The Opposable Mind

by Roger L. Martin

  Those experiences showed Lafley that he could successfully take the risks that come with originality. When he took over as CEO in 2000, his confidence in his originality was great enough that he was comfortable making some of the boldest moves in P&G’s history, including the Connect & Develop initiative and the Gillette acquisition. His experiences with originality, stretching all the way back to the ceramic elephants, gave him the courage and confidence to take big risks in search of even bigger rewards.

  The Most Powerful Experiences: Mastery Combined with Originality

  Mastery and originality need each other to grow. With a wealth of experiences behind him, Lafley can respond quickly when either mastery or originality are called for. In fact, his ability to toggle rapidly between modes sometimes gives others the impression that he has multiple personalities. There’s the precise, controlled, expert data-cruncher, working his way methodically through consumer surveys to reach a decision that seems completely data-driven. In the next moment, he can make another decision on what appears to be pure intuition. In fact, as much art as science likely went into the data-driven decision, and as much rigorous analysis as intuition went into the decision that appeared to come straight from the gut. At this stage in his career, most of Lafley’s decisions draw on the complementary power of mastery and originality.

  Using experiences to drive a combination of mastery and originality is characteristic of integrative thinkers. Moses Znaimer believes that carefully controlling and organizing Citytv’s spending is an important part of his job as CEO. It’s a skill acquired through years of experience. At the same time, Znaimer has been a pioneer of what he calls “radical broadcasting.” The word “visionary” is overused in business, but Znaimer’s originality has an element of the visionary to it. “Entrepreneurs like me have a necessary myopia,” he says. “We are seized by an idea, compelled, obsessed by it. I don’t ask where it all comes from. I just wake up and know what I want to do.” Znaimer recognizes the need for the difficult combination of mastery and originality.3

  Similarly, educator Gerry Mabin shows the ability to manage the tension between mastery and originality in the running of The Mabin School, the innovative institution she founded in Toronto. Her deep expertise in childhood education and learning gave her a strong ability to predict the development of each student based on the school’s pedagogical approach. Every element of the school was designed with the express intent of opening a specific learning pathway for her students. At the same time, her pedagogical approach made liberal use of the surprise and spontaneity the students themselves created. In fact, it’s fair to say the students’ surprises drove the learning process. “You move along with them,” Mabin says; “they pull you along.”4

  A famous piece of Mabin School lore concerns a student trip to a museum about ten blocks from the school. The students were all ready to leave for the museum when a flash downpour delayed their departure. When the downpour stopped, the children began walking with their teacher down a steep hill leading to the museum. Halfway there, the children became engrossed by the way the water from the downpour foamed and swirled into the storm sewers along the road. The teacher, rather than insist that the children stick to the plan and march to the museum, created an impromptu lesson on the flowing water. That spontaneous learning experience is now a school legend, and no student who was part of that excursion regrets never making to it to the museum.

  As Lafley, Znaimer, and Mabin illustrate, the great ones utilize their experiences to build and deepen their mastery while maintaining and expressing their originality. Average leaders do one or the other. Some deepen their mastery over time but never learn to trust their ability to express originality. They keep the proverbial trains running but will never invent the future. “Watch out,” warns Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School, “because our natural tendencies, the way we are hardwired, will lead us to favor mastery over originality, will lead us to keep going in the direction we are going and try to improve marginally around the edges on what we’re already doing. In so doing, we utterly miss opportunities to make a big difference, something brand new and exciting.”5

  Others express their originality but do not develop their mastery. They are sought out as “idea people” but aren’t trusted to run organizations of size and endurance because they can’t or won’t cultivate the multiple masteries that leadership of such entities demands.

  Mastery without originality becomes rote. The master who never tries to think in novel ways keeps seeing the same points of salience, the same causal relationships, and the same problem architecture. Such mastery will produce the same kind of resolution every time, even if the context demands something different. Mastery without originality becomes a cul-de-sac.

  By the same token, originality without mastery is flaky if not entirely random. Mastery is required to distinguish between salient and unrelated features, to understand what causal relationships are in play, and how to analyze a complex problem. Without such mastery, the creative resolution is likely to be a random guess. It might succeed once, but there’s little chance of repeated and consistent success. Perhaps the most famous example of mastery enabling originality is Pablo Picasso. His cubist revolution may lead those who don’t know of his earlier work to think of him as being entirely original, but those familiar with his pre-cubist work know him as master of traditional painting. His mastery enabled him to generate a truly original breakthrough in modern art.

  At its core, integrative thinking requires the integration of mastery and originality. Without mastery there won’t be a useful salience, causality, or architecture. Without originality, there will be no creative resolution. Without creative resolution, there will be no enhancement of mastery, and when mastery stagnates, so does originality. Mastery is an enabling condition for originality, which in turn, is a generative condition for mastery. The modes are interdependent.

