Jananas

This semester I’m taking Roger Martin’s course on The Opposable Mind, based on his most recent book. Roger is the Dean of Rotman (the school I attend) and the advocate of Integrative Thinking. For those of you who don’t know what Integrative Thinking is, here is a brief definition, taken from the Rotman website.

“Integrative Thinking is the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.”

In our first year we took two classes on integrative thinking. The first introduced the concept of the unconscious biases & assumptions that impact our daily lives and decisions. The second was a practicum (ITP) where we practiced developing argument maps and identifying the assumptions behind our models, and put theory into practice in a rather intense group project. Hey, you try getting five very different people to agree to a common defintion of a problem, develop a solution, and present to a board. At the time I conceptually understood why they were important, but struggled with actually beginning to implement any of the techniques or thought patterns. In fact, I often found myself railing at the way the ITP class had been set up and the manner in which it was taught.

I think that a part of me had shrugged the entire thing off as a bunch of hooey. Until this summer, when I realized that Integrative Thinking had somehow snuck up on me. This is not to claim in any way that I am practiced or well versed or the best of the best at it, but rather that it had somehow begun to manifest itself in my everyday life without me really being aware. The first time was when I was having a discussion with the mister about the future. We were both making assumptions about what the other wanted without having asked if they were true. So I asked. I asked him about what he wanted and expected and what he thought I wanted and expected. We talked about it and began the process of making our assumptions explicit. We communicated.

The first step for me in the Integrative Thinking process was that I recognized a situation where a model clash could occur based on differing assumptions. The second step was that I did something about it – we talked and communicated and asked questions. I was more surprised by how some of the skills started creeping up on me in the rest of my life, which is an observation that several of my other classmates have echoed.

Strangely, I find myself starting to ask more questions about the world around me. For example, do pdfs have to be laid out the way they are or is there a better model? Will call centre models change as mobile usage takes off? And most recently, why is our curriculum laid out the way it is? However, I think that this post is long enough so I’ll save that for the next post.