Creating Great Choices

by Jennifer Riel

  Integrative thinking is fostered by a belief that better answers are possible, even if they are not immediately evident. A new, superior answer is out there lurking somewhere—waiting to be discovered. This stance is tricky, in some ways, because not all attempts to solve a problem will result in an integrative solution. You won’t always find what you seek. But if you don’t go looking at all, if you settle for what we know and believe now, your chances of advancing your models are slim indeed.

  This doesn’t mean that you can avoid taking action forever, because you are constantly seeking better models. Rather, it is important to balance a search for better answers with the practicalities of getting things done. Often, this means provisionally accepting an imperfect solution, knowing that the model can be improved over time in application. And it means occasionally taking the time to question models that are working just fine, to see whether there is room to improve them. This was a trademark behavior of A.G. Lafley when he was CEO of P&G; he would every so often throw a topic on the table for discussion, just to see whether there might be a better way to think about it.

  A STANCE ABOUT YOUR ROLE IN THE WORLD

  A person’s stance also includes an understanding of self and identity. When it comes to the integrative thinker’s stance about his role in the world, there are also three elements here.

  My job is to get clearer about my own thinking, opening it to inquiry so that I can better understand my own model of the world.

  Integrative thinking doesn’t mean entirely giving up on your existing models or losing all confidence in your own thinking about the world. It is a more nuanced stance that says, “I feel pretty good about my model. I like it a lot. But I know it is limited. So I will question it and open it up to others in hopes that they can help me understand those limitations more clearly.”

  This balanced view requires confidence in yourself and your ability to think through models with others without being triggered by the need to be correct or to show that you are the smartest one in the room. When we first began teaching integrative thinking to children, we worried that the kids would be paralyzed by the notion that there are no right answers. What surprised us was that knowing their models are wrong was freeing for kids—because it means that everyone else’s models are wrong, too. Lauren, age twelve, explains: “In the past, I would not raise my hand when a teacher asked a question, because I was afraid of getting it wrong. [But] I’m more confident [now] because we were taught that nothing is necessarily a really bad idea. You can always put some good into it. Because in good there’s always some bad, but in bad there’s always some good. But you have to dig deep down to find the good sometimes.”

  This aspect of a person’s stance requires an appreciation of the value of thinking about thinking—not for its own sake, not in an endless loop of navel gazing, but for the purpose of finding integrative solutions.

  My job is to genuinely inquire into opposing views of the world to understand and leverage those opposing models.

  The process of engaging with opposing models is challenging, in part, because those who hold opposing models often are not our favorite people. We tend to like people who agree with us. Unfortunately, people who agree with us are far less helpful in advancing our thinking than are those who disagree. Those with opposing views are the ones best positioned to help us question our models and advance them.

  To productively engage with opposing views, we need not abandon our own. Instead, we need to strike a balance best summed up, again, by Chris Argyris, who introduced us to a mantra that can help: “I have a view worth hearing, but I might be missing something.” My view is worthwhile, in other words, but it is probably incomplete.

  Considering opposing models adds to the complexity of your life. It is simpler by far to consider only one model—your own. Engaging with other models means diving into complexity, not to wallow in it or get consumed by it but to use other models, via the integrative thinking process, to get past the complexity to a simple, elegant new model. Integrative thinkers do not shy away from complexity, because they understand that it’s their job to engage with complexity in order to create a great choice.

  My job is to patiently search for answers that resolve the tension between opposing ideas and create new value for the world.

  Successful integrative thinkers have faith that they, together with their teams, can generate great choices. Maybe not right away, and maybe not every time, but eventually they can do it. And it is clear that the task falls to them and not to someone else. It is the integrative thinker’s job to solve the problems she sees in the world. Here is how Polman puts it:

  How do you deal with these trade-offs, all these tension fields? I actually have moved myself to a different mindset: How do you move these tension fields? Most people act as they do because of boundaries that are placed upon them. But they react to the symptoms, not to the boundaries. So most CEOs would react to the symptoms: “Are the shareholders short term? I have to run my business on the short term.” They don’t say, “How can I change the boundaries? Why do the shareholders react short term?” If you change boundaries, you actually change behaviors. It’s much more motivating to spend my energy on trying to move these boundaries.

  It is this motivation, and faith in one’s abilities to shift boundaries, that makes integrative thinking possible.

  Integrative thinking is a task that also requires patience. As Victoria Hale, one of the integrative thinkers we interviewed early on, eloquently put it, “I stay with it, sit with it, spin it around.”13 She knew that coming to an integrative solution was worth the work, and she didn’t attempt to rush her thinking. Rushing, she knew, would make it less likely that she would actually solve the problem she’d set out to solve. This doesn’t mean she was willing to think forever—but she was willing to patiently use the time she had to think hard and seek insights toward a great new choice.

