innovation

We look for lessons in the actions of great leaders. But we should look at what goes on in their heads, particularly the way they creatively build on the tensions
Roger Martin

We are drawn to the stories of effective leaders in action. Their decisiveness invigorates us. The events that unfold from their bold moves, often culminating in successful outcomes, make for gripping narratives. Perhaps most important, we turn to accounts of their deeds for lessons that we can apply in our own careers. Books like Jack: Straight from the Gut and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done are compelling in part because they implicitly promise that we can achieve the success of a Jack Welch or a Larry Bossidy – if only we learn to emulate his actions.

But this focus on what a leader does is misplaced. That's because moves that work in one context often make little sense in another, even at the same company or within the experience of a single leader. Recall that Jack Welch, early in his career at General Electric, insisted that each of GE's businesses be number one or number two in market share in its industry; years later he insisted that those same businesses define their markets so that their share was no greater than ten per cent, thereby forcing managers to look for opportunities beyond the confines of a narrowly conceived market.

So where do we look for lessons? A more productive, though more difficult, approach is to focus on how a leader thinks – that is, to examine the antecedent of doing, or the ways in which leaders' cognitive processes produce their actions.

Most successful leaders share a somewhat unusual trait: the predisposition and capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they're able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both. This process of consideration and synthesis can be termed integrative thinking. It is this discipline – not superior strategy or faultless execution – that is a defining characteristic of most exceptional businesses and the people who run them.

Opposable thumb and mind
Human beings are distinguished from nearly every other creature by a physical feature: the opposable thumb. Thanks to the tension that we can create by opposing the thumb and fingers, we can do marvellous things – write, thread a needle, guide a catheter through an artery. Although evolution provided human beings with this potential advantage, it would have gone to waste if our species, the homo sapiens, had not exercised it in ever more sophisticated ways. Without exploring the possibilities of opposition, we wouldn't have developed either its physical properties or the cognition that accompanies and animates it.

Analogously, we were born with opposable minds, which allow us to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive, almost dialectic tension. We can use that tension to think our way toward new, superior ideas. Were we able to hold only one thought or idea in our heads at a time, we wouldn't have access to the insights that the opposable mind can produce.

Unfortunately, because people don't exercise this capability much, great integrative thinkers are fairly rare. Why is this potentially powerful but generally latent tool used so infrequently and to less than full advantage? Because putting it to work makes us anxious. Most of us avoid complexity and ambiguity and seek out the comfort of simplicity and clarity. To cope with the dizzying complexity of the world around us, we simplify where we can. We crave the certainty of choosing between well-defined alternatives and the closure that comes when a decision has been made.

For those reasons, we often don't know what to do with fundamentally opposing and seemingly incommensurable models. Our first impulse is usually to determine which of the two models is ‘right’ and, by the process of elimination, which is ‘wrong’. We may even take sides and try to prove that our chosen model is better than the other one. But in rejecting one model out of hand, we miss out on all the value that we could have realised by considering the opposing two at the same time and finding in the tension clues to a superior model. By forcing a choice between the two, we disengage the opposable mind before it can seek a creative resolution.

Stages of decision making
So what does the process of integrative thinking look like? How do integrative thinkers consider their options in a way that leads to new possibilities? They work through four related but distinct stages. The steps themselves aren't particular to integrative thinking. Everyone goes through them while thinking through a decision. What is distinctive about integrative thinkers is how they approach the steps.

Determining salience
The first step is figuring out which factors to take into account. The conventional approach is to discard as many as possible – or not even to consider some of them in the first place. In order to reduce our exposure to uncomfortable complexity, we filter out salient features when considering an issue.

We also do this because of how most organisations are structured. Each functional specialty has its own narrow view of what merits consideration. Finance departments haven't traditionally regarded emotional factors as salient. Similarly, departments concerned with organisational behaviour have often ignored quantitative questions. Managers pressure employees to limit their view of what's salient to match the department's doctrine, leaving people with only a subset of the factors to which they might otherwise have productively paid attention.

When our decisions turn out badly, we often recognise after the fact that we have failed to consider factors that are significant to those outside the immediate reach of our jobs or functional specialties. The integrative thinker, by contrast, actively seeks less obvious but potentially relevant factors. Of course, more salient features make for a messier problem, but integrative thinkers don't mind the mess. In fact, they embrace it, because it assures them that they haven't dismissed anything that may illuminate the problem as a whole. They welcome complexity, because that's where the best answers come from. They are confident that they'll find their way through it and emerge on the other side with a clear resolution.

In the second step of decision making, you analyse how the numerous salient factors relate to one another. Conventional thinkers tend to take the same narrow view of causality that they do of salience. The simplest type of all is a straight-line causal relationship. It's no accident that linear regression is the business world's preferred tool for establishing relationships between variables. Other tools are available, of course, but most managers shun them because they're harder to use.

