The Opposable Mind

by Roger L. Martin

  It was still a second-tier festival at best when Handling was appointed the festival’s director in 1994, after stints as program director and artistic director. Handling’s board wanted the Toronto festival to draw the same sort of excited notice enjoyed by the top European festivals in Venice, New York, Berlin, and Cannes. The ticket to the big leagues, board members believed, were the jury prizes the top festivals awarded. Cannes had the famed Palme d’Or—how could the TIFF top that?

  Juried festivals were one of the festival world’s two dominant models. Panels composed of industry luminaries—directors, producers, actors—would award prizes to a festival’s outstanding films, ensuring them prestige and, usually, wide distribution (the Palme d’Or awarded to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, for example, was instrumental to that film’s box-office success around the world). The major benefit of the juried model was the media buzz and attention that accrued to prize-winning films.

  But the jury was by its nature elitist, creating a gap between the festival-goers and the festival itself. Handling believed that the presence of an elite jury made it difficult for the people who paid the festival’s bills with their ticket purchases to feel that the festival was truly theirs.

  Non-juried festivals eliminated the element of elitism and gave the movie-lovers who attended a sense of ownership. But in the absence of prizes, a festival and its films had no easy way to capture the news media’s attention and generate buzz. And buzz was what the TIFF board desperately desired.

  Like Sharp, Lafley, and Young, then, Handling faced two less-than-ideal options. Salient to him was the TIFF’s grassroots atmosphere. “Toronto was designed to be inclusive, designed to be populist, designed to be for an audience, not designed to be a festival for experts,” he told me. But the needs of film producers and film distributors were also salient to him. Film producers wanted big crowds to create the buzz that would draw film distributors. And film distributors looked to festivals for signals of what would draw crowds in their own markets.

  What every player in the equation needed was buzz. The festival itself needed buzz to attract an audience; the producers needed buzz to sell their movies; and the distributors needed buzz to judge which movies to buy.

  Buzz fed on itself in a virtuous circle. If a festival generated buzz, more movie stars would show up. Their presence would feed the media’s buzz machine, and that in turn would bring in more moviegoers, producers, and distributors. There was no buzz without a prize, but a prize itself, with its negative overtones of elitism, could kill the very buzz it was supposed to generate.

  Handling understood these complex causal relationships and also appreciated how each piece linked to the other. As he thought through this complex causal map, a creative resolution began to take shape. TIFF’s continued growth required a buzz-generating prize to continue into the global elite. But that prize had to excite and involve moviegoers rather than make them feel left out.

  The resolution was right under Handling’s nose. Although the TIFF was not a juried festival, it had, since 1978, awarded a prize to the festival’s most popular film. But the People’s Choice Award, which the festival’s filmgoers themselves voted on, got little attention from the press, festival-goers, or TIFF management. Handling realized that with the right promotion, the People’s Choice Award could become a buzz-generating vehicle that was truly populist in nature, transforming a traditionally elitist activity into something that belonged to every movie lover who attended the festival.

  By making the audience itself the jury, the festival would give paying customers a powerful incentive to see as many movies as possible. The competition would satisfy the media’s desire for a horse race, ensuring plenty of coverage. And the TIFF People’s Choice Award would give distributors a clear signal of a movie’s likely commercial appeal. The directors might prefer a juried prize awarded by their peers, but they’d settle for popular acclaim without undue complaint.

  The People’s Choice Award put the Toronto International Film Festival on the map. By 1999, Roger Ebert, America’s most influential film critic, was telling one reporter that “although Cannes is still larger, Toronto is more useful and more important.”11 By 2005, TIFF had booked the largest volume of sales in film festival history, and film critic Liam Lacey named it “the most important film festival in the world—the largest, the most influential, the most inclusive.”12

  As the Hollywood Reporter said in 2005, “The Toronto International Film Festival increasingly has become the premier launching pad for studios looking to unveil their award-season hopefuls.”13 Winners of the People’s Choice Award include Shine, which won an Oscar in 1996; Life Is Beautiful, which took three Oscars in 1998; American Beauty, winner of five Oscars in 1999; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which captured four Oscars in 2000; Whale Rider, nominated for one Oscar in 2002; Hotel Rwanda, nominated for three Oscars in 2004; and Tsotsi, which won one Oscar in 2005.

  And it all started with the People’s Choice Award, a classic product of integrative thinking. In recognizing the award as the key to the Toronto festival’s identity and market power, Handling avoided confusing the existing clashing models with reality. He didn’t settle for a solution that fell short of his own standards. He took personal responsibility for a creative resolution. And when he encountered unpleasant trade-offs, he revisited his thinking to search for a creative resolution. The one he found reinforced TIFF’s position as a populist film festival that respected audiences as well as the commercial and artistic needs of the film community.

  Common Paths to Unique Solutions

  In forging creative resolutions to the unpleasant trade-offs they faced, Lafley, Young, and Handling illustrate the patterns common to the many integrative thinkers I have studied. Like the other integrative thinkers, the three leaders were able to separate models from reality. They were free to hold the models up to analysis and scrutiny without needing to refute one or the other. This crucial step enabled them to explore the tensions between the opposing models and gather clues pointing toward a better model.

