showed 127 films from thirty countries.2
THE PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED
It was successful enough that the Festival of Festivals became an annual event. By the time Piers Handling took over as festival director almost twenty years later, the Festival of Festivals had gathered momentum. It had grown its audience, expanded its slate of films, and added special events such as Midnight Madness screenings, which focused on edgy, youth-oriented films like Reservoir Dogs. The festival had even served as a successful launching pad, building early word of mouth for eventual hits such as The Big Chill and Roger & Me. Yet even as it grew, the festival struggled with its business model. Handling explains, “[The] Toronto [festival] was designed to be inclusive, designed to be populist, designed to be for an audience, not designed to be a festival for experts, not designed to be a festival for the industry . . . It was designed to be a very inclusive festival for everyone.”3 And so it was. But the box office receipts covered only a portion of the festival’s total expenses. Financial sustainability was proving to be a challenge.
The problem Handling faced as he took over the top job was how to create a more sustainable festival over the long run. In this chapter, we discuss how a careful examination of opposing models yielded important clues to a superior model for the event. How did Handling create his own great choice for the future of the festival?
THE FESTIVAL MODELS
According to Handling, at the time, “there were basically
two kinds of film festivals: there’s competitive film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin—the big European festivals), and there’s noncompetitive film festivals (Toronto, San Francisco, New York) . . . And they really are very, very different in terms of how they’re structured.” This dichotomy set up Handling well to employ integrative thinking. At one extreme, he had his noncompetitive, grassroots Festival of Festivals. In opposition, he needed a festival model with a very different structure and business model, ideally one that was highly sustainable (which the Toronto festival was not). If need be, Handling could have constructed a hypothetical model to set at the other extreme, but fortunately there was already a film festival in the world that fit the bill perfectly.
That was the Festival de Cannes. It was then, and is now, unapologetically an event for industry insiders, attended exclusively by directors, producers, distributors, stars, and press. At Cannes, festival staff select about twenty films for official competition, narrowing all the potential entrants to a small slate of films that represent the best of “auteur cinema with a wide audience appeal.”4 These films compete for a grand prize, the Palme d’Or, which is presented by a jury of nine esteemed industry professionals. The 2016 jury, for example, included director George Miller and actors Kirsten Dunst, Vanessa Paradis, and Donald Sutherland. Handling calls these jurors “the arbiters of taste”; they tell us what is worthy and what is not. Competitive festivals like Cannes are, by their nature, exclusive events, with lots of insider events, red carpets, and velvet ropes.
In contrast, noncompetitive festivals, such as the Festival of Festivals, look and feel very different in a number of dimensions. First, there is no jury at noncompetitive festivals. Without a competition, who needs a jury? In addition, even though industry pros often attend to support their films, the screenings are held primarily for a paying audience of film lovers—regular people from the local community. The slate of films shown typically is broader than at a competitive festival, sometimes encompassing hundreds of films aimed at a broadly diverse audience. Community festivals thus tend to be more inclusive and accessible than competitive festivals.
Although both models of film festivals had been implemented in cities around the world, Handling was resolute that neither of these two models gave him what he needed. The exclusive industry festival was financially sustainable and attractive to the industry, but very much at odds with the community spirit of Handling’s existing model. Moreover, the marketplace for industry festivals was already saturated. The Toronto community festival was open, egalitarian, and inclusive, but it struggled to pay the bills and to have much influence within the industry. As Roger first wrote in The Opposable Mind, Handling knew he needed a better answer, one that would give him the best of both models. Ultimately, he found one.
THE BENEFITS OF THE MODELS
The key to the great choice Handling created was embedded in the opposing models themselves. His challenge was to understand the models deeply enough to find the leverage points to an integrative answer. The next step was to dive into the benefits of each model.
The benefits of the industry festival model include meaningful economic benefits to the community in tourism dollars, tax revenue, and infrastructure spending. And even though members of the community can’t attend the festival, the town as a whole benefits from the mystique of the event, and—who knows?—in Cannes you might run into George Clooney outside the Hôtel du Cap.
The industry loves the festival for the attention it draws to film in general and to the festival selections in particular; the festival provides them with millions of dollars in “free” advertising from press coverage. In addition, it is a fun event in a beautiful location, and there’s the chance of winning a prize.
For the festival organizers, the big draws are money and power. The money comes primarily from luxury-brand sponsors eager to join the party. The power comes from the structure of the festival itself; the organizers set the agenda, pick the films, even select the jury—all of which gives them remarkable influence in the industry.