When we make bad decisions, sometimes it is because we got the causal links between salient features wrong. We may have been right about the direction of a relationship but wrong about the magnitude. "I thought that our costs would decrease much faster than they actually did as our scale grew." Or we may have gotten the direction of a relationship wrong. "I thought that our capacity to serve clients would increase when we hired a new batch of consultants, but it actually shrank, because the experienced consultants had to spend a huge amount of their time training the new ones and fixing their rookie mistakes."

The integrative thinker isn't afraid to question the validity of apparently obvious links or to consider multidirectional and nonlinear relationships. So, for example, rather than simply thinking, "That competitor's price-cutting is hurting our bottom line," the integrative thinker may conclude, "Our product introduction really upset our rivals. Now they're cutting prices in response, and our profitability is suffering."

The decision architecture
With a good handle on the causal relationships between salient features, you are ready to turn to the decision itself. But which decision? Even the simple question of whether to go to a movie tonight involves deciding, at the very least, which movie to see, which theatre to go to, and which showing to attend. The order in which you make these decisions will affect the outcome. For example, you may not be able to see your preferred movie if you've already decided you need to be back in time to relieve a babysitter who has plans for later in the evening. When you're trying to invent a new business model, the number of decision-making variables explodes. And with that comes the impulse not only to establish a strict sequence in which issues will be considered but also to dole out pieces of a decision so that various parties can work on them separately.

Integrative thinkers don't break down a problem into independent pieces and work on them separately or in a certain order. They see the entire architecture of the problem – how the various parts of it fit together, how one decision will affect another. Just as important, they hold all of those pieces suspended in their minds at once. They don't parcel out the elements for others to work on piecemeal or let one element temporarily drop out of sight, only to be taken up again for consideration after everything else has been decided.

Achieving resolution
All of these stages – determining what is salient, analysing the causal relationships between the salient factors, examining the architecture of the problem – lead to an outcome. Too often, we accept an unpleasant trade-off with relatively little complaint, since it appears to be the best alternative. That's because by the time we have reached this stage, our desire for simplicity has led us to ignore opportunities in the previous three steps to discover interesting and novel ways around the trade-off. Instead of rebelling against the meagre and unattractive alternatives, instead of refusing to settle for the best available bad choice, the conventional thinker shrugs and asks, "What else could we have done?"

A leader who embraces holistic rather than segmented thinking can creatively resolve the tensions that launched the decision-making process. The actions associated with the search for such resolution-creating delays, sending teams back to examine things more deeply, generating new options at the 11the hour – can appear irresolute from the outside. Indeed, the integrative thinker may even be dissatisfied with the fresh batch of options he's come up with, in which case he may go back and start over. When a satisfactory outcome does emerge, though, it is inevitably due to the leader's refusal to accept trade-offs and conventional options.

The consequences of integrative thinking and conventional thinking couldn't be more distinct. Integrative thinking generates options and new solutions. Conventional thinking glosses over potential solutions and fosters the illusion that creative solutions don't actually exist. With integrative thinking, aspirations rise over time. With conventional thinking, they wear away with every apparent reinforcement of the lesson that life is about accepting unattractive trade-offs. Fundamentally, the conventional thinker prefers to accept the world just as it is, whereas the integrative thinker welcomes the challenge of shaping the world for the better.

Given the benefits of integrative thinking, you have to ask, "If I'm not an integrative thinker, can I learn to be one?" In F Scott Fitzgerald's view, only people with "first-rate intelligence" can continue to function while holding two opposing ideas in their heads. But I refuse to believe that the ability to use our opposable minds is a gift reserved for a small minority of people. I prefer the view suggested by Thomas C. Chamberlin, a nineteenth-century American geologist and former president of the University of Wisconsin. More than 100 years ago, Chamberlin wrote an article in Science magazine proposing the idea of ‘multiple working hypotheses’ as an improvement over the most commonly employed scientific method of the time: testing the validity of a single hypothesis through trial and error. While acknowledging the cognitive challenges posed by such an approach, Chamberlin wrote that it "develops a habit of thought analogous to the method itself, which may be designated a habit of parallel or complex thought. Instead of a simple succession of thoughts in linear order...the mind appears to become possessed of the power of simultaneous vision from different standpoints."

Similarly, I believe that integrative thinking is a ‘habit of thought’ that all of us can consciously develop to arrive at solutions that would otherwise not be evident. First, there needs to be greater general awareness of integrative thinking as a concept. Then, over time, we can teach it in our business schools-an endeavour that colleagues and I are currently working on. At some point, integrative thinking will no longer be just a tacit skill in the heads of a select few.