Both-And. Yes: a review of The Opposable Mind

Development and Learning in Organizations

ISSN: 1477-7282

Article publication date: 26 April 2011

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Citation

Bokeno, R.M. (2011), "Both-And. Yes: a review of The Opposable Mind", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 25 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2011.08125cae.001

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Both-And. Yes: a review of The Opposable Mind

Article Type: Book review From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 25, Issue 3

I am often leery of projects that offer a new method of individual or organizational “success” by distilling heady academic concepts into some graphs and steps. I consume these unwillingly and deal with the indigestion in the form of a review.

The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin came with its own Ranitidine. (And it’s a good thing too, because I had run out of it over the holiday break here in the USA.) As an eternal “systems” thinker, I more or less anticipated the heartburn that might have accompanied a popular audience book about “success through integrative thinking.” Turns out the anticipation was mis-targeted, and the chemical relief unnecessary.

The book is not really about some new prescription for winning or success, but rather a careful and exceptionally well-composed explication of how fairly high-profile corporate leaders have used integrative thinking processes to achieve noteworthy and startling results. Martin employs the oft-cited F. Scott Fitzgerald quote to contextualize his thesis: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” I used this on a syllabus about 15 years ago in an undergraduate class in critical thinking, and in return got blank and confused stares, but for Martin it is a wise and precisely calibrated driver of the book. More importantly, Martin is reluctant to attribute skill in using integrative thinking to just the geniuses among us, and so what underwrites the text in the first place is the assumption that integrative thinking skill can be exercised by almost any of us. (This aggravates systems thinkers like me, who believe their capacity for this is god-given and just hard-wired in, and so, you know, special.)

Martin defines integrative thinking as:

The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and, instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each (p. 15).

And, yes, for the intended audience of professionals and practitioners who would read the book, there are the requisite charts and graphs and steps that explain the process – and, as I mentioned at the top, not indigestible. An integrative thinker’s thought process has four inter-dependent (they feed back to each other) steps:

  1. 1.

    salience – what features of the issue seem most important or obvious;

  2. 2.

    causality – how the salient features seem to be related;

  3. 3.

    architecture – how might those case-effect relationships be rearranged, to know what to do in what order; and

  4. 4.

    resolution – how will one know when the issue is, um, finished (pp. 29-47).

Equally important, the steps above need to be placed in the context of one’s own personal knowledge system. That is, figuring out how you see and deal with the world in the first place.

Mapping your own personal knowledge system involves your stance – “who you are and what you’re after,” your tools – how you typically go about “knocking the world into place,” and experiences – how your tools and stance have worked for you (pp. 91-106).

The complex dynamics and interdependencies of all of the elements in both processes are comfortably treated in succeeding chapters, again with ample illustration and example. I was especially pleased to see an Argyris-ish left/right-hand column technique for diagnosing the kind of communication that has to go along with the integrative thinking process.

I have to say (just a small burp) that at first blush and often throughout the book I was nagged by the question of whether Martin had provided simply a new name for compromisory thinking. Indeed, it is easy to lose grasp of the “synthesis” part of Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula without a very sturdy handle of the transcendent part of the synthesis. I believe the transcendence is what Martin is going for, and sometimes the examples nail it, sometimes they don’t. Whether they do or not, and this may be more important, the examples and illustrations do expose the reader to textured nuances between nailing it and not, and so refreshingly instructive in that way.

Indeed, by far the flashing neon attraction in Martin’s book is the wealth of specifically relevant, substantial and detailed examples from the 50 plus organizational leaders interviewed in the research for it (see pp. 20-22). As a matter of fact, the theoretical or principled points of the book, though deftly put, just sort of do their job as theoretical points and then wait for the examples and supportive material to light them up. As it should be. And tasty too, so I ordered up his previous The Responsibility Virus for an afternoon snack at an undetermined time.

R. Michael BokenoProfessor of Organizational Communication and BB&T Fellow in the College of Business, Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky, USA.

 

References

Martin, R. (2007), The Opposable Mind, Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA

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