Turning to the community festival model, what does this model give the key players that an industry festival might not? For the community, the core benefit is the access it provides—to films, to ideas, to other like-minded members of the community. For the industry, access is an important benefit as well: more films gain access to this kind of festival, and filmmakers get access to a potential test market. For the festival organizers, there is a level of intrinsic motivation that comes from working for the community and from focusing on the love of film rather than on prestige or power.
EXAMINING THE MODELS
Looking at this set of benefits, you can see why Handling might choose each of these opposing models, and you can equally see what he would be giving up were he to choose only one. This is more or less where Handling found himself as he considered the models. So it is time to turn to examining the models: holding them in tension to see what hints we may find to guide us to a superior answer.
This stage is about noticing what we notice, starting with what is similar and what is different about the two models. We might note that the models have some things in common: both provide economic benefits, although the scale and beneficiaries may differ. At the industry festival, five-star hotels and high-end restaurants would see substantial direct revenue from the event and from year-round tourism driven by the brand the festival creates for the city. At the community festival, smaller local restaurants and taxi drivers are the likely beneficiaries, mostly during the festival itself.
What’s different between the models? The community access to films and the more egalitarian feel of the community festival is absent from the competitive industry festival. And the global media attention that features centrally in the industry festival, and that benefits industry insiders, doesn’t feature in the community festival in the same way.
At this point, we can also consider what we most value from each of the models. For Handling, he loved almost everything about his community festival. The one thing he most coveted from the industry festival was the steady stream of revenue it generated. But he knew he couldn’t seek additional revenue only around the edges. His team had tried repeatedly to find new streams of revenue and to emulate what other festivals had done by way of sponsorship. The Festival of Festivals, as constructed in 1994, just wasn’t as attractive to sponsors as the industry festivals.
And were Handling to simply steal a few elements of the Cannes approach, he was likely to make his festival less compelling still, diluting what was special about it while failing to capture what was special about Cannes. Given the painful trade-off, Handling needed to think differently about the models to have a hope of creating a superior answer.
To make headway on that task, we dive even deeper into our consideration of the models by asking questions about the benefits we most value: What are the real points of tension between the models in general, and between the benefits we most value? What critical assumptions might we be making related to these benefits? How are the most valued benefits produced, and how might we attain these outcomes in a different way?
Points of Tension
First, we look at points of tension: the elements that are hard for us to reconcile in a single model. For instance, there is a tension between who benefits most from the festival. One festival has a driving focus on the community as the customer, and it delivers meaningful benefits to them (such as access, civic engagement, and pride). In contrast, the exclusive festival serves the industry as its customer, delivering the most impactful benefits to it (networking, validation, and financial returns).
The tension emerges because it is almost impossible to successfully serve two masters simply because we wish to do so. In this case, what the community wants (to see great films but also to be up close and personal with the stars) is at odds with what the industry might want (to sell movies, mingle with peers, and get business done). To generate a superior model, we can explore how we might better al
ign those incentives and overcome the tension between the two beneficiaries.
Our Assumptions
Next, we look at our assumptions. What underlying ideas and principles are the models holding as true that may not always hold? Here, we’re looking for assumptions that, if they could be turned into questions, could provide paths to a new answer.
For instance, in the industry festival model, we’re assuming that the exclusivity of the event is a central feature that attracts the industry—the stars, the media, and the sponsors—and so is a major contributor to the sustainability of the festival. On the community festival side, we’re assuming that inclusivity and competition are at odds with one another.
What if these assumptions aren’t true, or capture only part of the story? How might that change the way we think about the structure of the festival?
Cause and Effect
Finally, we analyze cause and effect as it pertains to the models. What are the forces that drive the most important outcomes, the benefits we most value?
As we begin to explore causality, we should pause for an important caveat. We’re using causality in a way that might well cause statisticians to strenuously object. In science, causation has a specific meaning and a high bar for proof. We’re being intentionally loose in our use of the term, seeking to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic. We use the notion of causality to help us think through complex problems without getting bogged down in semantics. As we see it, in complex social systems we will never be able to know for sure whether inputs, variables, and outcomes are causally related (A caused B) or merely correlated (A and B both occurred in this case and may or may not have some relationship). So we’re using “kitchen logic” causation: On balance, what seem to be the likely cause-and-effect relationships? Our answers to this question represent our best estimations, our models, of the cause-and-effect relationships in a complex system. We can use these hypotheses to push our thinking and explore new ways to produce the outcomes we seek, even if we can’t prove causation, in a scientific sense.
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