Remember we had two games running simultaneously. In one of the games, four teams sited their plants in North America, three in Europe, and one in Asia—a productive mix as it turns out. In the other game, all eight plants were sited in North America, which set off brutal head-to-head competition. The teams in the second game all earned substandard profits, because they were all competing viciously in the North American home market, with aggressive price cuts the weapon of choice. The teams playing the other game, where there was diversity in siting choices, produced cumulative profits that were twice as high as the profits the teams in the other game achieved.
In the discussion that followed, the teams in the game that generated the lower profits realized that they hadn’t even considered the competitive consequences of their siting choices. Indeed, they hadn’t considered that the competition would erode their profits—they only realized that their profits were less than optimal when they learned of the cumulative profits earned by the teams in the other game. Only when they were presented with the dramatic and unfavorable difference in outcome were they motivated to explore their thinking and the actions that were a product of that thinking. And only at that point did they realize that their own results were profoundly dependent on the decisions the other players made. It was a painful lesson in the need to be mindful of complexity, and it started them down the experiential path of seeing themselves as capable of wading into complexity. All the same, as one of the students remarked, it was a “good thing we weren’t playing with real money!”
6. I Give Myself Time to Create a Better Model
Perhaps the single toughest aspect of stance to teach is the element of patience. On this front I have my mother’s wise admonition ringing in my ears. Every time she attempted to rein in my impatience—and she did so frequently—she would assert, “Patience is a virtue, seldom found in women—never found in men!”
The only way students learn a patient stance is to experience the unsatisfactory results of not giving themselves enough time. After the HR executive group and the MBA students in the business simulation game systematically reflected on their own thinking, did they suddenly acquire the ability to wade into complexity fearlessly and allow themselves the time to create a better model? Hardly. But the exercises helped lay the foundation for a stance more like that of an integrative thinker. By exploring their own thinking, they got a taste of complexity. And by understanding the flawed thinking behind the unsatisfactory outcomes they produced, they discovered why it was worth the mental and emotional effort required to accept complexity and take time to forge a creative resolution.
C H A P T E R7
A Leap of the Mind
How Integrative Thinkers Connect the Dots
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
—Archimedes
ACTUARIES JOKE that they’re like accountants, but without the sizzling personality. And at first blush, actuary Taddy Blecher, cofounder of CIDA City Campus, an innovative South African university, seems to fit the stereotype. The gold medal winner in 1990 as the top actuarial science student in the country, he is small and slight and wears the obligatory thick-lensed spectacles. His rumpled clothes and running shoes speak volumes about his fashion sense.
But the stereotype crumbles as soon as he opens his mouth:
When people say “you can’t do it,” and all the reasons why, we set out to prove that you can, in fact. You can take kids out of the gutter, you can take people off the streets who’ve had absolutely no opportunities, who come from broken homes, and you can help those people live amazing lives and actually become the fabric of a new society.
These things sound so serious, they sound so impossible to solve. They are so solvable. They are so solvable! There are infinite numbers of ways that we can create wealth in sub-Saharan Africa. There are so many jobs that could be filled.1
Audiences give this actuary-turned-social entrepreneur their rapt attention when he speaks, and they feel a sense of loss when the words stop. Like souls at a revival meeting presenting themselves to be saved, listeners walk up to him after his talks to volunteer to work for the university, officially known as Community and Individual Development Agency City Campus. So maybe Blecher has a bit too much charisma to fit neatly into the actuarial stereotype.
Building Something from Nothing
Like the other integrative thinkers we’ve met, Blecher faced a crisis when his life’s work presented him with a set of unacceptable trade-offs. His dilemma concerned the state of education available for the huge population of young blacks in South Africa in 1999. The end of apartheid opened new political opportunities to these young people, but they enjoyed little in the way of economic opportunity. Unemployment among black youth was more than 40 percent, and they had few opportunities to upgrade their education—a serious problem in a country where only 6 percent of the population had a university education at all.
Blecher wanted to offer his young compatriots a chance at an education and a better life. He had two obvious options for attacking the problem: traditional “contact” education or the newer option of distance education. “Both of them have got fantastic advantages,” Blecher says, “but they’ve also got very, very real disadvantages in sub-Saharan Africa.” Traditional education was problematic because it had been scaled to the white minority, which traditionally was the only segment of the population eligible to attend university. Of the country’s 4.4 million whites (9 percent of a total population of 47 million), 65 percent had a high school education. Only 14 percent of blacks, who made up 75 percent of the population, had an equivalent level of education.
The existing educational infrastructure lacked the capacity to absorb the backlog of young blacks previously denied education. 2 And that was before any considerations of cost. A university education cost more than $5,000 year, a sum far beyond the reach of most black families and more than the government could afford on a scale large enough to make a real difference.
