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 excellent rextbook for critical thinking
I teach an undergrauate course about critical thinking in organizations. This semester, I assigned Professor Martin's book. It was a positive experience, so I recommend that other educators consider using it as well.
Roger Martin grounds his book in extensive interviews with acknowledged leaders, primarily in the business sector. Yet he brings a discerning mind to the material, detecting a broad pattern to the way many successful leaders think. From this template, he derives many lessons for prospective leaders who wish to advance.
I teach adult students. They could understand his examples quickly. And with some in-class exercises, they got a chance to practice his lessons. In my opinion, the author brings credibility to a realm of management studies that often gets overlooked. The book is relatively inexpensive, accessible, and handy -- traits students really appreciate.
 loosely connected ideas with poor examples
It would have been a 3-star book if it were published 10-15 years ago... There is not a single interesting or new idea in this book. And the model that is presented in the book loosely connects some elements of creative thinking and action and tries to demonstrate it with poor examples. If you are a new graduate starting your career, you may find a few things, perhaps, that are useful, but otherwise it's not worth spending your time.
 Interesting Read
In seeking lessons to apply, we often try to emulate what effective leaders do, drawing on the accounts of actions as recounted in popular management books. Roger Martin, author of The Opposable Mind, suggests our focus on a leaders actions is misplaced because moves that work in one situation may be defeating in another. Martin proposes we place our attention on how leaders think.
Based on interviews with over 50 top executives, Martin came to the conclusion that they all share one unique thought process -- the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposed 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. Martin calls this integrative thinking (the discipline of consideration and synthesis).
Frequently we are asked to do two or more diametrically opposed things such as delivering more innovation with less money. Often we are tempted to pick one side of the argument (the side, we most easily identify with as - right) and close our eyes to the other. After reading this book, I've been able to catch myself and others making the same mistake and I've started to realize how easy it is for us to have a tendency towards either-or thinking. Our minds tend to naturally dismiss the complexity and messiness required to hold conflicting ideas in our head.
Martin described four stages in an interesting process that integrative thinkers (and firms) use to decide on and craft superior solutions. These are
1. Discover the salient features of a problem.
2. Develop causality of the factors
3. Envision the decision architecture
4. Achieve resolution
I found Martin's introduction to this illuminating subject fascinating.
Did I overlook something?
I have no problem to apprehend the wisdom of Fitzgerald that "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same timeand still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.". However, I really cant appreciate the author's elaboration and modification of the above into his "Integrative Thinking and Opposable Mind" terminology and modelling, which to me are common practice of scholars to add to their collection of research papers with little value at all. Sorry to say that even de Bono's books can help more. In short, not recommended.
Beyond Binary Choices - Learning from the Best Leaders
Some of my best experiences in reading books have occurred when someone I trust and respect has said to me: "You need to read this book!" That is how I discovered the marvelous insights that Roger Martin shares in his book, "The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking." One day over lunch, my friend, Rick Cerf, showed me the book and told me that I needed to add it to my reading list. Thanks, Rick!
Martin, who is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, offers as his major premise the idea that the best leaders avoid simplistic binary choices, and put in the extra effort to find solutions to complex problems - solutions that go beyond false dichotomies. The best leaders think in terms of "Both/And" rather than "Either/Or."
"As I listened to some of the sharpest minds in business talk about how they thought through the most pressing and perplexing dilemmas of their careers, I searched for a metaphor that could give me deeper insight into the dynamic of their thinking. The skill with which these thinkers held two opposing ideas in fruitful tension reminded me of the way other highly skilled people use their hands. Human beings, it's well known, are distinguished from nearly every other creature by a physical feature known as the opposable thumb. Thanks to the tension we create by opposing the thumb and fingers, we can do marvelous things that no other creature can do - write, thread a needle, carve a diamond, paint a picture, guide a catheter up through an artery to unblock it. All those actions would be impossible without the crucial tension between the thumb and the fingers. . . Similarly, we were born with an opposable mind we can use to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive tension." (Pages 6-7)
The language that Martin chooses here is very instructive, and is reminiscent of language I remember being used by one of my favorite graduate school professors - Dr. Gordon Fee. Dr. Fee, one of the translators of the New International Version of the Bible, is a brilliant biblical scholar and communicator. He would often describe difficult portions of Scripture that, on the surface, may appear to contradict each other, and he would declaim: "We hold these truths in tension!"
As an example of "opposable mind thinking," Martin offers the legendary choreographer, Martha Graham:
"Like Graham, the creative thinkers I interviewed knew they would need plenty of help to reach creative resolutions. They chose their collaboration expressly for what they would contribute to an integrated whole. Bruce Mau, a renowned designer and frequent collaborator with architect Frank Gehry, told me, 'You can't make a renaissance person any more, because the range of what you would need to do is just impossible. But you could actually assemble a renaissance team.' The integrative thinkers rely on their 'renaissance teams' to broaden salience, maintain sophisticated causality, and create a holistic architecture in their drive for creative resolution." (Page 82)
Throughout the book, Martin lays out principle for integrative thinking and fleshes out those principles using real world examples:
"Nandan Nilekani, the builder and CEO of what is perhaps India's most successful global IT powerhouse, Infosys Technologies Limited, says that when he's confronted with two fundamentally opposed sets of requirements, his first inclination is to ask, 'Are there solutions that satisfy both?' And when asked whether he thought strategy or execution was more important, Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of General Electric, responded, 'I don't think it's an either-or.'" (Page 114)
Since Rick turned me on to this book and its treasure chest of ideas, I have had occasion to share those ideas with quite a few individuals. In several cases, they called me back a day or two later to thank me for the insights, and to tell me that they had ordered their own copy of the book. In the interest of "paying forward" the gift that Rick Cerf gave me of a marvelous suggestion that I read this book, I recommend that you procure a copy of "The Opposable Mind."
Enjoy!
Al
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