Functional specialization is especially inimical to integrative thinking because it undermines productive architecture—the keeping in mind of the whole while working on the individual parts. Functional specialization encourages the sequential or parallel resolution of discrete parts of a business problem. The result is that what is optimal from the perspective of one function will take precedence over what is optimal for the firm as a whole.
When designing a new product, for instance, the research and development department arrives at a formula and a set of specifications. Then R&D “throws over the wall”—an expression that speaks volumes about the balkanization of most complex business organizations—to manufacturing, which in turn throws it over the wall to marketing, and then to sales, and so on. Each subsequent function is saddled with the narrowly provincial decisions of the previous functions in the chain. So if R&D specialists didn’t consider manufacturability when they designed the product, the manufacturing function will just have to do the best it can. The next step down the line can expect similar disregard for its priorities.
The usual alternative to the sequential process is a parallel process in which the general manager of a project asks each functional unit to produce a solution to a common problem. Again, because of the degree of skill specialization, the people in each functional unit lack the range to consider features of the problem that might be salient to specialists in other functions. Nor can one specialist see the causal relationships that other specialists might see.
As a result, each function is likely to come back to the general manager with its own functional optimum, none of which is likely to embody all the features of a firm optimum. The general manager must then either pick one functional option or try to piece together a sort of Frankenstein’s monster from parts of each solution. The result is often something like Pontiac’s ill-fated Aztec SUV. The car was supposed to be the product of the best ideas of Pontiac’s engineers, marketers, and customers. But because there was no integrating intelligence drawing all those good ideas into a unified whole, the Aztec looked like what it was: a hodgepodge of good ideas that had never been integrated into single good design. The Aztec is no longer on the market.
Neither the sequential nor the parallel process generates the productive architecture characteristic of integrative thinking, in which the thinker keeps the whole in mind while working on the individual parts. So why, then, do we simplify and specialize, even knowing it produces results that are less than optimal? “The reason that the world is cut into little pieces is because it is easier to deal with,” explains Hilary Austen Johnson, who studied under Jim March. “Once you start integrating things, you end up with a much more complex problem than you had before. It’s harder to work with. Things are more in flux. You get more interactions between things, so the knowledge that you have has to be more robust.”5
That’s more complexity than most minds care to handle, and simplification and specialization can quickly come to look like the only refuge from chaos. But experienced integrative thinkers learn to draw a distinction between chaos and complexity. F. C. Kohli, the founder of Indian software giant Tata Consultancy Services and the man often called the father of the Indian software industry, offers encouragement to anyone facing a complex problem:
Any situation has a certain number of alternatives, but if you are doing system thinking, even for a complex problem, and you realize what is the system, what are the subsystems, what are the sub-subsystems, and you define their interrelationship as well as you can, you will start seeing some daylight, how to get out of it. The complexity—if you have some logical inputs and also have a system structure—I don’t think it looks that bad.6
In other words, complexity doesn’t have to be overwhelming, if we can master our initial panic reaction and look for patterns, connections, and causal relationships. Our capacity to handle complexity, Kohli suggests, is greater than we give ourselves credit for.
Teams can offer valuable support in maintaining the complexity that integrative thinking thrives upon. Martha Graham collaborated with giants from the domains of music and art such as Copland and Noguchi because she valued and needed their expertise. They helped her break free from conventional notions of what was salient to the dance and deepened her understanding of causal relationships among each element of the performance. Constant interaction with collaborators helped her keep the whole dance in mind as she designed its individual elements. In such an environment, a creative resolution isn’t assured, but the odds of success are dramatically improved.
Like Graham, the integrative thinkers I interviewed knew they would need plenty of help to reach creative resolutions. They chose their collaborators expressly for what they could contribute to an integrated whole. Bruce Mau, a renowned designer and frequent collaborator with architect Frank Gehry, told me, “You can’t make a renaissance person anymore, because the range of what you would need to do is just impossible. But you could actually assemble a renaissance team.”7 The integrative thinkers rely on their “renaissance teams” to broaden salience, maintain sophisticated causality, and create a holistic architecture in their drive for creative resolution.
Designing a Ride, Not a Railcar
One of the most sophisticated and successful renaissance teams in business today is the industrial design firm IDEO. What gives IDEO its edge is that CEO Tim Brown and his colleagues recognize that the people who use products and services don’t judge them simply by their functional performance. They also judge them by the degree of emotional satisfaction they provide. How a kitchen utensil makes its user feel is as important as how it chops or cuts. Many of IDEO’s competitors have belatedly come to the same realization, but IDEO got there first, and it has much more experience than its rivals in designing for the emotions, for the heart as well as the hand.8
Brown explicitly discourages both his designers and IDEO’s clients from oversimplifying and overspecializing. Excessive focus on the individual elements of a design problem, he argues, will detract from the overall solution that clients are seeking.
