The Opposable Mind

by Roger L. Martin

  After Execution, Collins’s advice is refreshingly restrained and straightforward. He explains what a Level 5 leader does, but he freely admits that he can’t yet tell readers how to become Level 5 leaders themselves. “For your own development,” he writes, “I would love to be able to give you a list of steps for becoming Level 5, but we have no solid research data that would support a credible list.”12

  Welch is particularly interesting. He was one of my integrative thinker interviewees, and I came away seeing him as an exemplary integrative thinker. But I wouldn’t advise trying to figure out how he thinks from what he did. Early in his tenure as GE’s CEO, Welch insisted that each of GE’s businesses be number one or number two in market share in its industry. He eventually noticed that his business unit leaders gamed the system he created by defining their markets in such a way that they were guaranteed the number one or two spot. Later in his career, he insisted that his businesses define their market share to be lower than 10 percent. He figured that business leaders would be quicker to spot market opportunities if they envisioned their market as much larger than their share of it. In this respect, Welch is an exemplary integrative thinker, secure enough to encounter changing circumstances without an inflexible ideology, and adaptable enough to change his approach when presented with new data. But emulating what Jack Welch did would invite confusion and incoherence, since Welch pursued diametrically opposed courses at different points in his career.

  I don’t wish to denigrate any of the books I’ve mentioned. They were best sellers for a reason: businesspeople want to know what makes a great leader because they themselves would like to be better leaders. Each book offers a particular perspective, and each perspective is valuable. But to approach every business problem with the question, “What should I do?” is to foreclose options before they can even be explored.

  Bossidy and Charan demonstrate that a bias toward doing doesn’t necessarily promote precise thinking. It can also promote a definition of execution that is too broad to be useful, crowding the entire spectrum of business activities under a single umbrella term. Collins demonstrates that even if you are pretty certain what Level 5 leaders do, there is no resultant prescription for what you should do to become a Level 5 leader. Finally, Welch demonstrates that a focus on leadership actions is limited because actions appropriate in one context can be completely inappropriate in another.

  Instead of attempting to learn from observing the actions of leaders, I prefer to swim upstream to the antecedent of doing: thinking. My critical question is not what various leaders did, but how their cognitive processes produced their actions. Dick Brown’s and Henry Schacht’s actions might have looked meritorious to Bossidy because something about them suggested good execution (however that may be defined). But their thinking produced actions that were a bad fit within their particular business context, leading to the failures that cost them their jobs.

  Meet the Cast

  Deciphering how exemplary managerial leaders think is the burden of this book. To do so, I picked leaders with unquestioned records of success. I strove to include a wide variety of leaders from a broad range of contexts. I included business rock stars such as Jack Welch, A. G. Lafley, Bob Young, and Meg Whitman of eBay, as well as less celebrated but equally successful CEOs, including Isadore Sharp, Chuck Knight of Emerson Electric, John Bachmann of Edward Jones, and Tim Brown of IDEO. I included a quintet of CEOs from fantastically successful Indian multinationals—Nandan Nilekani of Infosys Technologies, K. V. Kamath of ICICI Bank, Ramalinga Raju of Satyam Computer Services, and F. C. Kohli and S. Ramadorai of Tata Consultancy Services—and CEOs of globally consequential nonprofit organizations, including Victoria Hale of the Institute for OneWorld Health and Piers Handling of the Toronto International Film Festival. Also on my list are artists such as designer Bruce Mau and filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Finally, I included academics such as Nobel Laureate Michael Spence and the twentieth century’s greatest business guru, Peter Drucker. These business academics have shifted the paradigms in their disciplines as profoundly as the CEOs on my list changed paradigms in their industries.

  My approach was to explore in detail the thinking behind the decisions that each leader found particularly difficult to make. It is in those critical incidents, I believe, that thinking patterns are most clearly revealed. My exploration turned out to be a challenging process, for them as well as for me. One person I interviewed told me that my questions made his head hurt! I came to understand that many of those I interviewed thought about their choices in implicit or tacit ways. For many, their interviews with me marked the first time anyone had probed them on the thinking behind their most critically important decisions. Even though they were brilliant thinkers, they were not always reflective or articulate about their thought processes.

  I interviewed most of them a single time, typically before a large audience. Almost all allowed their interviews to be videotaped. With two subjects, I performed much more detailed explorations, taping them for approximately eight hours. I did so to see if the shape of their thinking changed substantially with prolonged probing. It did not—I simply took away a deeper understanding of their thought patterns.

  The interviews were exciting for me, but unsettling. I knew that my subjects came from widely differing backgrounds and reached success by a variety of routes. I didn’t know when I started out if I would discern common patterns in their thinking. But the more interviews I conducted, the more strongly I came to feel that my interviewees’ mental processors were equipped with a common operating system. They each used their operating system in their own unique context to produce their own unique outcome, but the thinking process seemed to come from a common program. The pattern of reasoning, or perhaps better, the cognitive discipline, that I discovered is what I came to call integrative thinking. It has a series of identifiable steps. It has a consistent purpose. It can be understood clearly and put into practice.

