Creating Great Choices: A Leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking

By Jennifer Riel and Roger L. Martin

Move Beyond Trade-Off Thinking

When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable. But what about those crucial times when accepting the obvious trade-off just isn't good enough? What do we do when the choices in front of us don't get us what we need? In those cases, rather than choosing the least worst option, we can use the models in front of us to create a new and superior answer. This is integrative thinking.

First introduced by world-renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin in The Opposable Mind, integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in Creating Great Choices, Martin and his longtime thinking partner Jennifer Riel vividly illustrate how integrative thinking works, and how to do it.

The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. And it lays out the authors' four-step methodology for creating great choices, which can be applied in virtually any context. The result is a replicable, thoughtful approach to finding a "third and better way" to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade‐offs.

Insightful and instructive, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781633692978

Book preview

cover-image

Integrative thinking is a powerful idea that offers new answers to our toughest problems. In this compelling work, Riel and Martin show us how to use this fresh mental model to make great choices rather than settle for weak compromises. Bursting with practical tips, engaging exercises, and keen insights, this book belongs within arm’s reach of every leader trying to navigate the future.

—DANIEL H. PINK, author, Drive and To Sell Is Human

In an age where society is tending more and more to lock in on one line of thinking, Riel and Martin give us the tools to break away from our prejudices and eliminate our blind spots, giving us the chance to arrive at a different and better conclusion. A critical tool in both business and life.

—LOWELL C. McADAM, Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications

titlepage

Copyright

HBR Press Quantity Sales Discounts

Harvard Business Review Press titles are available at significant quantity discounts when purchased in bulk for client gifts, sales promotions, and premiums. Special editions, including books with corporate logos, customized covers, and letters from the company or CEO printed in the front matter, as well as excerpts of existing books, can also be created in large quantities for special needs.

For details and discount information for both print and ebook formats, contact [e-mail], tel. [phone], or www.hbr.org/bulksales.

Copyright 2017 Jennifer Riel and Roger L. Martin

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [e-mail], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

First eBook Edition: Sep 2017

ISBN: 9781633692961

eISBN: 9781633692978

For our eternally supportive spouses,

Stephen Leckey and Marie-Louise Skafte, with love

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface: The Opposable Mind

Part One

In Theory

1. Integrative Thinking 2.0

2. How We Choose

3. A New Way to Think

Part Two

In Practice

4. A Methodology

5. Articulating Opposing Models

6. Examining the Models

7. Generating Possibilities

8. Assessing the Prototypes

9. A Way of Being in the World

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Preface

The Opposable Mind

There is an invisible strength within us; when it recognizes two opposing objects of desire, it grows stronger.

—RUMI

In 2007, Roger wrote a book called The Opposable Mind. The title was a nod to that most useful of tools, the opposable thumb. Shared by humans and most primates, the opposable thumb is what we use to create tension against our fingers to grasp and manipulate objects. Similarly, the opposable mind is one that can create tension between ideas, using that tension to develop new answers to challenging problems. Roger called this practice integrative thinking and argued that mastery of it is what sets highly successful leaders apart from the masses.

In the book, Roger tells the stories of remarkable leaders like Isadore Sharp, founder of Four Seasons Hotels; Bob Young, former CEO of Red Hat, Inc.; and Victoria Hale, creator of the Institute for One World Health. Although these leaders shared little by way of context or background, Roger saw one powerful connection between them: each of these leaders used integrative thinking to solve their toughest problems. These most difficult choices came in the form of an unsatisfying either-or choice: a trade-off between existing answers that were not good enough to truly solve the problem. Rather than choose between the suboptimal options, these leaders used opposing ideas to help them build integrative answers. The result of their thinking processes were new choices that creatively resolved the original either-or problem and produced new value for the world.

The leaders that Roger studied share the predisposition and the capability to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.¹ In The Opposable Mind, Roger explored this discipline of consideration and synthesis, explaining what he believed these leaders had done to solve their toughest challenges. It was, he said, a way of thinking that contained within it four critical elements.

First, they expanded what was salient to a decision, taking more things into account when thinking about a problem. Second, they explored complex causal relationships, embracing the relationships between the salient variables. Third, they architected the problem so as to take the whole problem into account, structuring with discipline and purpose rather than focusing only on the piece-parts of the problem. Finally, they actively worked toward the creative resolution of unacceptable trade-offs rather than meekly accept them; before moving on, these leaders strove to gain new insight and a resolution of the tension between ideas.