As for distance education, it worked fine in highly developed countries with well-established educational and communications infrastructures. Motivated and well-prepared students with strong social networks could thrive without hands-on guidance from professors. But apartheid had robbed South Africa’s black students of a solid educational foundation. They had little in the way of a support network and few role models, because young blacks were almost always the first in their families to go on to post-secondary education. “One’s really got to create some sort of third model,” Blecher decided.
Blecher set out to bring that third model into being, using technology, ingenuity, and sheer improvisational élan to provide to young blacks the support, coaching, and discipline that contact education had traditionally given young South African whites. His first order of business was to attack the educational cost structure. Blecher, with his profoundly optimistic stance, didn’t view his lack of financial resources as a serious impediment. “It’s not that we need more financial resources,” he told himself, “we just need to think differently and more creatively and more intelligently, to create everything out of nothing.”
The campus building itself, the former downtown Johannesburg headquarters of Investec bank, typifies Blecher’s something-from-nothing approach. It was donated to CIDA because its owner deemed it worthless after most tenants fled the violence and urban decay of downtown Johannesburg. 3
Students themselves help keep costs low. They’re in class eight to nine hours a day, and in addition, they cook, clean, and do the university’s maintenance and paperwork—in the process learning skills they can apply in their careers. Architecture students help construct the facilities. Agriculture students grow food for the dining hall. Tourism students run a hotel. Classes, which focus exclusively on business and entrepreneurship, are taught pro bono by local executives, and corporations donate computers, books, and equipment.
Such exercises in creative frugality have brought the annua
l cost of a CIDA education down to about $1,000 per student, a level at which corporations and individual donors can afford to sponsor students. Resources are still scarce, but even the most severe shortages can be overcome by Blecher’s boundless ability to make something from nothing. On CIDA’s opening day in 1999, Blecher still hadn’t received the computers a donor had promised. No matter. He handed each student a photocopy of a keyboard, and they used the photocopies for typing lessons. When the computers finally showed up months later, students were already typing proficiently.
The entire university community is enlisted to weave a social support network out of nothing. Students are required to “adopt” thirty students each from their former high schools and help prepare them for attending CIDA. Within five years after graduation, each graduate is expected to fund a scholarship for one CIDA student. By Blecher’s estimate, such outreach efforts have touched six hundred thousand South African youths since the school’s founding in 1999.
With only fifteen hundred full-time four-year students, plus an equal number in shorter vocational courses, CIDA is still small. But it has already met Blecher’s strategic goal, which he said was to “build a university and then build a whole economy around it and a community around it. It’s completely self-sustaining and self-generating because it’s generating its own economic activity.” And CIDA is well on its way to fulfilling the mission statement Blecher crafted as he imagined what a new-model university could be.
“CIDA’s vision,” the statement reads, “is to create an advanced, financially focused, state-of-the-art educational site with worldwide acclaim, which produces significant results in every area including: academic, personal development, alumni success, innovation, cost-effectiveness, speed of learning, technology-enriched learning, sport and culture, and societal transformation.”
Blecher’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed. CIDA has won the 2002 Age of Innovation grand prize for the most innovative organization in South Africa, and Blecher has been honored with the World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow Award (2002) and the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2006). But in conversation with him, I sense that the recognition is valuable to him only because it helps spread his vision of an educational system that is rooted in the realities of sub-Saharan Africa.
By now, you can probably detect in Blecher’s stance the tell-tale signs of an integrative thinker. Existing models are to his mind just models, each with something useful to offer. But there’s a better model just around the corner, and Blecher believes he can find it. The search will carry him deep into complexity and will require him to wait patiently for a better answer to take shape. But he’s confident he’ll find the answer.
In this chapter, we inquire into the tools Blecher used to create a new model of post-secondary education. I argue he used two of the three most powerful tools at the disposal of integrative thinkers—generative reasoning and causal modeling. I also discuss a third tool, assertive inquiry, and offer aspiring integrative thinkers a few lessons along the way.
Generative Reasoning
The first of the three tools is generative reasoning, a form of reasoning that inquires into what might be rather than what is. Generative reasoning helps build a framework for creative resolutions that is sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of the real world.
Most of us were never taught generative reasoning. Western education emphasizes declarative reasoning, which, as the term suggests, is a cognitive tool for determining the truth or falsity of a given proposition. It operates through deductive and inductive logic, which dominate both education and discourse in the world of business.
