Sharp also saw a complex causal relationship between guest service quality and the way employees felt about their employer. Conventional thinkers in the hotel business believed that service quality depended on tight regulation of employee-guest interactions. Sharp saw a much different, nonlinear causal relationship. Employees who felt they belonged to a Four Seasons family that treated them according to the Golden Rule would be inspired to provide service well beyond the merely adequate. Employees who felt disposable wouldn’t—couldn’t—do more than what the service handbook required.
The third difference between integrative and conventional thinkers is in the architecture of their decisions. Integrative thinkers don’t break a problem into independent pieces and work on each piece separately. They keep the entire problem firmly in mind while working on its individual parts. Integrative thinkers want to avoid the trap of designing a product before considering the costs of manufacturing it. So they would consider manufacturability as they design their product. Sharp used the Golden Rule as his central organizing principle. It touched every aspect of the strategy and illustrates his ability and insistence on keeping the whole in mind while working on the individual parts. In fact, Sharp describes the decision to make the Golden Rule the basis of all hotel operations as the choice that “bound together and made possible the other major choices.”
As they do with salience and causality, integrative thinkers allow complexity to compound as they design their decisions. The complexity presents a cognitive challenge that integrative thinkers welcome, because they know that complexity brings along in its train an opportunity for a breakthrough resolution.
Fourth and finally, the integrative thinker will always search for creative resolution of tensions, rather than accept unpleasant tradeoffs. The behaviors associated with such a search—delays, sending teams back to examine things more deeply, generating new options at the eleventh hour—can appear irresolute from the outside, but the results are choices that could only have been generated by an integrative thinker who won’t settle for trade-offs and conventional options. Sharp longed to create a combination of “the best of a small motel and a large hotel.” He didn’t want to sacrifice one for the other and wasn’t satisfied with either. The only way to accomplish his goal was to create a new-to-the-world model.
The distinctive features of integrative thinking are illustrated in figure 2-3.
FIGURE 2-3
Conventional Thinking, or the
Art of Settling for Second-Best
The thinking that produces the vast majority of managerial decisions follows a very different approach to each of the four steps. The conventional goal in salience is to build the simplest possible map of the decision by discarding as many features as possible—or not even considering them in the first place. Organizational structures and cultures typically encourage simplification by promoting specialization. Each functional specialty has its own narrow view of what is salient. Until recently, finance departments never viewed emotional considerations as salient, and in turn, departments concerned with organizational behavior rarely regarded numerical and quantitative questions as salient. The members of those departments are pressured to pare away their views of what’s salient until it matches the department’s doctrine. In essence, then, departmental specialization conditions people to pay attention to only a subset of the many things to which they might otherwise productively pay attention.
We often implicitly recognize after the fact that our determination of salience was problematic. When decisions we make go badly, we think to ourselves, “I should have thought about how the wording of the memo would have been interpreted by the employees in our European operation,” or “I should have thought about the state’s road-repair program before siting our new distribution center.” That’s an acknowledgement of an error in salience. It’s not that we incorrectly judged the salience of a feature. We didn’t judge it salient at all. That’s no accident. The complex organization of which we’re a part is structured in such a way that many features of our environment are outside the purview of our job or functional specialty. Those are usually the features we fail to see as salient.
Conventional thinkers also tend to take a narrow and simplistic view of causality. The simplest of all is a straight-line causal relationship between dependent and independent variables. It’s no accident that linear regression is the business world’s preferred tool for establishing the relationship between one variable and another. Other tools are available, of course, but most managers shun them because it’s easier to think about simple, unidirectional causal relationships. How many times has a superior scolded you for making a problem more complicated than it needs to be? You protest that you’re not trying to complicate anything; you just want the problem to be as complicated as it really is. Your boss tells you to stick to your job, which involves taking a causal relationship rich with potential complexity and flattening it into a linear relationship in which more of A produces more of B.
When decisions go bad, sometimes it is because we got the causal links between salient features wrong. We could have gotten the direction of the relationship right but the magnitude wrong: “I thought that our costs would decrease much faster as our scale grew than they actually did.” Or we could have gotten the direction of the relationship wrong: “I thought that our capacity to serve clients would go up when we hired a new batch of consultants, but it actually went down because the experienced consultants had to spend a huge amount of their time training the new consultants and fixing their rookie mistakes.”
With respect to architecture, the most common failing of conventional thinking is the tendency to lose sight of the whole decision. It may be easier to dole out pieces of a decision to various corporate functions, but that ensures that no one will take a holistic view of a particular problem. And in the absence of a holistic view, a mediocre result is the likely outcome. Imagine if Sharp had delegated to four different executive vice presidents the questions of marketing, customer service, hotel operations, and human resources. Would their individual answers, bolted together into an overall Four Seasons strategy, have looked anything like the resolution that Sharp crafted? Almost certainly not.
