The Opposable Mind

by Roger L. Martin

  In considering salience, causality, and architecture, the integrative thinkers we studied didn’t retreat into simplification and specialization. They waded into untidiness and complexity, confident they’d find an elegant resolution in the end. Like A. G. Lafley considering how to advance Procter & Gamble’s innovation agenda, integrative thinkers recognize that unsatisfactory options aren’t reality but only a model of reality built up from conscious and unconscious inferences. When presented with multiple unsatisfactory options, Michael Lee-Chin and other integrative thinkers don’t take the easy way out and pick the least-worst alternative; they view the creation of a truly attractive option as both their goal and their personal responsibility. They learn from each option without being bound by its limitations, and they use the insights gained to break through to an entirely new model that creatively resolves the tensions between existing models.

  I’m now going to shift the focus to developing your opposable mind and building your integrative thinking capacity. To illustrate key concepts, I’ll refer to the integrative thinkers I’ve interviewed, as well as materials and techniques that my colleagues and I have used to teach integrative thinking to MBA students and executives. In the present chapter, we’ll set the stage for the final three chapters by mapping a model for your own personal knowledge system. The tripod supporting the system is what I call your stance, tools, and experiences. In the chapters that follow, we take a closer look at each in turn. We examine how to apply specific integrative thinking skills to each component of your personal knowledge system, and observe how exemplary integrative thinkers applied their skills. And we look at how to bring your stance, tools, and experiences to bear on the toughest business problems, the ones that seem to have no good answer.1

  To get acquainted with the concepts of stance, tools, and experience, let’s return to Bob Young, the cofounder and former CEO of Red Hat (he handed off CEO duties to Matthew Szulik in 1999; he’s now busy with Lulu.com, an online self-publishing service). In the fall of 2003, Young sat down with me at the Rotman School in Toronto, in front of an audience of business school students and faculty. Over the course of seven ninety-minute sessions, the mercurial and self-deprecating billionaire talked about, well, almost everything: his penchant for wearing pajamas while running a start-up out of what was supposed to be his wife’s sewing room; what it was like to run a business next to a worm factory; why he bought a bankrupt professional football team in his home town of Hamilton; and his passion for protecting what’s left of the endangered public domain. Most of all, Young told us how he thinks. Better yet, he showed us.2

  Stance: Who You Are and What You’re After

  At the top of your personal knowledge food chain is your stance. It is your most broad-based knowledge domain in which you define who you are in your world and what you are trying to accomplish in it. Stance is how you see the world around you, but it’s also how you see yourself in that world.

  Young sees the world as a complicated place with an almost infinite number of branching paths to follow. “There is always more than one way to succeed in any given situation,” he says. But success rarely comes at the first attempt. “Whatever we adopt as our first answer,” he says, “is bound to be wrong.” Among the most vexing complications in this world are the other people in it, such as customers. “Customers are not always right . . . Customers lie or they are wrong.” It’s a world where the smartest people don’t always have the best ideas. At Red Hat, he worked with what he calls “the smart guys, all the guys with serious top-heavy IQ. None of them were business guys, so they didn’t know what the correct answer was.”

  If the world’s problems are so complex that they defeat even the smart guys, it’s no wonder there are so many mediocre organizations. They’re the norm, in fact, and the sooner people in business admit that, the sooner their organizations can improve. “Don’t think you’re any good,” he told the audience at the Rotman School. “And don’t get defensive about it. It’s not something to be embarrassed by, because the odds are no one else is any good either. That’s the big secret. That’s what’s behind the curtain—no one else is any good.”

  The world according to Young can be a baffling and intimidating place. The space he occupies within it is not a terribly exalted one, despite the success of Red Hat and all the money he has made. In the early days of the Internet revolution, he says, “most of us were engineers. Most of us were smart guys, unlike me. I was a sales guy.” He couldn’t bring a towering intellect to the table, he admits in his characteristic self-deprecating style, but he was happy to offer what he had, for whatever it was worth. “My strengths are . . .,” he says, stopping to think. Finally, he comes up with only one: “I’m a good salesman.”

  Young’s humility is an advantage, because it motivates him to learn what he needs to know, and then learn some more. “How do you go,” he asks, “from where you start when you first open your doors—where by definition you aren’t very good—to being excellent? It’s a really interesting and easy secret, which is: just get a little bit better tomorrow. The problem is, when you get to tomorrow, you have to have the same commitment. Just be a little bit better the day after that. That’s all it takes, is just this commitment not to be defensive. Don’t worry about criticism, because you’re not any good, so criticism is always valid.”

  What would motivate him to make the effort to improve day after day? Money alone isn’t enough. What keeps him going is his drive to accomplish something as an actor in this world. “One of my fundamental beliefs is, I want to create value,” he says. “It’s more important to me to create value than to make money.”

