Yup, another book, this one called The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin. He says that success in business (and other areas) can be traced (most of the time) back to integrative thinking, or what he calls "the opposable mind". The ability to hold two opposing ideas in tension and rather than to go into an either/or solution... to have both/and. To come up with a solution that incorporates both aspects but in a way that is new and novel. Something different...
I thought the title was kind of cool... and the idea of integrative thinking is needed more today than ever. We are so often stuck in an either/or world... in a world of black and white... We don't even look for other solutions anymore. We just go with A or Z and don't see anything in between... It comes out in the right/wrong approach as well. The idea that one choice is right and the other is wrong. That one person's idea is right and the other person's idea is wrong. But what if both choices are really not all that good... and we feel stuck between a rock and a hard place... In that instance, integrative thinking can get us out between the hard spaces and into something else... that we couldn't even dream of before.
The author says integrative thinking can be learned... can be taught... although in today's schools we are doing a fearsomely poor job of teaching our children to think...
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