FREQUENT ASKED QUESTIONS WITH DEAN ROGER MARTIN

1. Why is it important for modern leaders to think integratively?

The key job of a leader in today’s climate of constant change and relentless competition is to make robust choices. Today’s business choices exhibit a challenging combination of qualities including ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity, instability, and risk. They involve a vast array of interrelated elements and consequences, and demand special consideration. Addressing one piece of the ‘choice puzzle’ means many others are affected, making it sub-optimal to break the puzzle down into small parts and try to solve each sequentially. Such complex choices typically cannot be made from within narrowly-defined functional, regional or operational boundaries. This suggests the need for managers who can attend simultaneously to a vast array of interconnected variables and related choices to deal effectively with enigmatic choices. In short, modern leadership necessitates integrative thinking.

2. What is the result of non-integrative thinking?

Managers spend too much time producing outcomes that are perplexing and unsatisfying. There are consistent gaps between aspirations and outcomes, which can be defined as ‘error’. Why are errors prevalent? Because the world is a complex and messy place, and the links between cause and effect are not often clear. People despise and avoid error, because it involves feeling like they’ve ‘lost’ at something, or at least, lost control of a situation. In the face of this, people take preventive actions that often involve simplifying and specializing – taking the messy world they face and simplifying it to the point that they feel confident in accomplishing the task at hand. This is called narrow perfectionism – striving for perfection by narrowing the definition of the task at hand to the point that success is guaranteed. It involves simplifying cause and effect relationships to the point that actions produce a guaranteed result.

3. What are the effects of ‘narrow perfectionism’ in an educational environment?

Narrow perfectionism in the business school community encourages our future leaders to embrace narrow specializations, primarily by functional area. Business academics conduct research in narrow fields and create models for understanding in their particular area. Without their dedication and passion for their subject matter, we would not be able to provide students a strong foundation in the functional areas. However, attempts by academics to link their models to models outside of their field are rare. What business students are taught explains most of the variance between included variables – but it generally doesn’t dig into the unexplained parts – the parts that would prove difficult to model. Therefore, the primary skill students develop is in the application of models to situations that are tailor made for a specific model. For example, in Marketing, students are taught a marketing model, which they then apply to numerous marketing cases. Their success is measured and graded in terms of the degree of skill in applying a marketing model to a marketing case. If students learned nothing but the functional areas and their respective accepted models, they would be hard-pressed to think in ‘uncharted’ ways and to develop skills in tool-picking and model creation. In addition to having knowledge of specific functional disciplines, we firmly believe that business leaders need to be able to create mental linkages to understand the disciplines together.

4. Aren’t accepted models still important for navigating the business world?

Of course. Since the world is predisposed toward narrow perfectionism, graduates are well-prepared for such a world. They leave business school with a toolbox of models to apply to particular problems. Some even take jobs that are defined around the application of a particular model. However, MBA graduates will produce high levels of error if they only pick and apply narrow models. Worse yet, they will not define themselves as producing error, because they will see the error as caused by factors outside of their sphere of influence, by the collision of narrow models with a messy world. Our messy world necessitates the use of an integrative model, sometimes referred to as the ‘messy model’.

5. What do integrative models look like?

The models used by integrative thinkers consider a wide variety of variables to be salient in order to embrace the inherent complexity of a problem, rather than eliminating variables in order to simplify the world for easier decision-making. Integrative models consider more complex causal relationships between salient variables, rather than limit the causal relationships in order to simplify prediction of effect. These models provide a method of sequencing the decision-making without losing sight of the whole problem by breaking it into pieces. They enable the creative resolution of tensions among variables rather than accepting an unfavourable trade-off between variables or defaulting to choosing between conflicting narrow models.

Integrative thinkers develop and utilize models to understand and drive action in a messy world. They build models rather than choose between models. Their models include consideration of numerous variables -- customers, employees, competitors, capabilities, cost structures, industry evolution, regulatory environment -- not just a subset of the above. Their models capture the complicated, multifaceted and multidirectional causal relationships between the many salient variables in any problem. They consider the problem as a whole, rather than break it down and farm out the parts. Finally, they creatively resolve tensions to produce a more powerful model, rather than default to choosing one model over another when both are sub-optimal, but one is less so than the other.

6. Provide some examples of successful integrative thinkers.

Well-known integrative thinkers include Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, who recognized that even consumers who obsess about low prices want – and deserve -- quality products; Canadian architect Frank Gehry, who combined hope for the future with a reverence for the past and took a unique approach to building materials; Southwest Airlines Chairman Herb Kelleher, who focused on employee job satisfaction instead of the bottom line; and modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, who paid attention to the entire environment in her choreography, not just the movements of the body. Each of these luminaries has put the pieces of their respective puzzle together in a novel way, exploring uncharted territory and taking an entirely unique view of their field. Each has refused to compromise their vision, revolutionizing the way things are done in their domain and leaving their contemporaries scrambling to find ways to mimic their success.
We have been lucky enough to have several integrative thinkers visit the School recently as part of our Rotman Integrative Thinking Seminars – people like Richard Currie of George Weston and Loblaws fame, who found a way to sell groceries at low prices and high margins; Moses Znaimer, founder of CITY-TV, who figured out how to deliver local television globally and to give character to a TV station; and Issy Sharpe, founder of Four Seasons Hotels, who combined the best elements of hotels and motels and redefined customer service and luxury lodging.

7. What will students gain from the Rotman curriculum’s emphasis on Integrative Thinking?

Most students enter graduate business programs with no training in the critical analysis of models or the building of models. Most have never taken a course that presents conflicting models for consideration relative to each other. At Rotman, students will become skilled consumers and users of models. They will learn how to audit the logic of a model in order to decide whether to use it, and if necessary, how to refine it. They will also learn about model clash. Many students believe that when models clash, the appropriate course of action is to pick the best of the clashing models for the task at hand. At the Rotman School, we are teaching them that when models clash, it is an opportunity to build a more powerful model for understanding the messy world that faces us. Equipped with skills in model building in the face of model clash, our graduates will be better positioned than their counterparts to diagnose the implicit models behind decisions and strategies; to assess the validity of models; to identify the ways in which the model in question conflicts with their own; and to build a new model that is more powerful in dealing with the issue at hand. In short, Rotman graduates will learn to think in unique ways, and will be equipped to encourage a new and valuable way of thinking in their organizations.