  Motivation is a vital force in Young’s world. When combined with learning, it’s a more powerful problem-solving tool than sheer intellect. “You can overcome dumbness through motivation,” he says. Patience is also a key virtue, along with a determination not to jump to conclusions. “Wait,” he advises, “reserve judgment, and build data over time.” Don’t act until you’ve mastered what you need to know to carry out your intention. “I learned early on not to do anything I didn’t understand,” he says. “It was just one of my core assumptions.”

  Young engages his world, then, as a motivated and patient learner. By subduing his impulse to go on the defensive and by committing to improving a little bit every day, he can develop a better understanding of a confusing, complex world, in pursuit of his highest goal: to create value for the world.

  That is Young’s stance. It may be better defined than most, because he’s consciously considered it and honed his description of it in forums like the interviews at Rotman. But everyone has a stance, whether they realize it or not, and whether it is explicit or implicit. Everyone’s actions emanate from their view of the world and their place in it. Michael Lee-Chin saw the world as an accepting place that he could to some degree shape to his liking. Early in his career, he developed a view of himself as a value investor, and from that view flowed his motivation to build a renowned investment firm.

  Piers Handling’s stance was different. He saw himself as a privileged observer in a world full of magnificent films. Too privileged, in fact: he wanted to give other people the chance to enjoy and learn from the movies he loved and the new movies he was always discovering. When he rose to director of the Toronto International Film Festival, he didn’t occupy himself solely with managing the festival. He continued to pay close attention to the films themselves—and why not? His stance originated, after all, in his view of himself as a lover of movies and their history.

  Stance has both individual unique elements and shared cultural and community aspects. Young saw himself as a member of a community of sales guys who couldn’t match the top-heavy IQs of the smart people, but had accumulated valuable practical experience. Viewed from another angle, though, the engineers were his comrades, fellow soldiers in the army of open-source software revolutionaries. His stance derived in part from his functional association with the sales guys, and in part from his in
dustry and temporal association with the pioneers of the open-source movement. The rest of his stance was, and is, as unique as Young himself.

  Our stance is often something we take completely for granted. It is simply “who we are,” and we fail to see how our view of who we are governs our unquestioned assumptions about the “way things are”—which is to say, our assumptions about the model of reality that we mistake for reality itself. But even when we take our stance for granted, it guides us in making sense of the world around us and taking action on the basis of that sense-making. In fact, because we are so often unconscious of our stance and the assumptions about the world that flow from it, its guidance is all the more powerful and all the more difficult to resist or divert.

  Tools: Knocking the World into Shape

  One step down in your personal knowledge system are the tools you use to organize your thinking and understand your world. Your stance guides what tools you choose to accumulate. Your stance as builder of computers, for instance, will guide you to enroll in a computer engineering program to gain the formal conceptual tools you’ll need to design computer hardware.

  Tools range from formal theories to established processes to rules of thumb. Young’s tool set is entirely devoid of formal theories—not a big surprise, given his view that learning trumps intellect. He doesn’t begrudge the top-heavy IQs their fondness for formal theories, but it’s hard to miss his implication that they stumble when they try to apply their sophisticated formal theories to the world. He clearly believes they would be better served by a solid grounding in business experience.

  So much for the tools Young doesn’t use. The ones he does employ derive directly from his stance. The first is his penchant for developing products and services by following a process of prototyping and refining. “I just worked on coming up with strategies that were not incorrect,” he says of his years as an entrepreneur, “and then testing them in the marketplace.” This tendency follows from his view of himself as a patient learner and the world as a complicated place that no one can figure out perfectly on the first pass.

  Young’s learning stance leads him to consult widely before making decisions. “When I have talked to the last person,” he says, “I have gathered the maximum available information.” But because a key element of his stance is his belief that people are much more certain of themselves than they should be, he doesn’t necessarily follow the advice he’s given, even if it’s from a distinguished source. “The smart guys,” he says of his decision to distribute Linux over the Internet, “thought it was the stupidest thing.”

  In addition to these established processes, Young uses rules of thumb, just as we all do. One rule of thumb concerns employee motivation: “It’s hard to build a team if people don’t like to come to work in the morning.” He used that rule of thumb to fire five of the seven subordinates he inherited when he got his first real job. A second rule concerns asset values and the wisdom, or lack thereof, of crowds: “When any asset is dismissed by others, it should be bought.” He used that rule of thumb to buy several businesses after leaving Red Hat. A final rule of thumb concerns personal happiness: “Ya gotta do what makes you happy.” He used this final rule to quit a high-paying job he hated before having an alternative lined up. At the time, he was living in a house with a big mortgage and his wife was just a month away from the birth of their first child. He knew he had done the right thing shortly after he quit, when the stomach ulcers that had been plaguing him disappeared forever.

  Theories, processes, and rules of thumb are efficiency vehicles. Without a conceptual tool kit, you would have to tackle every problem from scratch, proceeding from first principles. Theories, processes, and rules of thumb make it possible to recognize and categorize problems, and apply tools to them that in the past proved effective in similar circumstances. Your browser has crashed often enough for you to recognize that the problem should be solved if you close a few windows and quit the photo program.

