Innehållsförteckning för Winter 2011 från Rotman Management

NEW GLOBAL REALITIES are rapidly working their way into the very structure of our existence: economic, social, political and environmental realities with profound implications for thinking and learning. As a result, the power of the mind to command itself and regularly engage in self-analysis will increasingly determine the quality of our work and our lives. Unfortunately, most people don’t give any thought to how they think, and we often look at decisions as a series of either/or propositions, or trade-offs: we can either keep costs down OR invest in better service; we can either have steady growth OR pioneer new ways of designing and building things. But what if there was a way to do both? My Rotman colleagues and I believe that there is a way to integrate the…

PROBLEMS IN LIFE CAN BE DIVIDED into two general classes: well-defined and ill-defined. With a well-defined problem, the correct formulation is given. That is, the problem is presented with the expectation that the current state, the goal state and the ‘operators’ – the resources available to get from one state to the other – will be sufficiently obvious to allow steady progress towards the goal. If progress cannot be made, this will be due to a lack of relevant knowledge or skill, rather than to some inadequacy in the problem formulation. Unfortunately, most of today’s problems look nothing like this. Instead, they are ill-defined: uncertainty is inherent not only in whether the goal will be reached, but in how best to conceive of the current state, the goal state, and…

You have found that contrary to popular belief, high personal achievement has very little to do with one’s IQ, life circumstances, financial resources, or even luck. What, then, does it have to do with? It has everything to do with creating a failure-resistant brain and thinking your way to success. Every time you think a thought, feel an emotion or execute a behaviour, your neuro-circuitry changes, and the good news is that while it takes hard work, you can take charge of this process. Through fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and other tools, we are finding that Winner’s Brains actually operate differently than the average brain. Of course, success is a very personal thing. Being a ‘winner’ isn’t just about how much money you earn – each individual has specific…

DESIGNERS OFTEN DESCRIBE THEIR PROFESSION as ‘a way of organizing complexity’ or ‘finding clarity from an overwhelming amount of data’. For instance, Jeff Veen, founder of leading design consultancy Adaptive Path, has noted that “Good designers can create normalcy out of chaos.” Jim Wicks, vice president and director of Motorola’s Consumer Experience Design Group, gives the name ‘synthesis’ to this ability to create normalcy. As he explains it, design always includes synthesis – in his case, a synthesis of market needs, technology trends and business needs. Synthesis is defined as “the process or result of building up separate elements, especially ideas, into a connected whole.” The term indicates a push towards organization, reduction and clarity. Yet despite the acknowledged importance of this phase of the design process, it continues to…

AS WE TEACH AND PRACTICE IT AT Rotman DesignWorks, ‘Business Design’ is a methods-based approach to innovation that helps teams get to bigger breakthroughs faster and define strategies for competitive advantage. In our work over the last six years with hundreds of students and executives around the world, my colleagues and I have seen some clear patterns emerge regarding the particular attributes required to excel in this emerging discipline. What we are finding is that it takes a combination of the right mindset (being) and a rigorous methodology (doing) that unlocks a person’s thinking, and that one must consider all three of these factors to fully realize the potential of Business Design as a platform for enterprise success. Let’s examine each in turn. Being: Design as a Mindset A design…

Let me begin with a question that you yourself have posed: Can we collectively deal with accelerating change and complexity without revolutionizing the way we think? If you look at the pressing problems we’re facing, there is clear evidence that we need to start thinking very differently as a species. People across the globe are interconnected as never before, and unless we start to routinely examine our thinking in explicit, systematic ways, we will continue to do what we’re doing now – which is a seemingly hopeless blend of both good and bad thinking. Consider the oil that gushed uncontrollably in the Gulf of Mexico last summer – an accident primarily caused by the lack of critical thinking on the part of BP management and employees. The problem is that…

You have closely studied the thinking processes of great thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci. What can we learn from his example? Not surprisingly, da Vinci is a supreme role model for creative thinking. Considered perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived, he was not only a pioneer in Biology, Botany, Geology and Anatomy, but is renowned as one of the greatest fine artists ever, in part because he integrated scientific and artistic ways of thinking. There are other great scientists who have had some artistic ability, and there are great artists who’ve dabbled in Science, but no one has integrated the two as thoroughly as da Vinci. For me, he was a childhood hero, and the more I learned about him, the more he seemed to embody the very…