  In Lafley’s case, the new spending model helped him understand that P&G needed a higher level of innovation to resume growth. The old spending model helped Lafley understand what level of investment P&G could actually afford. In Young’s case, the free software model helped him understand the power of broad distribution. The proprietary software model helped him see the potential for earning profits from service. The juried model helped Handling see the value of prize-related buzz. The non-juried model reminded him of the salience of his audiences’ need to feel included.

  Like other integrative thinkers, Lafley, Young, and Handling refused to settle for mediocrity and half measures. An unpleasant trade-off signaled to each of them that the current answers simply weren’t good enough, even if they appeared to be the only ones available. If an existing model didn’t meet their standards, the model would have to change, because the standards wouldn’t.

  Like other integrative thinkers, Lafley, Young, and Handling took responsibility for finding a satisfactory resolution. Facing nothing but suboptimal solutions, they didn’t rail against circumstance; instead, they thought, “I face an unpleasant trade-off because I haven’t thought through the problem hard enough, expansively enough, creatively enough.” The message they took away when faced with unpleasant choices was not “choose now” but “think harder.” And by keeping the whole in mind while working on the individual parts, each was able to find a creative resolution to the tension between the two initial choices.

  This drive for the creative resolution of tensions is the single most striking feature of the successful managerial leaders who I interviewed. When I pressed them on why they felt compelled to think past the existing models when everyone around them encouraged them to choose one, I got a few variations on a single answer: “I’m just not an either-or kind of person.” Lafley’s variant offers the business case for not settling for “or” when “and” is possible. “We weren’t going to
win if it was an ‘or,’” he told me. “Everybody can do ‘or;’ everybody can do great trade-offs. But you’re not going to win if you’re in a trade-off game.”14

  C H A P T E R 4

  Dancing Through Complexity

  Shaping Resolutions by

  Resisting Simplification

  Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

  —Albert Einstein

  WHEN MARTHA GRAHAM DIED in 1991 at the age of ninety-six, she was a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, the acknowledged queen of modern dance, and one of Time magazine’s “100 Greatest Americans of the Twentieth Century.”1 She was also one of the century’s most gifted integrative thinkers, whose thought had far-reaching results—so far-reaching it might even be of interest to executives responsible for fashioning creative solutions to perplexing business dilemmas.

  Martha Graham joined The Denishawn School dance company of Los Angeles in 1916, following her graduation from the University of Cumnoch in California.2 It was a time of great artistic ferment. Dance, like painting and literature, was casting off the rigid conventions of the nineteenth century, and a handful of mavericks were pioneering the style that would come to be known as modernism. Graham threw herself into the modern dance movement, and by the early 1920s she was one of its leading lights. When she made her New York debut in 1926, she was already choreographing dances that dispensed with the fluid, prettified line of classical ballet in favor of a “contraction and release” technique characterized by harsh, angular movements. Her dances pulsated with angst and emotion.

  Graham’s work was utterly contemporary, but the practices of the dance world at the time were still stuck in the nineteenth century. Dances were choreographed to musical scores that for the most part, were not written to accompany a particular dance—most weren’t written as dance music at all. The performers wore traditional ballet tunics or folk costumes that bore little connection to the content of the dance. Stage sets were sterile, two-dimensional “flats”—mere backdrops with little or no apparent relation to the dancers or the dance.

  That would all change under Martha Graham. Working closely with Lewis Horst, a composer she met at Denishawn, Graham made music integral to the dance it accompanied. She continued that practice throughout her career. For her 1944 masterpiece, Appalachian Spring, she collaborated with legendary composer Aaron Copland to create a powerful synergy between music and choreography.

  Graham also took a keen interest in costume design, replacing ballet tunics and folk dresses with straight, long shirts and simple leotards. The stage sets for her dances broke the mold as well, by incorporating sculpture and other three-dimensional elements. Her long and productive collaboration with Isamu Noguchi, the renowned Japanese-America sculptor, resulted in revolutionary stage designs for Frontier, Appalachian Spring, and many other dances. Graham’s dancers were able to interact with their stage environment, often holding or touching props. This was unprecedented in performance dance.

  For Graham, composition, choreography, costumes, and sets were all part of an interdependent, integrated whole. In a sharp break from conventional dance practice, she explicitly considered the whole while working on every element of the production, rather than doling out each element to independent specialists. In doing so, she revolutionized an art form.

  Simple Comforts

  Theoretically, businesses and their leaders could take a similarly coherent, holistic approach to crafting their products and services. Why don’t they? Blame the “factory setting” of the contemporary business organization, which is biased toward simplification and specialization.

