Book Review: The Opposable Mind
Trade off’s are an unpleasant but unavoidable part of decision making process for the most of us. Trade offs like cost vs quality, local vs global, volume vs margins are all known business conundrums and we are told that, we must pick one or the other and live with our choice. The Opposable Mind, questions this rhetoric of choosing one over the other and proposes a different solution. Integrative thinking, as the author puts it, is the process of holding two opposing ideas in your mind and come up with a solution that can satisfy both your objectives.
The book explains, how conventional way of thinking promotes breaking down of a problem in very simplistic bits and tackling them separately. This process of optimizing parts of the problem rather than looking at the whole leads to some parts of the problem conflicting with others giving rise to the need for trade offs. Ultimately we end up with a sub optimal result.
The author, Roger L Martin instead asks his readers to consider the multi directional causal relationship between the various salient features of the problem and visualize the whole while working on individual parts. Martin cites several examples to demonstrate how this type of thinking has been carried out in the real world. The Integrative thinkers, interviewed by him include personalities like Bob Young of Red Hat, Isadore Sharp of Four Seasons hotel, A G Lafley of P&G and many more, all of whom have rejected the conventional wisdom of choosing the least worst option and instead have made new paths leading to success in their respective domains.
The first lesson in becoming an Integrative thinker is to acknowledge the fact that, reality as you see it is not the only reality. In business lingo, the models you have built to explain a real business scenario is never perfect and definitely, not the same as reality. As Martin quotes Young, there will always be flaws in your first model and their will be opposing models by other which contrast with your view of the business reality. Martin says, such clashes are not to be feared but welcomed as they offer proof that your own model is incomplete and can be improved further. By not shunning the possibilities of other realities, you open up the potential of a new model which might work better than either existing models.
How to develop your own Opposable Mind
Martin postulates that any person’s knowledge system is based on, what he calls their Stance, Tools and Experience.
Stance — is a person’s outlook of the world around them and their position in it. A person’s stance determines what s/he is trying to accomplish in this world. Stance is both a view on the world and yourself.
Towards the world : Existing models do not represent reality, they are mere constructions by people like me.
Towards yourself: I am capable of finding a better model and give myself time to reach it.
This is the stance of an Integrative thinker, and one we can try to imbue in ourselves.
Tools — are used to organize our thinking and understand the world. We pick the tools that support our stance, tools like deductive reasoning and inductive logic are quite common and taught extensively. However, to be able to think of solutions that have eluded everyone else or to reconcile two opposing models of reality requires different tools.
Martin describes three tools, which are used by Integrative thinkers -
1) Generative Reasoning: To be able to make decisions with incomplete data, and then validating it with deductive or inductive logic. This requires fair bit of intuition or ‘gut’ feel, but it is needed to make leaps across the mind.
2) Causal Modeling: To build sophisticated models which takes into account the multi-directional causalities between various elements and the even the effect of your entry into this system.
3) Assertive Inquiry: To be able to gather information from people with conflicting views to your own, so as to increase your understanding of the situation and ultimately to improve your model.
Experience — This is what comes out as the action of your stance and tools and then feeds back into them. As experience reinforces your stance and tools, it becomes the most important of the three elements in the personal knowledge system. Martin gives the example of Lafley and how his journey from running a navy exchange store led him to pursue formal tools in management and marketing at the Harvard Business School and then further work at P&G to gain more experience using those tools and his stance of himself as a problem solver. Experience enhances both mastery over formal tools like deductive reasoning and originality coming from generative reasoning.
Overall, these 3 form our personal knowledge system and exercising them can help use our opposable minds to think integratively instead of in parts, and come up with better solutions than we would have found otherwise.