Inventing Elephants

Integrative thinking has been defined and popularized by Roger Martin, but it is not confined within the pages of this one book.

The University

Most dramatically, integrative thinking is the core concept behind the business school curriculum at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.

Roger Martin is the Dean and is featured on his own page which includes article both by and about him, including those with ideas leading up to the publishing of The Opposable Mind. If you go back through them you can get a sense of how he pulled together this framework for thinking.

More information on how the concepts are applied at the school can be found at the home page of the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking. The definitions page includes video of Martin speaking about the concepts and links to other free material.

Joshua Wong, a student at Rotman, started a blog in March 2009 called Integrative Thinking to Win. He has a number of posts up and I hope he continues. A couple of them refer directly to Martin's framework as he analyzes a business problem.

Back to the Book

Michael McKinney summarizes the book a bit differently beginning with this review.

Grant McCracken buries his opinions in a discussion about being Canadian but especially appreciated that the book gave him "license to embrace complexity."

Tim Milburn added worthwhile philosophical commentary at the end of his review. I was struck by how he said the book filled him with optimism.

Jeff de Cagna of Principled Innovation had a conversation about the book with Roger Martin early in 2008 and Jeffrey Veffer reports on an interview/discussion he attended while reading the book.

Other Organizations

The term "integrative thinking" was used before Roger Martin for similar, but not identical, purposes.

Graham Douglas promotes it as a part of a mind science and for him it seems to mean something closer to deliberately using visualization and right-brained processes.

The Integrative Strategies Forum, a non-profit formed to "build just and sustainable communities" referred to integrative thinking as "moving from taking things apart to see how they work (analysis) to seeing how the pieces all fit and work together (synthesis or integration)" in a 1995 paper.

This post is the last in a series that covers the major topics of The Opposable Mind.

1. Book Review: The Opposable Mind by Roger Martin
2. How Integrative Thinkers Think Things Through
3. 6 Foundation Beliefs of an Opposable Mind
4. 3 Techniques for Moving Beyond Either/Or Thinking
5. Experiences Enhance the Opposable Mind
6. Integrative Thinking Beyond The Opposable Mind

Next week I will begin covering the major topics of Thinking in Systems.