Finally, with respect to resolution, conventional decision makers tend to accept unpleasant trade-offs with relatively little complaint. What alternative is there? By the time a decision maker reaches the resolution stage, the potential for discovering interesting and novel ways around unpleasant trade-offs has been leached away. So instead of rebelling against the unpleasant trade-off, the conventional thinker shrugs and asks, “What else could have we done?” Much else, in fact, could have been done, if the decision has been approached from a completely different direction, one that embraced complexity, multidirectional causal relationships, and holistic, rather than segmented, thinking.
The World as It Is, or as It Might Be?
The differences between integrative and conventional thinking are summarized in figure 2-4.
FIGURE 2-4
The two types of thinking are diametrically opposed, and so are the outcomes they generate. Integrative thinking produces possibilities, solutions, and new ideas. It creates a sense of limitless possibility. Conventional thinking hides potential solutions in places they can’t be found and fosters the illusion that no creative solution is possible. With integrative thinking, aspirations rise over time. Conventional thinking is a self-reinforcing lesson that life is about accepting unattractive and unpleasant trade-offs. It erodes aspiration. Fundamentally, the conventional thinker prefers to accept the world as it is. The integrative thinker welcomes the challenge of shaping the world for the better.
C H A P T E R 3
Reality, Resistance, and Resolution
How Integrative Thinkers
Keep Their Options Open
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
—Albert Einstein
IF INTEGRATIVE THINKING is such a good idea, why don’t people use thei
r opposable minds all the time? Craig Wynett, head of corporate new ventures at Procter & Gamble, answers with a great metaphor; he blames our “factory setting.”1 Like your car’s ignition timing, your computer’s screen brightness, or your washing machine’s spin cycle, your mind emerges from the factory set for a specific mode and speed of operation. Few factory settings ever get adjusted, and many of us wouldn’t know how to change them if we wanted to—hence all those VCRs forever flashing 12:00 a.m. But as with your ignition timing, screen brightness, and spin cycle, your mind’s setting can be adjusted, if you know how.
One factory preset of the human mind is a tendency to assume that our models of reality are identical to reality itself. That conflation shuts down the latent power of our opposable mind before it can be engaged. To understand how, let’s look at how our minds process some of the data that swarms over and around us daily.
The World, Filtered
We swim in a veritable ocean of data every day. We don’t drown in it because we are born with a capacity to shape it into something meaningful. But that meaning comes at the expense of a great deal of information. We filter out much of what comes flying at us and knock the rest into some kind of narrative order that seems to make sense. There’s no guarantee that we won’t filter out valuable data in our drive to compile a coherent narrative. As cognitive psychology professor Jordan Peterson puts it: “There’s an infinite wealth of information in this room, yet when you come in and you process it, you only see those things that directly serve your purposes. The things you don’t know, and the territories you don’t know how to maneuver in, are everywhere.”2
Close your eyes and picture the room you are in right now. You aren’t seeing the room in its infinitely detailed reality. You are seeing a simplified model of the room that your mind has painted with a broad brush. Models are our customized understanding of reality.
We filter the data that besieges us in part to protect our brains. The thalamus is the part of the brain where incoming information is organized, and if it is disabled, “massive amounts of sensory information comes pouring through,” says Peterson. “That’s very, very overwhelming, and that seems to be the reason, by the way, that people become schizophrenic. It’s that too much of what’s out there is pouring in, and their bodies cannot handle it, their exploratory systems burn out, and their conceptual systems start to fragment. Not a pretty thing.”
Corporate Rashomon
Nor is it a pretty sight when we confuse our simplified models of reality with reality itself, in all its rich complexity. Here’s an example of how our capacity for filtering information, meant to make sense of the world, can instead make for confusion and conflict.
Sally and Bill are two vice presidents of a real company, which we’ll call VisionTech. Like the rest of us, Sally and Bill create narratives from the data that comes at them, and like the rest of us, they are prone to the mistaken belief that their narratives and reality are one and the same.3
Sally and Bill have just paid a visit to an important customer. During the visit, the customer said, “I really like VisionTech. It has been an innovative leader in this business for a long time. But I’m coming under increasing cost pressure and have to make trade-offs.”
That’s a verbatim statement, objective reality, tape-recorded and then transcribed by a third party who wasn’t at the meeting. Our minds’ factory settings come into play when we unconsciously extract from that reality the information that has salience to us and fit it into a coherent story. Sally zeroed in on the first and second sentences of the customer’s statement (“I really like VisionTech. It has been an innovative leader in this business for a long time”) and all but forgot the rest (“But I’m coming under increasing cost pressure and have to make trade-offs”). Her memory was accurate, as far as it went. The words came out of the customer’s mouth in the order she remembered. But because she didn’t recognize the back half of the customer’s statement as salient, it found no place in her mental model.