  These six elements of stance can shift the way you are in the world, and they can have a dramatic impact on your outcomes over time. If you see little similarity between this stance and your own, don’t fret. It turns out that you do not need to have this stance in order to practice integrative thinking. In fact, practicing integrative thinking may be the most effective way to cultivate this stance over time. Even a small shift in what you do each day can be a catalyst for a substantial change in mindset, like the one we saw in Jabril.

  JABRIL’S STORY

  Jabril was a student in a grade-12 integrative thinking class taught by our colleague Nogah Kornberg and a teacher named Rahim Essabhai. Jabril was an outstanding basketball player, but perhaps not always the most attentive student. After the course was finished, we asked him what he felt had changed about himself. Here is what he had to say.

  Before, I was one of those guys who, when I came up with one idea, one conclusion, I’d just stick with it. Like, I was just too stubborn to change it. “That’s the answer, I’m sticking with it.” Like how you do multiple choice: the first question you circle, you think, “Is it wrong? Should I circle something else?” I’d just stick with it. [That’s] just how I was before I joined the class. I used to write everything with pen before, but I started writing in pencil right after I finished the class. It just became like a habit . . . When I do my short answers, I write with pencil. I just write something that first comes to mind, and then I read it over again, and it just continues flowing: I expand, and I erase, and my answers just keep getting better and better throughout.

  Jabril used to write in pen. And now he writes in pencil. On one level, using a pencil is a tiny shift. On another, it signals a profound change. Because now every answer can be improved, and it can just keep getting better and better.

  This is the stance that helps us create great choices. It spurs us to metacognition, empathy, and creativity. It helps mitigate some of our most sticky cognitive biases. And it provides a powerful platform for a different way of thinking about the world—one that leverages the tension of opposing id
eas to create new choices and new value.

  That said, integrative thinking is not a silver bullet. It is not the single thinking tool for all circumstances. But when you find that your conventional thinking tools are not helping you to truly solve a problem, integrative thinking can be the tool that shifts the conversation, defuses interpersonal conflicts, and helps you move forward. So in those situations when the choices in front of you are not good enough, work through the integrative thinking process: articulate the tension, examine the two models, generate possibilities to resolve the tension, and then test those prototypes.

  The process may not provide brilliant answers every time, but it will always help make your thinking clearer, boost your curiosity about other people’s models, and give you room to create. And that, after all, is the goal: not to choose between mediocre options, but to create great choices.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. Roger Martin, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), 6.

  2. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” Science 185, no. 4157 (1974): 1124–1131, and Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 74, no. 2 (1979): 263–291.

  3. Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness (New York: Penguin Books, 2008); Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009); and Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).

  4. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969).

  5. Roger Martin, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), and Tim Brown, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009).

  6. Martin, Opposable Mind, 15. Italics added.

  Chapter 1

  1. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, The LEGO Movie, Blu-Ray Disc, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Los Angeles: Warner Bros., 2014).

  2. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Jørgen Vig Knudstorp are taken from an interview with Jennifer Riel and Roger Martin, June 28, 2016.

  3. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, “LEGO Boss Reads The Opposable Mind,” YouTube video, CNN, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2014/12/08/spc-reading-for-leading-jorgen-vig-knudstorp.cnn/video/playlists/intl-reading-for-leading/.

  Chapter 2

  1. Kenneth Craik, The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943), 61.

  2. Unless otherwise noted, all John Sterman quotations are taken from his lecture, Rotman School of Management, March 23, 2003.

  3. Charles A. Lave and James G. March, An Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993), 3.

  4. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (Lancaster, PA: The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1933), 58.

  5. Albert H. Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, “They Saw a Game,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 29, no. 1 (1954): 129–134.

  6. Ibid., 130.

  7. Ibid., 132.

  8. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 157–162.

  9. Chen Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli, “Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?” Psychological Science 19, no. 9 (2008): 838–842.

  10. Randolph E. Shmid, “Facing a Judge? Study Says Go Early or After Lunch,” Globe and Mail, April 11, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/science/facing-a-judge-study-says-go-early-or-after-lunch/article575948/.

  11. Elizabeth F. Loftus and John C. Palmer, “Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction between Language and Memory,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13 (1974): 585–589.

  12. Richard Ronay and Bill von Hippel, “The Presence of an Attractive Woman Elevates Testosterone and Physical Risk Taking in Young Men,” Social Psychology and Personality Science 1 (2010): 57–64.

  13. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions,” Political Behavior 32, no. 2 (June 2010): 303–330.