  It is important to note at this point that not all successful business leaders are adept at integrative thinking. It was a common theme, not a universal one. Some of my sample group thought in ways that were distinct from the common pattern. And I freely admit that I couldn’t figure out how certain leaders thought or how their thinking pattern contributed to success. From this I conclude that integrative thinking is not a necessary condition for success. Success can derive from other approaches. Within those limitations, however, the integrative thinking approach was the most common theme connecting the leaders I interviewed.

  Cultivating the Opposable Mind

  An important question remains: is the capacity for integrative thinking a gift reserved for a small minority or can it be consciously and intentionally developed? The Fitzgerald quote that opens this chapter suggests that integrative thinking is a naturally occurring capability limited to those born with “a first-rate intelligence.” By contrast, Chamberlin, with his explicitly developmental perspective, implies that integrative thinking is a skill and discipline that even those of us who aren’t geniuses can develop. In Chamberlin’s view, the opposable mind is there waiting to be used—and with use, it develops its capacity for creating solutions that would otherwise not be evident:

  The use of the method leads to certain peculiar habits of mind which deserve passing notice, since as a factor of education its disciplinary value is one of importance. When faithfully pursued for a period of years, it develops a habit of thought analogous to the method itself, which may be designated a habit of parallel or complex thought. Instead of a simple succession of thoughts in linear order, the procedure is complex, and the mind appears to become possessed of the power of simultaneous vision from different standpoints. Phenomena appear to become capable of being viewed analytically and synthetically at once.13

  Is integrative thinking unteachable, or is it merely untaught? Is it a function of pure intelligence, as Fitzgerald would have it, or of dedication and practice, as Chamberlin suggests?

  My own classroom experience
suggests—but does not prove—that people can be taught to use their opposable minds, and they grow more skilled and confident with practice. But it is already clear that integrative thinking is untaught. The world has not organized itself to produce integrative thinkers as it does brain surgeons or computer engineers. Integrative thinking is largely a tacit skill in the heads of people who have cultivated, knowingly or otherwise, their opposable minds. Many of those people don’t appear to know how they are thinking or that it is different from the common run of thought. They just do it. But an outsider can observe, describe, and analyze their thinking processes. And from this conscious, systematic study, a method of teaching that process is starting to emerge.

  In the next chapter, I begin the exploration of integrative thinking by breaking that thinking process into its four constituent parts: salience, causality, architecture, and resolution (chapter 2). Then I show how integrative thinkers’ capacity for distinguishing models from reality is critical to driving through the constituent parts to a creative resolution (chapter 3). Following that, I identify how the twin forces of simplification and specialization discourage integrative thinking and describe how those forces can be countered (chapter 4). Then I introduce a framework for building integrative thinking capacity (chapter 5). Finally, I describe how to build capacity in each of the three components of the framework—stance (chapter 6), tools (chapter 7), and experiences (chapter 8)—including how each can be and is being taught.

  C H A P T E R 2

  No Stomach for Second-Best

  How Integrative Thinkers

  Move Beyond Trade-offs

  We weren’t going to win if it was an “or.” Everybody can do “or.” That’s the way the world works. You trade things off but you’re not going to be the best in your industry. You are not going to win if you are in a trade-off game.1

  —A. G. Lafley, Chairman and CEO, Procter & Gamble

  HOW DO INTEGRATIVE thinkers actually think? How do they consider the options before them in a way that leads forward to new possibilities and not merely back to the same inadequate alternatives? To answer those questions, let’s look first at the cognitive steps we take in making a decision. We’re rarely conscious of them as we work our way through them, but we engage in them whenever we make a decision, whether or not we employ integrative thinking. Which is to say that it’s not the steps that set integrative thinkers apart; it’s how they take them. But we need to understand the steps before we can see what integrative thinkers do differently.

  The Process of Thinking and Deciding

  Imagine you’re planning your next summer holiday. After much thought and discussion with your spouse, you’ve whittled a nearly infinite number of choices down to three serious alternatives: touring Tuscany by bicycle, exploring the ancient Buddhist temples of Cambodia, or whale watching in Hawaii. As you and your spouse try to choose among three alternatives that seem equally compelling, you ask each other a series of questions:

  How much will each trip cost?

  What kinds of accommodations are available?

  What sorts of tours are offered? Can we find knowledgeable guides?

  Which destination is the most exotic and likely to offer the most unusual experiences?

  Will we learn something new on the trip?

  How safe is each alternative likely to be?

  How much time will we spend in transit, compared to the time we’ll spend at our destination?