Deductive logic—the logic of what should be—is the first mode of reasoning most of us were taught. It entails establishing a frame-work and then applying the framework to a problem. In biology class, we would have learned that mammals are vertebrates with warm blood that procreate via live birth. When the teacher asked us if bears were mammals, we used deductive logic to test the veracity of the proposition. Do bears come into the world via live births? Check. And they have warm blood? Check. Both conditions are satisfied, ergo, we can declare that bears are mammals.
Now let’s use deductive logic to test the proposition that snakes are mammals. Live births? No, snakes lay eggs. Are they warm-blooded? No. Ergo, snakes are not mammals. What about birds? They fit one part of the pattern, being warm-blooded, but not another, because they lay eggs. Thus, birds are not mammals.
The next type of logic most of us learned is inductive—the logic of what is operative—which infers general rules from empirical observation and draws conclusions about what is and isn’t true. When we see the sun rising in the east every morning, while never coming up in the west, we establish from a preponderance of data that the sun always rises in the east. That’s induction. The technique of market research that many of us learned in business school is another application of inductive reasoning. If we ask questions of a statistically significant sample of consumers, we can draw conclusions from the preponderance of data to understand what they want.
Most of us learned to use ever more sophisticated techniques of deductive and inductive logic as we progressed through formal education, all in service of declarative reasoning—the ability to declare a proposition to be true or false. We received little or no instruction in an equally useful form of reasoning known as modal reasoning. It uses logic to inquire into what could possibly be true. Integrative thinkers reason about what might be—about models that don’t yet exist—to generate a creative resolution.
Modal reasoning makes use of deductive and inductive logic, but it also requires a third form of logic, dubbed abductive logic by Charles Sanders Peirce. He hit on the concept to help him explain the logic that went into what he called “inventive construction of theories.” 4 To Peirce, neither deductive nor inductive logic satisfactorily explained how entirely new models came into being. Deductive logic needed a preexisting theory or model on which to base its reasoning. Inductive logic sought to draw inferences from repeated experiences or observations. But invention, Peirce saw, required a logic for making “leaps with your mind.”
In essence, abductive logic seeks the best explanation—that is, it attempts to create the best model—in response to novel or interesting data that doesn’t fit an extant model. Deductive or inductive logic might prove such a model true or untrue over time, but in the interim, abductive logic generates the best explanation of the data. That’s why I call the process of using abductive logic “generative reasoning.” This process inquires after what might be, and thus is modal in intent. It employs abductive logic to leap beyond the available data to generate a new model.
Business is fertile ground for abductive logic. Business managers, management theorist Jim March and his colleagues observe, often have only a handful of data points on which to make highly consequential decisions. March posits a business with a poor record of making major marketable discoveries. It wants to increase the return on its innovation investment. But because the firm has a scant history of innovation, the firm’s managers don’t have nearly enough data points to determine inductively the best model for innovation. And without an established innovation model, it can’t use deduction to determine the soundness of a given course. 5 This is just the sort of routine business problem that cries out for the inventive leaps of generative reasoning.
Modal reasoning and abductive logic are not completely un-taught in the West. Some design schools teach students to investigate users’ needs that have gone unrecognized and invent designs to suit those needs. But nearly all the students learning business or other left-brain subjects (which is to say, highly rational, quantitative, and methodical disciplines) have had no educational exposure to generative reasoning at all.
Where many of their colleagues find generative reasoning to be suspect, integrative thinkers implicitly accept that generative reasoning is both conceptually legitimate and, practically speaking, the only tool suited to the job of fashioni
ng a creative resolution. Generative reasoning facilitates the trial and error that is integral to creative resolution. As integrative thinkers put their resolution through multiple prototypes and iterations, they use generative reasoning—whose raw material, remember, is what does not yet exist—to work back down from resolution to architecture to causality to salience. Large organizations may not recognize generative reasoning as a legitimate mode of inquiry, but they depend on it for lasting competitive advantage.
Much of Blecher’s reasoning about CIDA can be best described as generative. Like any observer, he saw that an overwhelming majority of South African blacks were poor, uneducated, and dispirited. But he also saw, as others did not, that young Africans could flourish in the right conditions. Given a helping hand, many escaped their seemingly hopeless circumstances, then extended a hand back to help their communities and make a positive difference in South African society. He saw that other low-income countries such as India and China had made rapid social and economic progress, and he could see no reason why the same couldn’t happen in Africa. He had seen South African entrepreneurs create wealth and opportunity where it hadn’t existed before. And as befits an integrative thinker, Blecher used abductive reasoning to discover a pattern among these disparate data points.
“It’s not through handouts and giving to the poor that poverty is ultimately changed,” he concluded. “It’s really through teaching people how to create wealth and, through entrepreneurship, really helping people help themselves. What we’re doing is not just building a university; what we really have to do is help people reconstruct a reason to live.”
The Opposable Mind Page 13