Integrative Thinking: 4 Major Steps

There is an advertisement I have seen in magazines for a number of years, encouraging me to subscribe to the publication of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

So, I finally bit and ordered Rotman’s free “best of” issue.

I’m still working my way through it, but it’s a pretty impressive set of articles.

The Dean and Professor of Strategic Management, Roger Martin, kicks off this “best of” issue with an article that sets forth the underlying theme of the magazine, and the entire teaching philosophy at Rotman.

Martin writes, “Our premise is that extremely successful people think in a distinctly different way than their less-successful peers, and that this distinct pattern of thinking enables them to make better choices and largely accounts for their success.”

Termed “integrative thinking,” it assumes that there are no such things as marketing decisions or finance decisions—there are only business decisions “that sprawl relentlessly across functional boundaries as if boundaries didn’t exist.”

In an effort to model this thinking, Rotman describes four major steps that comprise integrative thinking. (And, lest you think they are obvious, witness events in the last two days: Apple, a highly skilled marketing company cuts $200 off the price of an iPhone, only to realize too late that they have angered the thousands of folks who rushed to the store a few weeks ago, stood in line, and paid full price. That would be NON-integrative thinking.)

1. Salience: A good decision maker chooses which features in a decision are salient—and which are not. For example, an executive may consider the likely response of government officials as salient to his decision to close a plant in a town, not just the response of workers.

2. Causality: A good decision maker will consider the causal relationships between the features he or she has determined to be salient. So, the number of full-time jobs lost, the greater the negativity of government officials. Or, how will other locales where he owns plants react?

3. Sequencing: Once salience and causality are determined, a good decision maker creates some mechanism for working from inception of the problem through to choice. He may work on pieces of the problem at various times, but it remains integrated in his mind. For example, an integrative thinker designing a new product will never lose sight of the ultimate manufacturability of the product.

4. Resolution: The decision-maker will actually produce a choice, reaching a conclusion.

So, the integrative thinker tends to consider more features of the problem to be salient, plots multi-directional and non-linear causal relationships instead of only simple, uni-directional relationships, and always considers the whole even if the parts need to be worked on independently.

Interestingly, Rotman believes that the integrative thinker will always search for creative resolutions to tensions, rather than accept unpleasant trade-offs. This may result in delays, sending teams back to ponder problems anew, or generating new options at the last minute.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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