Reality and Sally’s model of reality start to diverge when she tries to interpret the causal content embedded in the customer’s statement. According to her interpretation, the customer is really telling her and Bill that he places a high value on VisionTech’s leadership and innovation.
What has changed? “Liking” VisionTech has been replaced with “valuing” VisionTech’s leadership and innovation. But “liking” and “valuing” mean different things. Customers may like lots of things, but they pay for—that is, they value—only a small subset of the things they like. By changing “like” to “value,” Sally has added a causal relationship—this customer will pay us for the fruits of our leadership—that wasn’t in the customer’s original statement. Sally then fits this newly processed data, which she would call a fact, into the narrative she’s made of her past experience. Her conclusion: “Customers value VisionTech’s leadership and innovation.” And that conclusion, in turn, points toward a general causal relationship: “Customers will stick with us if we continue to innovate and lead.” Finally, Sally uses her model to plot a way forward for VisionTech, based on what she believes customers think: “Innovation and leadership are the most critical avenues to pursue.”
Sally’s resolution is based on a mental construction, not on objective reality. She has taken real data that she found salient and added layers and layers of causal interpretations to fashion a prescription for what VisionTech should and should not do to meet what she believes are the core concerns of VisionTech’s customers (see figure 3-1).
Sally’s model turns out the way it does because of her factory setting. But settings are nonstandard—we don’t all construct the same models from the same set of data. Sally’s colleague Bill heard the same customer statement and came away with a completely different sense of its meaning. The part of the statement that he registered as salient was, “But I’m coming under increasing cost pressure and have to make trade-offs.”
Starting from that slice of salient reality, Bill’s model grows in a distinctly different direction. He infers that the customer is going to make a trade-off against VisionTech because of cost pressure. From there, Bill constructs a generalization: “Customers are feeling intense cost pressure.” Which in turn leads to the following conclusion: “Customers will migrate away from us because of our pricing.” Just as Sally did, Bill in due course comes to an ultimate resolution as to what action VisionTech must take, predicated on his interpretation of what customers think: “We’ve got to get our costs down so that we can be price competitive.”
FIGURE 3-1
How Bill’s thinking model contrasts with Sally’s is illustrated in figure 3-2.
The divergent narratives that Sally and Bill have constructed appear equally plausible. Both proceed from objective data. But the resulting resolutions are polar opposites. That’s not unusual. Limitless data combined with the mind’s natural drive to add meaning produce a profusion of clashing models.
FIGURE 3-2
But Sally doesn’t see her construction as a model of reality—she sees it as reality itself. As she told me at a debriefing after the meeting with the customer, her narrative is “the way it is in our industry.” Bill, too, insisted to me that his view was “reality.”
On their way back to VisionTech headquarters, Sally and Bill talk over their meeting with the customer. Bill says, “We risk losing our client base if we don’t get our costs down.”
Sally is flabbergasted. “What client interview was Bill at?” she wonders to herself. “Or does he have an agenda that causes him to completely ignore the customers and push cost cutting, which is exactly the opposite of what they want?” Aloud, she says, “But Bill, our clients are counting on us to show leadership in innovation.”
Bill can’t believe his ears. “Was Sally at the same meeting I was?” he thinks. “Or does she have a hidden agenda that leads her to completely ignore the customers’ wishes and push for innovation, whatever it costs? That is exactly the opposite of what th
ey want!”
When Opposites Collide
The communication breakdown between Sally and Bill is a consequence of their conflating their mental models with reality. Both exhibit a strong tendency to defend their own models of reality and disparage any model that clashes with it. “We think that what we see,” says John Sterman, MIT’s expert in systems thinking, “is what there really is.”4
This tendency makes it difficult for us to know what to do with opposing and seemingly incommensurable models. Our first impulse is to determine which one represents reality and which one is unreal and wrong, and then we campaign against the idea we reject. But in rejecting one model as unreal, we miss out on all the value that can be realized by holding in mind two opposing models at the same time. We disengage the opposable mind before it can seek a creative resolution.
The integrative thinkers I interviewed have learned to change their factory settings and distinguish between reality and models that purport to reflect reality. Unlike the rest of us, they don’t need to take sides. “It’s not a choice of this model or that model,” says Sterman. “They’re all wrong. See what you can do to combine those multiple perspectives and enhance the quality of your mental model.”
Let’s now look at three extraordinary executives who each demonstrate the capacity to hold multiple perspectives in mind at the same time and still function. These leaders—A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble; Bob Young, cofounder and builder of Red Hat software; and Piers Handling, the visionary behind the global emergence of the Toronto International Film Festival—demonstrate the power that comes from distinguishing mental models from reality. Later in the book, I discuss how you can go about changing your factory setting to do the same.
The Opposable Mind Page 5