Its been a while since I was able to post any of my new findings here. However the time away was spent wisely understanding more about ‘Integrative Thinking’.
What is Integrative Thinking
‘Integrative Thinking’, as a concept, is probably nothing new. I would suspect its been used extensively during the past 2 decades, however I also suspect that it was never formally identified till now.
The current dean of Rotman School of Business, Roger Martin, conducted extensive research about the art of Integrative Thinking and ended up writing a book - The Opposable Mind - to document and share his findings.
An example of Integrative Thinking - Eric von Hippel’s ‘Lead User’
During the last few days, my personal research into the matter of Integrative Thinking brought me into contact with a similar phenomena called ‘Lead User Method of Innovation or LMU’ [the term was coined by Eric von Hippel]. The method centres around the process whereby manufacturing companies can use the insight of what are ‘lead users’ or ‘alpha users’ to come up with break through innovations. Lead / alpha users usually have extreme needs and usually push every product to its limit. Once the limit is reached and they are unable to go any further due to deficiency in the product, lead users will ‘jerry rig’ their own ideas onto the products and take it one step further. An example of something like this is presented in Eric von Hoppel’s book ‘Democratizing Innovation’ where high performance wind surfers discovered that by strapping on foot holds onto the existing standard manufactured surf board, they could jump higher and literally fly over the waves. According to one surfers account, he had initially designed a surf board with foot straps for his own personal use. He was having trouble with the high jumps on a standard board - he would fall on the water, hurt himself and his board. As soon as he used his own modified surfboard for high jumps, he noticed a dramatic difference in his high jumps. This was noticed by all his other surfing partners who promptly came out with their own versions of foot straps. Without even trying, these lead users had innovated surfboard manufacturing and surfboarding, the sport.
Why are Integrative Thinking and LMU similar
LMU is an example of Integrative Thinking. Both concepts promote what I call a ‘Blender Approach’. Instead of focussing on only one way to solve problems, both approaches try to be inclusive and allow various alternatives to be used to come up with an answer.
For example using LMU, manufacturing firms can target the average and lead users together and end up with a sum which is greater than the parts. Integrative Thinking advocates a similar mind set for problem solving.
Being involved with technologies, I can mention open source softwares as a valid example of products that use LMU and Integrative Thinking.
Why Integrative Thinking is critical for the future
In another post, I have discussed the need to forego standard problem solving approaches and embrace a new attitude towards finding solutions. The advent of human kind has brought along with it great leaps in technical proficiency and an explosion in the width and depth of human knowledge. However, on the flip side of the coin, problems are not as simple as they once were. The world is faced with wicked problems and to solve them, problem solvers need to be armed with an arsenal which includes more than standard operation manuals.
Concepts like Integrative Thinking and LMU can help us in true ‘out of the box thinking’ and help our generation and coming generations to be more successful than is possible right now.