That belief was put to the test a few years back, when Amtrak, the U.S. passenger rail corporation, was preparing to launch its Acela high-speed train service along the Boston-to-Washington metropolitan corridor. It asked IDEO to design the interior of its Acela rail coaches. Amtrak wanted a railcar that was more attractive and functional than the interior of the passenger airliners that were Amtrak’s primary competition.
Brown could have taken on the assignment and designed a car that would have been a huge improvement over Amtrak’s dowdy and rundown rolling stock. But Brown is an integrative thinker who rejects simplification and specialization. He argued that Amtrak, by focusing on the interior of its cars, was missing a much larger problem. Travelers didn’t favor the airlines over Amtrak because they disliked Amtrak’s cars. Travelers avoided Amtrak because they disliked the entire Amtrak experience. They didn’t like booking tickets on Amtrak, they didn’t like waiting in Amtrak stations, they didn’t like the boarding procedures. Once they’d run that gauntlet, Amtrak’s cars could have been furnished in silk and gold, and it wouldn’t have made a difference.
Brown persuaded Amtrak to rethink the design challenge and put IDEO’s designers to work analyzing the typical train trip. They determined it involved ten distinct steps: learning, planning, starting, entering, ticketing, waiting, boarding, riding, arriving, and continuing (their subsequent journey). The interior of the railcar was relevant to only one of ten steps in the customer experience: riding.
Brown describes his work for Amtrak and IDEO’s other clients as “a synthetic process” that takes into account “the whole thing, whatever that thing is.” In Amtrak’s case, “the whole thing” involved an end-to-end rethink of the entire Acela customer experience—the very definition of holistic architecture. Not only were Acela railcars redesigned, so were train stations, interactive information kiosks, employee workstations, and indeed the Acela brand, which was positioned as
an experience that was superior in every respect to air travel.
The Acela is a shining example of the breakthroughs possible when simplification and specialization are set aside in favor of viewing both problem and solution in all their complexity. Now let’s meet another integrative thinker who also chose to wrestle with the individual components of a business problem without ever forgetting that they were parts of a greater whole.
Moses Znaimer: Local Hero, Global Conquest
Moses Znaimer is a compact and animated man who has lived and breathed television ever since he bought a television set with money from his bar mitzvah in the mid-1950s. In 1972, Znaimer cofounded Citytv, an independent Toronto television station that competed against two giant Canadian networks, government-owned CBC and private CTV, as well as the Buffalo affiliates of the three big American networks of the day, CBS, NBC, and ABC.9
It was a challenging environment, but Znaimer’s quirky little station managed to thrive by making a virtue of necessity. Where mainstream TV was polished, practiced, and bland, Citytv was funky, spontaneous, and idiosyncratic. It featured hip newscasters, fringe U.S. and European shows, and, late at night, movies that were racier than anything the big competitors would dare to show at any hour.
But mere survival wasn’t enough for Znaimer. By the early 1980s, it was clear to him that the competitive landscape was changing, requiring him to make a significant choice. On the one hand, the broadcast media business was globalizing. CNN and MTV were emerging as global brands and operations, and other regional media powerhouses, such as BSkyB in Europe and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire in Asia, weren’t far behind. The global players, he realized, could move into individual local markets brandishing resources that local players had no hope of matching.
On the other hand, he saw that viewers still loved their local television stations, which connected with communities in a way that the global players, cable channels, and superstations could not. Advertisers were eager to reach those local viewers, and their continued spending gave the local stations a solid economic underpinning, even as the global behemoths grew larger and more powerful.
The apparent choice that Znaimer faced was to stay local or go global. If Citytv stayed local, it risked being swamped as the TV business globalized. It was already happening in other industries. From retailing to consumer packaged goods to movies, Znaimer could see that players with global scale were beating the locals.
But the global alternative was equally unsatisfactory. Going global meant taking on huge financial risk. Citytv would have to borrow huge sums of capital, make expensive acquisitions with no guarantee that they’d earn out, and find the management talent to negotiate tricky alliances while expanding at breakneck speed. Even if everything broke Citytv’s way, it might not catch the global players, who had a head start of a decade or more.
Znaimer’s easiest choice would have been to stay comfortably local, in the belief that going global was beyond his reach. The big players would swallow him up eventually, but he’d make a good living while waiting for the end. That’s what a conventional thinker would likely have done. When facing any dilemma with nasty trade-offs on both sides, the conventional thinker declares there is really no choice at all.
But being an integrative thinker, Znaimer refused to accept the slow encroachment of international media players into his market, just as he refused to miss out on the globalization of media. He rethought the question of global versus local, looking for salient information he overlooked the first time.