What is ‘mindsight’, and how can we use it to enhance our lives? Mindsight is a powerful lens through which we can understand our inner lives with more clarity, transform the brain and enhance our relationships. Mindsight is the ability of the human mind to see itself. Many people are blind to the energy and information flow inside of themselves, which can make them behave impulsively and reactively. They may even behave destructively – not intentionally, but because they suffer from a sort of ‘mind blindness’. It’s almost like putting a blind person behind the wheel of a car. The good thing about the mind is, almost everyone can be assisted in developing the skills to see more deeply into their energy and information flow, and that is the basic…

IN THE WAR FOR BAGHDAD, United States’ generals developed a doctrine called ‘clear and hold’: troops would clear a neighborhood of guerilla fighters and the Iraqi army would hold the area. But Iraqi troops were unprepared, so that when U.S. troops retired to their bases, guerillas returned. Only when the army changed its doctrine from clearing an area to ‘protecting its residents’ did they understand what ‘holding’ required: it meant living close to the neighborhoods, rather than in large distant bases, taking a census of the population, providing services and talking with community leaders. The big stick took a back seat. Executives leading organizational change face the same challenge. They can ‘clear’ (make changes), but they can’t often ‘hold’ (sustain those changes). As Kurt Lewin, founder of the group dynamics…

IN THE HEADY DAYS OF THE DOTCOM BOOM, convergence was all the rage. The new economy was about to overtake the old, and the future was all about ecommerce, clicks and URLs. New business models based on online eyeballs made traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses look old fashioned and boring. Nothing summed up the spirit of the boom quite so well as the merger of AOL and Time Warner in the year 2000. It was a huge deal, the largest in history, and it saw upstart AOL purchase venerable Time Warner for some $160 billion in stock, creating a $350 billion, fully-integrated newmedia powerhouse. Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin made the case for the merger by highlighting the synergies that would be generated between the world’s leading Internet service provider (ISP) and…

WHILE WE ARE ONLY JUST BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND the inner workings of the brain, research to date has made one thing clear: the human brain is a social organ. Its physiological and neurological reactions are directly and profoundly shaped by social interaction. This presents enormous challenges to managers. Although a job is often regarded as a purely economic transaction whereby people exchange their labour for financial compensation, the brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system. People who feel betrayed or unrecognized – for example, when they are reprimanded, given an assignment that seems unworthy, or told to take a pay cut – experience it as a neural impulse, as powerful and painful as a blow to the head. Most people learn to rationalize or temper their…

PROGRESS IN THE BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCES is occurring rapidly, making this an exciting time for those of us interested in the inner workings of the human brain. Two particular challenges lie ahead, both of which are substantive. The first is to better understand how mind, brain, body and society operate as a single unit. For instance, how does what occurs in the brain affect social relationships and society in general? A second and related challenge is to better understand how specific aspects of mind and behaviour are bound together. For example, how are memory and the development of insights related? In this article I will focus on this latter challenge by attempting to connect the dots between thought processes that are normally treated independently. In doing so I will show that…

“TO INVENT IS TO DISCERN, TO CHOOSE.” These words of the late theoretical physicist Henri Poincare highlight an important feature of the creative process: in many human domains, being creative is not about creating an entity out of thin air. Rather, it involves combining existing ideas and resources into something new and useful. According to the Darwinian perspective, the creativity process involves two key steps: variation and selection. In the variation step, existing ideas or resources are subject to recombination and ‘mutation’ to derive new ones. These new variants (of ideas or products) are then subject to the creator’s judgment, and only those that best address the problem at hand are selected for implementation. Inherent in this process is the need to contemplate and choose between myriad possible combinations. For…

1. Look beyond your industry. Creativity almost never occurs in a vacuum – it builds off the ideas of others. When putting together a portfolio of possibilities to explore, looking at other organizations, experiences and industries can be enlightening. For the best results, carefully define the vectors of your search. IDEO’s business designers usually take a three-step approach: first, define the challenges and hypothetical opportunities; second, find examples of where similar challenges have been effectively addressed and opportunities seized, and third, study the success stories and imagine how you might apply their principles in your work. For example, a team working on a project for Florida Horse Park speculated that, although equestrian sports attract mostly women, there could be a broader tourism opportunity that appealed to the whole family. The…

