How important is integrated thinking?

Nowadays, with the in-depth development of mobile Internet and digital technology, the "post-Internet era" has brought subversive changes to our social life and business world. How to be in it without confusion? Roger martin, a famous business thinker and former dean of rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, put forward "integrated thinking", which can be a sharp weapon to temper our thinking ability. The so-called integrated thinking is to accommodate two contradictory views in the mind at the same time, and draw a solution that integrates the advantages of both sides.

Professor Martin put forward the thought system of integrated thinking more than ten years ago, and wrote the book Opposing Thinking and related articles. On the list of top 50 global thinkers released on June 3rd, 20th117th, Professor Martin won the prize for putting forward the theories of "integrated thinking" and "design thinking" to make the world run more efficiently. In the era of VUCA, this way of thinking will be more applied to the face of more diverse and complex variables in human society. The word "VUCA" that entered the public eye in recent two years originated from the US military in the 1990s. It is the abbreviation of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and fuzziness, which summarizes the characteristics of the business world in the post-Internet era.

In the Uka era, due to the supersaturation of information, the temporary balance in various fields will be constantly broken, and it is easy for both commercial organizations and individuals to find themselves in chaos; Integrated thinking provides us with a compound, dynamic and flexible choice. The uniqueness of this kind of thinking lies in: "First-class IQ depends on your ability to keep thinking while having two contradictory ideas in your mind."

Integrated thinking deals with opposing viewpoints in a constructive way, without sacrificing one party to choose the other, but eliminates the opposition between the two viewpoints in an innovative way. The new viewpoint also contains some factors of opposing viewpoints, which is superior to the two opposing viewpoints. That is to say, for leaders, it is not a choice between the two situations, but a better answer, such as taking into account innovation and maintaining existing business at the same time, such as seeking the best balance between the interests of employees and organizations, how to behave and how to do things.

For some people who have a rough understanding of integrated thinking, they may think that it is similar to China's traditional "golden mean". In fact, many people misunderstand the golden mean, which is neither "mediocrity" nor compromise, nor is it the exclusive concept of oriental philosophy. Confucius once said "Too much is not enough", and Aristotle also said: "Too much is not enough, too much is not enough is evil, and the' middle way' is good virtue". The doctrine of the mean/the middle way combines two extreme advantages and is a higher level of rationality and commitment. On the basis of management thinkers such as leader james march, Professor Martin spent several years interviewing dozens of famous CEOs of multinational companies, including Jack Welch and Lafley, as well as management guru Drucker, Nobel laureate in economics and famous film directors, and formed a complete set of integrated thinking ideology.

The most important point of integrated thinking is: never settle for second best. This principle distinguishes integrated thinking from the "rare confusion" and the misunderstood "golden mean" in traditional thinking. Integrating thinking requires a lot of trade-offs and compromises, but it doesn't mean "doing it"-"If you adopt an attitude of doing it when making a choice, you will never succeed," Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, told Professor Martin. In order to make the best choice, you must be brave enough to accept complexity; Complexity is the starting point of integrated thinking, so it will penetrate deeper and deeper in today's Uka era.

* * * * Integrated thinking also requires staying away from simplification and "specialization". Traditional thinking emphasizes simplification to improve efficiency, while integrated thinkers stay away from simplification and "specialization". The simplification here can be explained by Einstein's sentence "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not for simplicity". Simplifying thinking is to simplify and externalize the facts, making them easy to understand, but it is easy to cause our inertia and make us more inclined to one-way direct causal relationship. Specialization is another form of simplification here. Professor Martin's explanation is: "Specialization is to extract parts from the whole and make a special analysis in order to achieve a thorough purpose." Specialization can help us cope with complexity, such as different specialties and sub-specialties in hospitals, which can effectively solve most patients' problems, but at the same time it will also lead doctors to ignore the organic integrity of patients' bodies. Similar division of functions has happened in commercial organizations, and how to make all departments cooperate with each other has always been a key issue for leaders.

Undeniably, simplification and specialization are helpful to deal with complex situations, and they provide us with a fast track to escape from chaos; However, in the face of the escalation of uncertainty, escape is not the ultimate solution. A battle-hardened comprehensive thinker can draw a clear line between chaos and complexity and get rid of confusion. In the face of temporary disorganization, you need a comprehensive and profound knowledge structure, including pure knowledge and personal experience, which can strengthen your cognitive ability and sensitivity. At this time, the effective way is to form an "all-round team" with the help of external forces to make up for the limitations of personal knowledge and expand the width of thinking.