Articulating this theory of integrative thinking was one thing. It was another to teach it. So Roger asked Jennifer to join him in his work, helping translate the theory to action and expanding from the (mainly corporate) executives profiled in The Opposable Mind to individuals in a wide range of organizations. Over the past decade, together with some wonderful colleagues, we have engaged with corporate executives in various industries but also with undergraduate students, graduate MBA and executive MBA students, business managers, nonprofit and government agency leaders, teachers, and even elementary-school students. From each group, we have learned a great deal about the theory and practice of integrative thinking.

LESSONS LEARNED

We found, for instance, that the stories in The Opposable Mind, which had proven inspirational to readers, could actually be a barrier to learning. We also learned that integrative thinking is applicable to a much broader set of problems than we once imagined, by a much broader array of leaders. And we saw, as we had always hoped, that integrative thinking is not an innate skill—one you either have or don’t have—but rather is a practice that can be cultivated over time.

The Stories

As we began to translate the book into lesson plans and courses, we found a troubling gap emerged between knowing and doing. Even for students who could easily recount the stories and who understood the tools at a cognitive level, it was often a struggle to apply integrative thinking to their own challenges and in their own contexts. In part, this was the effect of using aspirational leaders as our subjects; it proved difficult to understand how to translate the actions of, say, A.G. Lafley, then CEO of Procter & Gamble (P&G), to students’ own contexts. Our students didn’t work for P&G, and they weren’t CEOs. The translation task, it turns out, was especially difficult when the story was both vivid and real. It was easy to get swept up in the details of the narrative, the characters, and the specific actions undertaken. The broader lessons could be overlooked.

In our teaching, we had to strike a more effective balance between storytelling and application. We have attempted to do that in this book as well. We still tell stories, because they’re fun and instructive, but you will find much greater emphasis on methodology in this book than in The Opposable Mind. In that way, this one is intended to be a how-to book rather than a know-what book. We encourage you to work on your own challenges as you read and to engage in the short Try This exercises you will find throughout the chapters. They’re intended to help you apply what you’re reading in real time. You will also find templates at the end of many of the chapters, to help you structure these discussions.

Application

In The Opposable Mind, Roger argued that integrative thinking was a tool to be used in the face of trade-offs: those tough either-or situations that are a feature of every managerial career. Trade-offs are an element of almost every decision, but Roger argued that integrative thinking was best used when the trade-off in question was simply too painful to make; he focused on situations in which choosing one of the options wasn’t good enough. And, indeed, we have seen integrative thinking used to great effect in these kinds of situations. What surprised us, though, was the extent to which integrative thinking has proven to be a better tool for generating great solutions to a multitude of problems, challenges, and opportunities—even those in which a truly painful and unacceptable trade-off wasn’t part of the original problem construction. In those cases, reframing the problem as an either-or choice often shifts perspectives and changes the discussion in a way that makes new answers possible.

Then there is application in terms of the person making the choice. Many of the stories in The Opposable Mind feature CEOs and entrepreneurs who overcame unacceptable trade-offs to great success. This focus on individual transformative leaders was useful from a narrative perspective: it made the stories clear, memorable, and powerful. But it proved misleading. Those profiled, almost to a person, would be quick to clarify that they made their choices together with their teams rather than alone in a corner office. Integrative thinking, it has become clear to us, is both an individual skill and a team sport. In our experience, applying the process of integrative thinking in a diverse team, rather than as an individual, almost always leads to superior outcomes.

An Innate Skill?

Finally, let’s look at the notion that integrative thinking is an inherent skill. To be sure, the folks profiled in The Opposable Mind did not have the benefit of taking a course or reading a book to learn about integrative thinking. Integrative thinking was a problem-solving approach each developed in a unique way, over a lifetime of work and practice. But the fact that each leader came to this way of thinking without formal training does not necessarily mean that it was innate. To find out whether it could be taught, we needed to translate the idea of integrative thinking into a methodology, supported by a set of tools. Now, rather than a description of how successful leaders think, integrative thinking has become a process anyone can learn and practice.

This process makes up the heart of this book. It is a methodology for problem solving that, we believe, enables all leaders to leverage the tension of opposing ideas to create transformative new value. But before we get into the methodology, we also share some enriched theory that incorporates what we have learned from others who are thinking about decision making in different, but complementary, ways. In particular, we share principles from behavioral decision making and design thinking that have become increasingly influential on our work.

BEHAVIORAL DECISION MAKING

In 1974, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published a groundbreaking article titled Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. It was followed, five years later, by Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.² Together, these articles punched holes in the prevailing view of decision making as taught at business schools. The dominant view had assumed that human beings make decisions based on economically rational, bias-free logic. Kahneman and Tversky helped demonstrate that humans have a set of predictable biases that influence our decision making, often to our own detriment. Their work won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics (Tversky died before he could be honored) and spurred a new and growing field of study: behavioral decision making, often called behavioral economics.