  As with stance, some of your tools will be yours alone, while others will be community property, as it were. All the investment bankers at Goldman Sachs may share the same models and spreadsheets, and all the derivatives traders across the world may have learned from the same textbook. But through experience, most of them have developed rules of thumb for negotiating acquisitions or assessing risk that are uniquely their own.

  Experiences: Where Stance and Tools Meet the World

  Your experiences form your most practical and tangible knowledge. The experiences you accumulate are the product of your stance and tools, which guide you toward some experiences and away from others. If your stance as a business executive is as a great model builder and your tools for understanding consumers are sophisticated quantitative models, your experience likely comes from analyzing survey results in your office, not from talking face-to-face with consumers. If instead you see yourself as a people person, skilled at getting consumers to open up about their needs and desires, you will be inclined to build tools for in-home visits and accumulate experiences talking to consumers.

  Not surprisingly, Bob Young accumulated a deep and rich body of experience centered around developing and marketing software products. His stance and tools guided him to acquire experience by putting products into the market, gaining feedback from users, improving the product, gaining more feedback, further improving the product, continuing the cycle throughout the product’s lifetime. Those experiences are consistent with his stance as a learner whose tools are derived from practical experience rather than formal theories.

  Experience enables us to hone our sensitivities and skills. Sensitivity is the capacity to make distinctions between conditions that are similar but not exactly the same. A chef can make fine distinctions between a piece of meat that is done and one that is not quite done. An art critic has the sensitivity to make distinctions between a bold, original talent like Caravaggio, and more timid, conventional craftspeople. An experienced stock analyst can read nearly identical financial statements from two different companies, pinpoint where they diverge, and use experience and rules of thumb to accurately predict which will outperform its peers.

  Skill is the capacity to carry out an activity so as to consistently produce the desired result. A skilled chef can consistently cook a steak to the desired state. A skilled art critic can help viewers see the difference between a masterpiece and a merely competent piece of art. A skilled stock analyst can consistently distinguish between stocks that will track the overall market, and those that will outperform it.

  Skills and sensitivities tend to grow and deepen in concert. As you repeat a task, you are inclined to build what you learned from the previous repetition into the next iteration, until you develop a consistent technique. An improved technique sharpens your skill, making you faster and more accurate. And as you repeat a task, you learn to make finer and finer distinctions between levels of quality, so that an experienced chef can tell almost by instinct when a steak is bleu, and when it’s rare.

  When we learn something new, we’re acutely aware of features that more experienced practitioners take for granted. Think of your self-consciousness when you learned a new sport or took your first driving lesson. This hyperawareness of yourself and the skill you’re learning does not last long. Over time, practice transforms conscious acts into the automatic habits characteristic of mastery. Think of your anxiety at stoplights when you first learned to drive using a standard shift, and the unthinking ease with which you now put the car into first and drive off. The better we get, the faster we forget about what we are doing. Our awareness of what we are doing and how we are accomplishing it quickly becomes as intuitive and inaccessible as the knowledge we use to tie our shoes or ride a bike.

  The Dynamics of Your Personal Knowledge System

  Personal knowledge develops as a system because its three elements influence one another. Stance guides tool acquisition, which in turn, guides experience accumulation.

  The flow, however, is not one-way.
Experiences inform the acquisition of more tools. Some tools are shortcuts, where we apply experiential learning to pare away excess effort. In the course of performing the same task ten times, you’ll figure out what steps are essential and which can be cut back or eliminated, and what sequence of steps will produce the desired outcome most quickly and reliably.

  But developing or acquiring new tools isn’t just a matter of refining a known process. Experience might also guide you to seek new tools from an outside source, and in the process learn a new process, which will then in turn be refined with practice. Perhaps as you work in the lower ranks of an engineering firm, you conclude that your undergraduate engineering degree hasn’t prepared you to take on the work that most interests you. So you decide to return to school and pursue a master’s in engineering, or perhaps an MBA, if the work that most interests you is management or product development.

  Young’s experience guided him to further deepen his pattern-recognition skills. When I asked him why the top-heavy IQs had so much trouble formulating a profitable business strategy, Young said the answer was “really straightforward. It’s all pattern recognition, and they had no experience. They had no patterns to compare” their proposed strategy with known business results. His own capacity for making sound strategic decisions, he said, was largely a function of pattern recognition—which by definition requires experience. “It is all pattern recognition,” he says, “and I’ve been around for several rounds.”

  As experience leads us to acquire new tools, we add depth and clarity to our stance. If our engineer enters business school and acquires the tools of an MBA, she modifies her view of her place in the world—her stance. No longer simply an engineer capable of tackling the technical aspects of a particular class of problems, she is an engineer with the business skills to view a wider range of problems with a broader perspective and address them with more diverse set of tools.