When seeking the optimal solution with the help of complexity, the decision-making process of integrated thinking and traditional thinking adopts four similar steps: 1. Find out the outstanding factors (that is, what is the most important); 2. Establish a causal relationship model; 3. Combine causality into a framework (to execute and speculate on specific results); 4. Finalize the solution. However, the practice of each step is quite different. Integrated thinking creates all kinds of new ideas, possibilities and solutions, while traditional thinking hides potential possibilities and pushes creative solutions into a dead end. In these four steps, integrated thinking should follow four principles respectively:

1. Expand the scope of key factors in decision-making. For example, in product improvement, the company should not only pay attention to the demands put forward by customers, but also look for the demands that they have not said, but they really want to be satisfied.

2. Be good at considering all kinds of indirect causality. A single causal relationship is easy to trace, but it cannot provide a deep and extensive analysis path for the best solution.

3. In decision-making, the problem is not divided into several independent individuals to solve one by one, but the colleagues who keep the problem as a whole begin to deal with each part.

Try your best to find innovative solutions, and each idea and process is more effective and accurate than the previous one (that is, the popular word "iteration" in recent years).

Integrated thinking needs holistic thinking. When Professor Martin interviewed timothy brown, CEO of IDEO, Brown told the story that the National Railway Company of the United States asked IDEO to design intercity high-speed train carriages.

At that time, the national railway passenger transport company of the United States required to improve the aesthetics and function of the carriage, but Brown, who had integrated thinking, didn't just do his job well. He refused the inertia drive of simplification and specialization. He thinks that the main reason why many Americans choose airplanes instead of trains is not the beauty of carriages, but the whole process of taking trains. So the IDEO design team finally identified ten links that can be improved, including entering the station, purchasing tickets, waiting for the bus, getting on the bus, taking the bus and arriving at the station. This global solution has been very common in the in-depth application of design thinking in recent years, but it was rare at that time.

Nowadays, more and more enterprises begin to design "customer tours" to create new value for brands and customers. For a long time, enterprises have predicted the next reaction of customers by speculating the process from considering buying, placing orders to using products, and looking for countermeasures at each stage; In the era of big data, enterprises can jump out of passive response and actively shape the "customer journey"-guiding rather than catering.

Control ability and innovation ability. Ray Dalio's "Principles" is very popular in China recently. Its core idea is: everything in the world has principles, enterprise management has management principles, and investment has investment principles; Everyone must find their own principles and form an algorithm to win. Integrated thinking is also a way of thinking based on principles. Applied to organizations, its core is the combination of control ability and innovation ability. This control is not only the control of existing business, but also the control of key links in innovation, and it is based on the control of core business or skills to accelerate innovation.

Cultivate individual's comprehensive thinking ability. In the development of human beings in the past few hundred years, the basic way of thinking has not changed much. Integrated thinking may not be revolutionary thinking, but it has been used a lot and will be more and more widely. For example, Professor Chen Chunhua said in the dialogue of Management Evolution in Uncertain Times: In the future, more and more enterprises will focus on dual business models; Leaders should stand in the future and look back, looking from the outside to the inside. Many of her recent views are actually highly compatible with integrated thinking.

In the era of VUCA, many traditional views are changing. For example, many management scientists used to think that leaders and employees should make good use of "dominant hands", but now they should make good use of "left and right hands"-for leaders, both microscopes and telescopes should be used well. In the environment of escalating uncertainty, it is more difficult to make strategic planning. From the perspective of integrated thinking, strategy must be done, but more importantly, it must be constantly adjusted. Strategy must conform to the trend: enterprises should always monitor the internal and external environment and respond quickly to new situations. Napoleon once said that no war was won by planning, but he still made plans for every war-only with planning can we adjust our strategy and tactics more calmly.

For us personally, how to keep two opposing views in our minds without falling into chaos?

This first needs to improve our cognitive model and mental model; Secondly, the more uncertain the times are, the more it is necessary to control certain factors, such as study-this may be the main reason why reading and learning are becoming more and more popular today.

Dario wrote in Principles: "Maximize your evolution; The most important thing for ourselves and the people around us is evolution. Not the reward itself "(maximize your evolution. What matters to us is development, not reward, and what we do around us. His dream formula can also be said to include the application of integrated thinking, and it is also a "dual channel" of fantasy+pragmatism: dream+surrealism+determination = success. Let us remember that on the road of self-evolution, we can explore deeper and more suitable principles.

Wang Xiaohong | Wen

Wang Xiaohong is a senior editor of Harvard Business Review in Shanghai.