Scholars concerned with the problematics of human thinking are part of a long intellectual tradition predicated on the belief that human thinking is often flawed, but that through rigorous intellectual work, the quality of one’s thinking can improve. Conceptually speaking, critical thinking dates back to any early society that recognized the need to work through complex problems – problems that required information and reasoning within multiple points of view or frames of reference. Socrates and Francis Bacon are two key historical examples of this tradition. Each articulated various obstacles to thinking critically and proposed intellectual principles that remain essential to reasonable living. Following is a brief sketch of what each has contributed to our understanding of critical thinking. Socrates (ca. 479-399 B.C.) Socrates helped people see the inconsistencies and assumptions…

Research indicates that innovation requires two types of thinking: divergent and convergent. Please explain the difference between the two. The most commonly-studied aspect of creativity is divergent thinking: the generation of many ideas that are novel relative to prior solutions, and the depth and richness with which each idea is explored. The goal of divergent thinking is to generate a wide variety of ideas or a list of possibilities, whereas the goal of convergent thinking is to come up with a single high-quality output or a ‘right’ answer. In the brainstorming literature they advocate a very structured process, whereby first you think divergently and then you move on to convergence. But as far as my colleagues and I can tell, in the real world people do both at the same…

FOR ORGANIZATIONS SEEKING GROWTH through value creation, the challenge at hand is to create cultures in which platforms for the exploration of possibility are both encouraged and enabled. Unleashing this innovative mindset is about creating a culture that empowers inquisitive minds to imagine the future, and to think beyond the legacy of the past. I call these ‘Places of Possibility’, and they look quite different from traditional organizations. Both lean and nimble, they embrace risks, partner with spectacularly different competencies than the obvious, and prototype fast, fail fast and fail cheap. These are places where everyone feels empowered to explore and share ideas, with no fear of consequences. Places of Possibility are free of the day-to-day metrics of the traditional organization – and the word ‘free’ is of particular importance…

You have referred to intelligence as ‘a biopsychological potential’. Please explain this term. People often use the terms ‘mind’ and ‘brain’ interchangeably, but they are not one and the same. The brain is an organ within the skull, while the mind is a hypothetical construct that includes cultural knowledge, interaction with other people, societal rules etc. By using the term ‘biopsychological’ to describe intelligence, I am straddling the fence between Biology and Psychology, making it clear that the mind and the brain are separate entities. As for the potential part, no form of intelligence expresses itself automatically; it has to be stimulated, guided, nurtured or channeled by the surrounding culture. Your Theory of Multiple Intelligences defines eight distinct intelligences (see page 12). In your view, which one (or combination thereof)…

THE IDEA THAT STRATEGY EXISTS within the realm of thought is pervasive. Grounded in the realm of the rational and the objective, this paradigm emphasizes the value of effective strategic rhetoric that defines powerful core concepts, provides clear guidelines for action and uses simple maxims to communicate vividly. It urges strategic planning processes that utilize conscious forethought, commit aspirations and plans to paper, generally include a strong quantitative component, stress effective communication and carefully measure and monitor outcomes. In short, it makes a great deal of sense. Within this mindset, gaining employees’ intellectual acceptance of a new strategy is seen as an early milestone in successful strategy implementation. The problem managers face is that this approach does not appear to be working very well: the gap between strategic rhetoric and…

MANAGING IN THE WHAT? That’s right: in the ZOO, or the Zone Of Oblivion – both yours and that of others. The ZOO is a special place: it comprises all of the facts, feelings and experiences that make a huge difference to you and your business, but which you neither know, nor know that you don’t know. “Ahhh!” – you will say, “I have heard about this before – in some classroom or workshop: slightly greying gentlemen telling me to beware of ‘unknown unknowns’ with a look of self-important quizzicality on their faces.” I, for one, have never seen someone’s behaviour actually change as a result of hearing such a tired homily, just as you cannot actually grow eyes on the back of your head, no matter how hard you…