  14. Quoted in Fred Attewill, “World’s Cheapest Car Upsets Environmentalist,” Guardian, January 10, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jan/10/india.climatechange.

  15. John D. Sterman, “All Models Are Wrong: Reflections on Becoming a Systems Scientist,” Systems Dynamics Review 18, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 501–531.

  16. Fisher Black and Myron Scholes, “The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities,” Journal of Political Economy 81, no. 3 (May–June 1973): 637–654.

  17. Warren Buffett, “Letter to Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway,” January 27, 2009, http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2008ltr.pdf.

  18. Fischer Black, “Living Up to the Model.” Risk 3, no. 3 (1990): 11–13.

  19. Lave and March, Introduction to Models in the Social Sciences, 3.

  20. Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 148.

  21. Ibid., 148.

  Chapter 3

  1. Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 298.

  2. Chris Argyris, Overcoming Organizational Defenses (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1990), 88.

  3. Quoted as part of an interview for The Learning Exchange, Innovations in Thinking and Learning online resource, http://thelearningexchange.ca/itl-project-home/itl-project-reflections/itl-project-k-5/itl-project-beth-grosso/.

  4. Giacomo Rizzolatti et al., “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain Science 3, no. 2 (1996): 131–141.

  5. Susan Krauss Witbourne, “How Reading Can Change You in a Major Way,” Psychology Today Blog, January 6, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201501/how-reading-can-change-you-in-major-way.

  6. Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003), 7.

  7. Tim Brown, “Tales of Creativity and Play,” TED video, May 2008, https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_brown_on_creativity_and_play?language=en.

  8. David Kelley and Tom Kelley, Creative Confidence (New York: Crown Business, 2013), 9–10.

  9. Belle Beth Cooper, “The Secret to Creativity, Intelligence and Scientific Thinking,” Fast Company Blog, June 18, 2014, http://www.fastcompany.com/3031994/the-future-of-work/the-secret-to-creativity-intelligence-and-scientific-thinking.

  Chapter 4

  1. Jay Z, Decoded (New York: Speigel & Grau, 2011), 104–105.

  2. Peter Drucker, “The Effective Decision,” Harvard Business Review (January 1967), https://hbr.org/1967/01/the-effective-decision.

  Chapter 5

  1. Cynthia G. Whitney et al., “Benefits from Immunization During the Vaccines for Children Program Era: United States, 1994–2013,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 63 (2014): 352–355, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6316a4.htm.

  2. Andrew J. Wakefield et al., “Ileal-Lymphoid-Nodular Hyperplasia, Non-specific Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children,” Lancet 351, no. 9103 (February 1998): 637–641. (Retracted)

  3. Laurie D. Elam-Evans et al., “National, State, and Selected Local Area Vaccination Coverage Among Children Aged 19–35 Months: United States, 2013,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 63 (2014): 741–748, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6334a1.htm.

  4. Erin Allday, “Vaccine Avoiders Put California at Risk,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 7, 2015, http://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Vaccine-avoiders-procrastinators-put-California-6068858.php.

  5. Bill Kaufmann, “Alberta Not Immune to Raging Debate over Vaccinations f
or Infectious Diseases,” Calgary Sun, February 7, 2015, http://www.calgarysun.com/2015/02/07/alberta-not-immune-to-raging-debate-over-vaccinations-for-infectious-diseases.

  6. Jonathan Haidt, “Two Stories About Capitalism, Which Explain Why Economists Don’t Reach Agreement,” Righteous Mind Blog, January 1, 2013, http://righteousmind.com/why-economists-dont-agree/.

  7. Michael L. McDonald and James D. Westphal, “Getting By with the Advice of Their Friends: CEOs’ Advice Networks and Firms’ Strategic Responses to Poor Performance,” Administrative Science Quarterly 48 (2003): 1–32.

  8. Charlan Nemeth, “The Differential Contributions of Majority and Minority Influence,” Psychological Review 93 (1985): 23–32.

  9. Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (New York: Viking, 2016), 185.

  10. John Dewey, Logic: Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1938), 108.

  11. Warren Berger, “The Secret Phrase Top Innovators Use,” HBR.org, September 17, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/09/the-secret-phrase-top-innovato.

  Chapter 6

  1. Peter Sciretta, “What Is the Longest Theatrical Run in the History of Cinema?” August 12, 2008, http://www.slashfilm.com/what-is-the-longest-theatrical-run-in-the-history-of-cinema/.

  2. “Transforming the Way People See the World, Through Film,” http://tiff.net/explore/history.

  3. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Piers Handling are from an interview with Roger Martin, March 2002, at the Rotman School.

  4. “About the Festival: About Us,” http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/about/whoWeAre.html.

  5. Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (New York: Currency Doubleday, 2006), 71.