The study of behavioral decision making is a growth industry, and in the past decade three essential books have spread the word: Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein; Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by our friend Dan Ariely; and Kahneman’s own Thinking, Fast and Slow.³ As these books pushed behavioral decision-making theory to increased prominence, they also pushed us to make deeper connections between the principles of behavioral decision making and our own work.

Humans, behavioral decision making tells us, do not rely on rational, unbiased logic when we make a choice. We are biased toward data that is immediately available. We anchor on an initial point of view and look disproportionately for data that confirms it. We are more averse to losses than we are enthusiastic about gains—and so on. Our biases inform our decisions in significant ways. And, as we see it, conventional decision making in organizations does little to mitigate these biases and may in fact exacerbate them. Think about how we typically make management decisions: we bring relevant data into the room to set the context, and we inevitably anchor against it; we seek evidence to confirm that our choice is the right one and ignore any disconfirming data; we ask leaders to make early public declarations about the right answer, leaving them little room to shift their views later without creating cognitive dissonance; and we demand the agreement and buy-in of the whole team, easily leading to groupthink.

In contrast, as we watched our students, particularly grade-school children, employ integrative thinking, we observed a very different outcome. It seemed that these students were less likely to fall prey to cognitive biases after practicing integrative thinking than they had been before. It seemed possible that a number of the most common cognitive biases were uncovered and mitigated by aspects of the integrative thinking process. So we began to tie behavioral decision making explicitly to our process. Now, when we teach integrative thinking, we begin with a primer on biases and heuristics, using examples from Kahneman, Ariely, and others to help explain why many conventional problem-solving methodologies fail. You will find such a primer in chapter 2.

DESIGN THINKING

At the same time that behavioral decision making was infiltrating business schools, a second important wave of thinking on decisions was gaining influence in the corporate world: design thinking. Large mainstream companies such as General Electric, Fidelity Investments, and IBM identify design thinking as the key skill underpinning their innovation capabilities. Its roots go back decades, but one defining moment came in 1969, when Herb Simon wrote The Sciences of the Artificial.⁴ From the concept of design as a process for creating a particular artifact, Simon abstracted the idea of design as a general way of thinking.

This insight inspired many followers, including Roger as well as Tim Brown, CEO of the global design consultancy IDEO. Together and separately, they have worked to explore the fundamental and identifiable set of thinking skills and practices that underpin design, using the term design thinking to describe them. Both men published books on the subject: The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage and Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.⁵ They argue that design thinking represents a set of tools and techniques that can be applied to any field, and not only one particular design medium.

Design thinking is the way we create something new, something that does not now exist. It is an approach to solving mysteries about the world, creating new ways to meet the needs of users, and producing new value for organizations. As such, it has something to teach us about the generation of new ideas in integrative thinking. The definition of integrative thinking has always contained within it the creative act: it is "the ability to face constructively the tension of opposing models and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, to generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models but is superior to each."⁶

Early in the development of integrative thinking, we had little to say about how one might productively go about generating that new idea. Initially, our model of integrative thinking was aimed at coming to one better answer to an unacceptable trade-off. Once that answer was imagined, the hard work was all but finished. It was neat and tidy, in theory. But then, influenced by design thinking, we came to see the value of exploring many possible answers before converging on one. We started to view any creative resolution as a low-resolution prototype that would need to be tested and iterated before it could be adopted. As we teach integrative thinking now, we show students how to create, prototype, and test multiple possibilities on the path to a creative resolution. You’ll read more about the creative act in chapter 7, and about prototyping and testing in chapter 8.

EXAMPLES AND CONTEXT (OR, THE WORLD NEEDS MORE CANADA)

Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about integrative thinking. This book shares those lessons with you, drawing in large part from people we have taught. For much of the past decade, the base of our work was at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, so you may notice something of a Canadian theme throughout the book. We’re all for getting a little more Canada into the world, but you will also find stories from far afield; we have seen examples of integrative thinking in Cape Town, South Africa; in Billund, Denmark; in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and beyond. We’ve seen integrative thinking practiced in social enterprises, in financial services, in consumer packaged goods, and in the public sector. For this book, each example has been chosen to illustrate a universal point, and we hope that the applicability beyond the specific context will be clear.

In the following chapters, we lay out a case for a new approach to problem solving. We articulate some of its core principles, and we provide a step-by-step explanation, laying out a process for using this approach on your own most difficult problems. Whether you are a longtime devotee of The Opposable Mind or new to the concept, this book is designed to give you the tools for using integrative thinking to create great choices in your own work.

Part One

In Theory

Chapter 1

Integrative Thinking 2.0

In The LEGO Movie, there is a joke that always makes Jørgen Vig Knudstorp laugh. The hero