He found it. The love of local media, he realized, wasn’t limited to Toronto. Viewers in almost every local market are powerfully attached to the homegrown stations that reflect and foster the community’s values and sense of itself as a community. Local media, Znaimer told me, helps members of a community find “unexpected connections.” That may sound obvious, but Znaimer, unlike his rivals, integrated his insight into Citytv’s operating philosophy. As Znaimer explains—in terms that might be a working definition of salience—a key to his station’s success is that “at City, we pay attention to things that others have chosen to ignore.”
In Znaimer’s view, stations have, or at least could have, distinct identities, separate and apart from the programming they carried. “Many would say, ‘People don’t watch stations, they watch programs,’” he told me. “But that’s because most stations aren’t there. Stations can speak through everything they produce themselves, through the space between the programs. I believe that the character is in the delivery.”
Znaimer uses “the space between the programs”—which other TV executives consider dead air—to create Citytv’s distinct identity. The station’s personalities appear between programs to tell viewers what’s coming next and why they should stick around. Those personalities reflect Toronto’s ethnic diversity better than any competitor or any foreign station, creating another bond with the audience. And with their regular, rhythmic appearances in the spaces between shows, they embody Znaimer’s dictum that “the nature of TV is flow, not show.”
From the start, Znaimer used simple-seeming, mutually reinforcing devices to forge a distinctive identity for Citytv, starting with its tagline: “Citytv—Everywhere . . .” Citytv, the line implies, is connected to every part of the city; it’s anywhere anything interesting is happening. Reinforcing that notion is Citytv’s fleet of television trucks, which are ubiquitous in Toronto. They carry Citytv’s “videographers”—the camera-toting correspondents whose interactions with passersby are broadcast throughout the day as a sort of running commentary on the world.
These rather simple devices create a bond between Citytv and its audience that national and global outlets can’t hope to replicate. So does the feature known as “Speaker’s Corner.” Speaker’s Corner is tiny studio booth in Citytv’s headquarters building, accessible from the street. Anyone passing by can step in to the booth and film a fifteen-second message. If the message is interesting or thoughtful or funny or touching enough, it will be broadcast in “the space between the programs.”
Citytv’s real estate also reinforces its connection with its viewers. The Citytv building is located on Queen Street West, Toronto’s equivalent of Times Square, and gives the area much of its identity. The station’s first-floor studios open up to the street, and its mammoth internal courtyard is the site of numerous parties and entertainment features. The big U.S. networks now all have ground-floor studios in Manhattan that interact with the local street life. They’re copying Znaimer, who was the first to make his station’s connection with its local environment the cornerstone of its identity.
If Znaimer’s identity-creating devices are simple, his view of the causal relationships in the TV business is anything but. In the 1980s, most of his counterparts assumed globalization would eventually erode the attachment to local stations. But Znaimer realized that globalization would actually increase viewers’ appetite for TV with a local flavor. Or as he puts it, “globalization drives localization.” The more connected viewers feel to their local station, the more they will stick with it when invited to switch to one of the myriad of alternatives. But Znaimer also recognized that global players have the resources and economies of scale that allow them to invest in things a local player couldn’t afford.
Like other integrative thinkers, Znaimer describes himself, without any prodding, as “not an ‘either-or’ kind of guy but rather a ‘both-and’ guy.” So he was never likely to accept a view of the TV business as simply a matter of globalization versus localization, with unsatisfactory trade-offs in both directions. Instead, he has squared the circle by making Citytv the template for quintessentially local television stations across the world. In his words, he has “globalized the science of local television.”
Citytv is now a truly global enterprise with affiliated stations in twenty-two countries around the world. In more than 100 countries, local stations unaffiliated to Citytv license its content and style of presentation. That licensing revenue p
rovides Citytv with a resource base that’s not available to purely local players, allowing it to compete with the global players without losing its local advantage.
“Glocalization,” as Znaimer calls it, is his creative resolution of the tension inherent in the television business. In the classic manner of integrative thinkers, Znaimer fashioned a creative resolution out of apparently irreconcilable alternatives by separating existing models from reality, setting unyielding standards, and taking responsibility instead of claiming to be a victim of circumstance. His view of what was salient was broader than that of the conventional thinkers around him, and he explored more sophisticated causal relationships among the salient elements. He kept the whole firmly in mind while he worked on the parts, and he drove relentlessly for a creative resolution. In doing so, he demonstrates both how integrative thinkers think and why integrative thinking is worth the trouble.
C H A P T E R 5
Mapping the Mind
How Thought Circulates
By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.
—Confucius
IN THE FIRST HALF OF THIS BOOK, we observed integrative thinkers using their opposable minds to produce strikingly positive outcomes. We watched Issy Sharp build a world-standard hotel chain by taking a wide view of what might be salient to his business problem. We saw Bob Young discover unexpected causal relationships that unlocked the door to market leadership for Red Hat. And we saw Moses Znaimer keep his television station’s programming, community presence, and competitive context in mind as he devised the architecture of a unique solution to the problem of local media in a global era.
The Opposable Mind Page 8