  Personal Knowledge as a System

  It’s hard to overemphasize how much stance, tools, and experience reinforce each other. Each time you use generative reasoning, causal modeling, and assertive inquiry to construct a creative resolution, you deepen your understanding of the tools used to produce the constructive outcome and reinforce the belief that you are capable of forging creative resolutions.

  You also improve the odds that your next attempt to fashion a creative resolution will succeed, because you bring a greater level of skill to the task at hand. Success, in turn, will reinforce your optimistic stance and your confidence in your skills. Integrative thinkers continually gain experiences that deepen their mastery and make them more confident they can handle complexity as they approach a creative resolution.

  For some, the positive spiral starts young. In the early days of the Institute for OneWorld Health, Victoria Hale got to be known among her colleagues as Dr. Why Not. “People would say to me, ‘Oh that will never work,’” she remembers. “And my response to them would be, ‘Why not?’” That’s not far at all from her stance as a child, when she questioned everything she was taught, preferring to decide for herself what she believed. “Who says this is the answer?” was a characteristic question of hers.6

  In due course, she figured out that it was rarely productive to blurt out her thoughts in that particular form. But though she grew more tactful, her stance didn’t change. Repeated practice in the creative resolution of tensions reinforced her view that the existing models aren’t the only ones, motivated her to acquire tools that made the job of model creation easier, and honed the sensitivities and skills she needed to find the creative resolutions she sought.

  Repetition also boosted her confidence. She knew that what she tried to do on a daily basis was difficult; but at the same time, she knew from long experience that it could be done. She had used her opposable mind so often that, as Thomas C. Chamberlin predicted, she developed her thinking pattern as an unconscious habit.

  Hale was by no means alone among the integrative thinkers I interviewed. Almost to a
person, they were confident but not cocky. They had acquired faith in the deep sensitivities and skills they had accumulated over years of experience, and with those skills came a stance infused with calm optimism.

  Advancing Experiential Knowledge

  None of us can go back to our childhood to practice creating new models in the face of existing ones. But we can benefit greatly from experiences going forward. To do so, we need to think about our own thinking as described in chapter 6. Only if we record our predictions in some fashion will we be able to audit the actual outcome against our expectations and learn from our experiences.

  A. G. Lafley is highly disciplined about exploring his own thinking. He always wants to know “what would we have to believe” for this conclusion to be robust, just as we learned in chapter 6 to ask what would have to be true for a particular model to be valid.7

  By asking his question in advance, Lafley creates a logical audit trail for his decision. If the decision doesn’t produce the desired outcome, he can review what had to be true for the decision to be a sound one and figure out what he got wrong or what salient data he overlooked. Like Bob Young getting a little better every day, he builds what he learned from experience into his next model, becoming slightly more skilled each time.

  To ensure that students and executives at Rotman’s integrative thinking courses maximize the learning benefit of their experiences, we teach them to audit and record the logic of their own decisions, and compare the results to the outcomes they predicted. If the results are consistent with their predictions, the validity of their tools and stance is reinforced, building confidence for the next decision cycle. If the results are inconsistent, class participants can ask themselves: what changes in the tools used or the guiding stance could have produced a better outcome? With a relatively small amount of practice, participants can become proficient in reverse engineering their decisions and auditing the results.

  The Personal Knowledge System of the Integrative Thinker

  Over the course of this book, we have mapped the typical features of the integrative thinker’s personal knowledge system—her stance, tools, and experiences. They are graphically depicted in figure 8-1.

  With this combination of stance, tools, and experiences, integrative thinkers grow continually more proficient at generating creative resolutions. This personal knowledge system can help you become more proficient, too. But you will need patience and reflection as you learn.

  With respect to patience, to be a truly inspired integrative thinker, you need a wealth of experiences to hone your sensitivities and skills. For most, those sensitivities and skills will take years if not decades to build—“time takes time,” as they say in twelve-step groups. By adopting the six attributes of the stance, you can give time a hand, as it were, by creating a structure that will help you develop the tools you will need and direct you toward experiences that build sensitivities and skills.

  FIGURE 8-1

  As for reflection, it speeds you along the path to integrative thinking by maximizing what you learn from each new experience. Our tendency is to think and do rather than think about how we think. The late, great Peter Drucker commented on this point in a speech in 1965:

  One always finds that the most obvious, the simplest, the clearest conclusion has not been drawn except by a very small fraction of the practitioners. One always finds that the obvious is not seen at all. Perhaps this is simply saying that we never see the obvious as long as we take it for granted.8

  In the spirit of Drucker’s insight, this book has attempted to chronicle the obvious that has been taken for granted. The obvious is that highly successful managerial leaders think differently than the great mass of their counterparts. The integrative thinking they employ is not rocket science; it is sensible and practical thinking. But such thinking requires the mastery and originality that can only come from experience. Reflection, which defeats the tendency to take the obvious for granted, is what gives experience value. When you refuse to take your thinking for granted, you give yourself the best opportunity to enhance and utilize your opposable mind to its fullest.

