The Opposable Mind:How Successful Leader Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin. One of the best business books I have ever read. The book is designed to help us ask a much better question - “What should I think?” and not “What should I do?”.
The leaders I have studied share at least one trait, aside from their talent for innovation and long-term business success. They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.
We were born with an opposable mind we can use to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension. We can use that tension to think our way through to a new and superior idea. 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. And just as we can develop and refine the skill with which we employ our opposable thumbs to perform tasks that once seemed impossible. I’m convinced we can also, with patient practice, develop the ability to use our opposable minds to unlock solutions to problems that seem to resist every effort to solve them.
Four differences between integrative and conventional thinkers:
Integrative thinkers are a varied lot but their stances have in common six key features. Three concern the world around them; three concern their role in it:
“There’s an infinite wealth of information in this room, yet when you come in and you process it, you only see those things that directly serve your purposes. The things you don’t know, and the territories you don’t know how to maneuver in, are everywhere.”
The leaders I have studied share at least one trait, aside from their talent for innovation and long-term business success. They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea.
We were born with an opposable mind we can use to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension. We can use that tension to think our way through to a new and superior idea. 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. And just as we can develop and refine the skill with which we employ our opposable thumbs to perform tasks that once seemed impossible. I’m convinced we can also, with patient practice, develop the ability to use our opposable minds to unlock solutions to problems that seem to resist every effort to solve them.
Four differences between integrative and conventional thinkers:
- Integrative thinkers don’t mind the mess. In fact, they welcome it, because the mess assures them that they haven’t edited out features necessary to the contemplation of the problem as a whole. They welcome complexity because they know the best answers arise from complexity.
- Integrative thinkers don’t flinch from considering multidirectional and nonlinear causal relationships. Simple, unidirectional relationships are easier to hold in the mind, but they don’t generate more satisfactory resolutions.
- Integrative thinkers don’t break a problem into independent pieces and work on each piece separately. They keep the entire problem firmly in mind while working on its individual parts.
- Integrative thinker will always search for creative resolution of tensions, rather than accept unpleasant tradeoffs. The behaviors associated with such a search—delays, sending teams back to examine things more deeply, generating new options at the eleventh hour—can appear irresolute from the outside, but the results are choices that could only have been generated by an integrative thinker who won’t settle for trade-offs and conventional options.
Integrative thinkers are a varied lot but their stances have in common six key features. Three concern the world around them; three concern their role in it:
- They believe that whatever models exist at the present moment do not represent reality; they are simply the best or only constructions yet made.
- They believe that conflicting models, styles, and approaches to problems are to be leveraged, not feared.
- They believe that better models exist that are not yet seen.
- They believe that not only does a better model exist, but that they are capable of bringing that better model from abstract hypothesis to concrete reality.
- They are comfortable wading into complexity to ferret out a new and better model, confident they will emerge on the other side with the resolution they seek.
- They give themselves the time to create a better model.
“There’s an infinite wealth of information in this room, yet when you come in and you process it, you only see those things that directly serve your purposes. The things you don’t know, and the territories you don’t know how to maneuver in, are everywhere.”
- Cognitive psychology professor Jordan Peterson
And finally some words of wisdom from the master himself:
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