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR CONTAINS A STRIKING MIX of habit and creativity. On the one hand, much of what we do in life is routine: we take the same route to work each day; we sit in the same seats in meetings; and we purchase the same products at the grocery store each week. On the other hand, our daily life is marked by language whereby we produce novel sentences in new contexts, communicating our thoughts with sequences of words that we have never uttered before. Much of our everyday behaviour – both the habitual and the productive – feels effortless. In contrast, innovation settings often feel effortful and frustrating. Consequently, we are prone to think that innovation requires cognitive processes quite different from those involved in our daily behaviour. We suggest…

You have called reasoning “the core of human thinking”. How do you define it? Reasoning is a systematic mental process in which an individual reaches a conclusion from a starting point that depends on a perception, a memory or a set of verbal propositions. Children reason, as do infants even before they can speak, and even other species reason to some degree. When we reason, we aim to draw conclusions that are valid; that is, conclusions whereby if our premises are true, then our conclusions must also be true. Of course, we differ in our ability to reason, but the good news is that we can improve these abilities. Inferences are a key element of reasoning. Please describe how they work. Inference is a process by which new information is…

You have said that PowerPoint is part of the ‘epistemic culture’ of strategy making. How would you define an ‘epistemic culture’? ‘Epistemic’ refers to knowledge, and what I’m trying to achieve with my research is to show that strategy-making involves a distinct knowledge-production system, in the same way that scientific research involves a distinct knowledge-production system. In this way, strategic knowledge is like scientific knowledge – it is something that gets produced by organizations and by people. The epistemic culture is basically the culture within which that knowledge gets produced. There are practices in every organization around how to produce knowledge: you might hold meetings, collect data, perform analyses, or create PowerPoint documents. The epistemic culture defines not only how knowledge is generated, but how it gets ‘certified’ – how…

PHILOSOPHERS HAVE LONG THEORIZED about the inner workings of moral decision-making. With a few important exceptions, rational thought has taken a dominant position in this literature. Recently however, scholars have drawn from findings on moral intuition to suggest that decision-making is also impacted – if not dominated – by reflexive or automatic cognitive processes. As work in this area progresses, a major hurdle has emerged: despite strong arguments for the relationship between automatic processes and moral behaviour, there is no direct evidence of this relationship. Furthermore, though many have acknowledged that organizations can play an important role in shaping automatically-driven behaviour, these discussions have been relatively abstract: to date, no research has shown how an organization can affect the relationship between an individual’s automatic cognitive processes and their behaviour. The…

You have said that “just as rational thought depends on the imagination of alternatives, so, too, imaginative thought depends upon rational principles.” Please explain. The idea that logic and creativity are opposites – perhaps even each other’s nemesis – has been dominant for some time, but I would argue that rational principles actually underlie everyday imaginative thoughts. Cognitive scientists used to believe that rational thought was based on a ‘mental logic’ of strict rules, but the experimental evidence indicates that people reason by imagining possibilities, as Philip Johnson-Laird (see interview, page 78) has shown. In my book I suggest that imaginative thought is not as chaotic, unpredictable or impenetrable to scientific study as people think, but is instead underpinned by a set of principles that guide the possibilities that people…

January 19, 2:00-8:00pm Crispo Forum on Public Policy Speakers: Prof. Tom Wilson, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Rotman School, Prof. Anil Verma, Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Rotman School, Prof. Richard Lipsey, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Simon Fraser University Hon. Michael Wilson, former Ambassador of Canada to the United States, Tom d’Aquino,Chairman and CEO, Intercounsel Buzz Hargrove, former President, Canadian Auto Workers Rick MacDowell, former Chair, Ontario Labor Relations Board Bob Rae, Member of Parliament and former Premier of Ontario Prof. Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School, Thom Paterson, Councillor, Clearview Township January 24, 5:00-6:15pm Innovation in Business Experts Speaker Series Speaker: Prof. Shlomo Maital, Director, Technion Institute of Management and Co-Author, “Global Risk/Global Opportunity: Ten Essential Tools for Tracking Minds, Markets and Money” (Sage Publications, 2010) January 25, 6:00-8:15pm Big Ideas Speaker Series Topic:…