  Good luck as you build your personal knowledge system, dear reader, and learn the art and science of integrative thinking. Work hard, think hard, and don’t dawdle. The world needs you.

  Notes

  Chapter 1

  1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1945).

  2. Michael Lee-Chin, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, February 28, 2002.

  3. Forbes 2006 List of Billionaires. Lee-Chin ranked 365 with $2.1 billion net worth, see http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/7TE8.html.

  4. All monetary references in the book converted to and denominated in U.S. dollars except those contained within the quotes of a speaker.

  5. Andrew Willis, “AIC’s Disadvantage: No Street Friends,” Globe and Mail, September 2, 1999.

  6. Thomas C. Chamberlin, “The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses,” Science XV, no. 366 (February 7, 1890): 93.

  7. Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward an Extreme Fiction,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 380.

  8. A. G. Lafley, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, November 21, 2005.

  9. Bob Young, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, September 23 and October 6, 2005.

  10. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Execution:The Discipline of Getting Things Done (New York: Crown Business, 2002); Jim Collins, Good to Great:Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . And Others Don’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Jack Welch, Jack: Straight from the Gut (New York: Warner Business, 2001).

  11. Bossidy and Charan, Execution, 22.

  12. Collins, Good to Great, 37

  13. Chamberlin, Science, 94.

  Chapter 2

  1. A. G. Lafley, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, November 21, 2005.

  2. Isadore Sharp, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, April 11, 2002.

  3. Kevin Libin, “Four Seasons Hotels,” Canadian Business, June 23, 2003, 48.

  4. Roger Hallowell, “Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts,” Case 9-800-385 (Boston: Harvard Business School, 2000).

  5. Fortune, “Best Companies to Work For” annual lists, 1998–2006.

  6. The concept of an “activity system” is drawn from Michael Porter, “What Is Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1996, 61–70.

  Chapter 3

  1. Craig Wynett, in discussion with author at Proctor & Gamble, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 18, 2006.

  2. Jordan Peterson, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, November 24, 2004.

  3. The concepts behind this example draw heavily on a lifetime of work by Chris Argyris, for example as discussed in Chris Argyris, Overcoming Organizational Defenses (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1990).

  4. John Sterman, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, March 23, 2003.

  5. Jack Neff, “Does P&G Still Matter?” Advertising Age, July 25, 2000.

  6. A. G. Lafley, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, November 21, 2005.

  7. See http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/news_events/alumni_achievement /2004_lafley.html.

  8. Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab, “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter & Gamble’s New Model for Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, March 2006, 58–66.

  9. Bob Young, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, September 23 and October 6, 2003.

  10. Piers Handling, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, March 7, 2002.

  11. Brenda Bouw, “25 Years of Toronto’s Film Festival,” The National Post, May 8, 2000.

  12. Liam Lacey, “TIFF/Outpacing Sundance, Passing Cannes,” Globe and Mail, September 3, 2005.

  13. Gina McIntyre, “Buzz Bin,” Hollywood Reporter, September 6–12, 2005.

  14. A. G. Lafley, in discussion with auth
or at the Rotman School, Toronto, November 21, 2005.

  Chapter 4

  1. See http://www.medaloffreedom.com/MarthaGraham.htm; http:// www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/graham.html.

  2. Subsequent facts concerning Martha Graham from http://www.kennedy-center.org/honors/history/honoree/graham.html; http://www.biography.com/search/article. do?id=9317723.

  3. Daniel Levinthal and James March, “The Myopia of Learning,” Strategic Management Journal, 14 (Special Issue, Winter 1993): 95–112.

  4. Peter Drucker, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, June 12, 2002.

  5. Hilary Austen, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, March 25, 2002.

  6. F. C. Kohli, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, October 5, 2006.

  7. Bruce Mau, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, November 2, 2004.

  8. Tim Brown, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, January 15, 2004.

  9. Moses Znaimer, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, April 10, 2002.

  Chapter 5

  1. I am indebted to Hilary Austen Johnson for the thinking behind the stance, tools, and experiences framework. I became familiar with her thinking on personal knowledge systems during the writing of her dissertation at Stanford University; this chapter has strong roots in that work. For those wanting to read more of her work, see Hilary Austen Johnson, “Artistry for the Strategist,” Journal of Business Strategy, vol. 28, issue 4 (2007): 13–21.

  2. Bob Young, in discussion with author at the Rotman School, Toronto, September 23, October 6, 7, 27, and 28, December 1 and 2, 2003.