With many competency frameworks making such a big play on how to win friends and influence people, the way we think and problem solve has had very little airtime.
But the thinking competencies (analytical thinking, strategic thinking, decision making, innovation, etc.) play a very significant role in work performance in general and what must surely be a pivotal role in leadership. In an informative article Roger Martin describes the integrative thinking that leaders use to make them successful.
Using six years worth of field based interviews of successful leaders Roger Martin (1) believes he sees a difference in the way successful leaders think. The idea that there are different styles of thinking which people use to problem solve has been around for many decades (see Sternberg, R. J. (1997)) (2). However, research into the way that leaders think is not very common. The emphasis over the last twenty years or so has been on leadership influencing style including their team development skills, their emotional intelligence, their interpersonal skills, and so on. Also, there is quite a lot of scientific interest in motivational aspects of leaders, what drives them and how they get themselves through difficult times. But there is very little by way of explanation of the way that they think and their approach to problem solving.
Roger Martin sees successful leaders as those that use what he terms <integrative thinking>.
Integrative Thinking
The capacity to hold two opposing ideas at once and to find a solution by integrating both. (p62)
Central to integrative thinking is the comfort and ease with which integrative thinkers manage ambiguity and complexity. Whereas most of us conventional thinkers are anxious about complexity and ambiguity, seeking to minimise it in our craving for certainty and closure, integrative thinkers like it, they welcome it and even seek it out. It enables them to illuminate anything that may have a bearing on a possible solution.
To draw out the definition of integrative thinking he uses the comparison between integrative thinking and conventional thinking:
Conventional thinking
- To discard as many factors as possible in order to reduce complexity, focusing only on clearly relevant factors
- To look for straight line relationships between factors, what obviously affects what
- To break problems into parts and to work sequentially through each of them
- To make either/or decisions about what to do
Integrative Thinking
- To seek as many factors as possible in order to increase complexity, seeking less obvious factors
- Considering multidirectional and non linear relationships between factors
- To see the problem as a whole, how each part will fit together
- To try and integrate options rather than either/or, to look for innovative new solutions, what-if solutions. It can result in <<creating delays, sending teams back to examine things more deeply, generating new options at the 11th hour, and other apparently irresolute behaviour>> (p67)
(1) Martin, Roger (2007) How successful leaders think. Harvard Business Review. June. p60-67
(2) Sternberg, R. J. (1997). Thinking styles. New York: Cambridge University Press
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