  And it’s not just business organizations. In every domain, human beings gravitate toward simplification and specialization. We do so, says Stanford management theorist Jim March, because we live in a dauntingly complex and ambiguous world, full of causal inconsistencies. We cut prices by 5 percent one month, and sales rise 7 percent. So at the end of the next quarter, we again cut prices 5 percent, but this time sales barely budge. A competitor has introduced a rival offering that has eaten into the anticipated sales gain. Our reaction to this baffling turn of events is to simplify and specialize. “Organizations,” he says in an article with colleague Daniel Levinthal, “seek to transform confusing, interactive environments into less confusing, less interactive ones by decomposing domains and treating the resulting sub-domains as autonomous.”3

  We know that we sacrifice something in doing so, rationalizing the sacrifice by referring to what’s popularly known as the 80–20 rule. The rule states that for 20 percent of the maximum effort, we can get 80 percent of the ideal result. Applied to the cognitive domain, the rule says that 20 percent of the maximum mental effort will yield 80 percent of the perfect answer. Further, the rule suggests that only an obsessive or pathological perfectionist would invest 80 percent more effort in the hope of reaching an answer that would at best be only 20 percent better.

  The 80–20 rule implicitly acknowledges that simplification is not the perfect solution to the problems of ambiguity and causal inconsistency, but rather a coping mechanism. We settle for 80 percent to avoid being overwhelmed by complexity and losing the ability to function at all. When a colleague or superior admonishes us to “quit complicating the issue,” it’s not just an impatient reminder to get on with the damn job—it’s also a plea to keep the complexity at a tolerable level.

  As comforting as simplification can be, however, it impairs every step of the integrative thinking process. It encourages us to edit out salient features rather than consider the question of salience broadly. Editing, in turn, leads to unsatisfactory resolutions of the dilemmas that business throws at us. Issy Sharp would not have been able to create the Four Seasons difference if he had simplified as most of his rival hoteliers did. He would not have engaged business travelers in a dialogue deep enough to elicit the crucial information that they longed for their own home and office. That kind of conversation would have raised issues too complex for a specialist-dominated organization to address. But Sharp actually preferred a complicated picture, because he understood, at least implicitly, that simplification, 80–20 style, leads to more business as usual. Truly creative resolutions, Sharp realized, spring from complexity.

  Simplification makes us favor linear, unidirectional causal relationships, even if reality is more complex and multidirectional. The simplifying mind would have not grasped Handling’s causal connection between film festival prizes and the audience’s feeling of inclusion, because it is not a straightforward linear relationship.

  Simplification also encourages us to construct a limited model of the problem before us, whatever it might be. The alternatives we perceive are meager and unattractive, closing any remaining avenue to an integrative resolution. The simplifying mind has no choice but to settle for trade-offs, also known as the best bad choice available.

  Specialization and Its Discontents

  Specialization is a variant of simplification. If the simplifying mind attempts to understand the whole picture by making it more shallow and superficial than it really is, the specialist attempts to preserve depth and thoroughness by masking out all but a few square inches of a vast canvas.

  Like simplification, specialization allows us to cope with what might be overwhelming complexity. Consider medicine, by any measure a massively complex field. The medical field copes by mandating intensive and formalized specialization. There are official specialties, such as obstetrics and gynecology, and subspecialties, such as neonatology. Subspecialists possess a staggering depth of knowledge of their corner of the medical universe but only a thin layer of knowledge about medicine outside their subspecialty. Subspecialists also tend to take little interest in or responsibility for developments outside their subspecialties.

  At its best, medicine weaves the deep knowledge of each specialty and subspecialty into a seamless fabric of patient care. But at its all-too-frequent worst, specialized medicine cares for discrete parts of the body without
ever recognizing the whole person standing before it. Think back to your last visit to a hospital. You likely interacted with several specialists, and they probably didn’t spend much time sharing their particular perspectives on your case with their fellow physicians. Chances are you checked out of the hospital feeling that your heart, knees, and sinuses (for instance) had been subjected to microscopic scrutiny, but that no one stepped back to consider you as a whole person. You may also have felt dissatisfied, even resentful. Dissatisfaction with the dehumanizing consequences of conventional medicine’s specialization has spurred the emergence of the alternative medicine movement.

  The business world has proceeded down a similar path of specialization, with equally unsatisfactory results. Business’s dominant mode of specialization is the functional area—finance, marketing, production, sales, human resources, and the rest of the organizational chart. Each functional area has its own accepted range of salience, its own accepted causal relationships, its own training, its own insiders’ language, and its own culture.

  As in medicine, specialization in business enables practitioners to accumulate deep knowledge. With time and effort, managers can acquire encyclopedic expertise in finance, marketing, or accounting. But that expertise actually works against the development of expertise in business itself. As Peter Drucker told me, “The business that is going to hire your new MBA will hire somebody to do specialized work. And for the first five, eight, ten years, your students will work as specialists. And in most organizations, it is resented if they show any interest in anything but their specialties. They’re then pushy, or nosy, or empire builders.”4 But specialists aren’t optimally suited to solve the biggest problems businesses face, because as Drucker also pointed out, “there are no finance decisions, tax decisions, or marketing decisions; only business decisions.”