  All those questions touch on the features that you and your spouse consider relevant and important, or salient, to your decision. Other features will have no relevance or importance to you—or you won’t recognize their relevance—and thus won’t be salient in your decision-making process. For example, when you planned your trip, perhaps you didn’t take into consideration the kinds of people you were likely to meet. You didn’t intentionally leave that consideration out of your set of salient items. It just wasn’t on your mental desktop when you were making your holiday plans—something you may regret when you find yourself sharing a tour bus with a party of hard-drinking hardware salespeople and their chatty spouses. Salience is individual and idiosyncratic; what I see as salient might be completely different from what you see as salient. And both of us have blind spots that make it likely, though not certain, that something important will be left off our list of salient concerns. “I wish I’d thought of that sooner” is just another way of saying, “I wish that had been salient to me when I was making up my mind.”

  Having selected our salient features, however imperfectly, we next consider how they relate to one another: The word we give to the pattern formed by the relationships is causality. Will a long trip cost more than a short one (i.e., is there a causal relationship between the length of a trip and its cost)? Is a potential destination less safe because it’s more exotic? Will my traveling companions enhance my experience or make me regret signing up for the tour? In essence, we build a little map in our heads as to how the salient features influence one another—that is, their causal relationship to each other. A causal map lays out the array of causal relationships at work in a given situation.

  With the causal map of salient features in our mind, we turn to the architecture of the decision. In simple decisions, the architecture is minimal because the decision is binary: “Shall I go to the newly released blockbuster movie tonight, or stay in and watch television?” Our vacation decision, on the other hand, has multiple moving parts: travel, lodging, and activities, just for starters. We might say to ourselves: “I am going to think first about what tours are available at each destination before I worry about hotels and flight schedules and fares.” Alternatively, we might think: “I am going to figure out the cost and logistics of getting there before I even think about what I can do when I get there.” Either sequence is reasonable. You might also break up the job, looking at flight schedules and lodging options while your spouse searches the tours available at each destination.

  There are various paths a decision might take; none is necessarily right or wrong. But you’ll probably resist trying to keep the whole vacation problem in mind as you and your spouse work out its constituent parts. Keeping the whole in mind makes your head hurt. So instead you’ll keep each component of your decision in its own separate compartment. That eases the mental burden, but it might also mean that you lose half a day of sightseeing because you opt for the earliest, cheapest flight home. A later and only slightly more expensive flight would allow you a few more hours to tour a vineyard, visit another temple, or check out the whaling museum, but because you’re focused on only one part of the problem—the price—you overlook the effect your choice has on the overall experience.

  Finally you choose: you come to a resolution as to whether you’ll roll through Tuscany, trek through Cambodia, or ply the waters off Hawaii. Or maybe none of your three options was satisfactory—the flight schedules were inconvenient, the lodging was substandard, the tours were all booked—and you begin the decision-making process again from the beginning. The diagram in figure 2-1 represents that thinking process graphically. Note that it allows for discarding your set of alternatives and starting over, which is why the dotted arrows in the diagram head back down the cascade.

  Whatever we decide, we’ll arrive at our choice by considering a set of features we deem salient; creating a mental model of the causal relationships among those features; arranging those causal relationships into an architecture intended to produce a specific outcome; thereby reaching a resolution of the problem at hand. With different salience, causality, and architecture, we would almost certainly arrive at a different outcome.

  Now that we’ve broken the decision-making process into four steps, let’s revisit the question with which we began this chapter: How do integrative thinkers actually think? To answer that question, let’s observe an integrative thinker as he works his way toward a business decision.

  FIGURE 2-1

  Isadore Sharp: Creating the Four Seasons Difference

>   Meet Isadore Sharp, one of four children of Polish parents who immigrated to Toronto before his birth in 1931. 2 His father, a plasterer by trade, became a contractor. Issy, as he is known to his friends, was a star athlete in high school, where he was known as “Razzle-Dazzle Issy,” and helped his father on jobs as a teenager.

  After college, he worked at his father’s construction company. While he was building a motel for a client, he formed the ambition of building and running a motel of his own. Six years later, after endless rejections by lenders and developers, Sharp finally secured funding for his project from friends and family. The Four Seasons Motor Hotel opened in 1961 with 125 rooms in a rather seedy area outside the core of downtown Toronto. A standard room cost about $12 a night. 3

  When Sharp began his undertaking, would-be hoteliers had two choices. They could build a small motel with fewer than two hundred rooms and offer guests modest amenities—often not much more than a television set in the room, an ice machine down the hall, and a bar and restaurant in the lobby. The capital requirements of such an establishment were modest and per-room operating costs were low. The Four Seasons Motor Hotel followed that model. With its warm, intimate atmosphere, friendly service, and welcoming restaurant and bar, it became a favorite watering hole for local businesspeople.