Quotes from Roger L. Martin

If you can define the problem differently than everybody else in the industry, you can generate alternatives that others aren't thinking about.

simplification, 80–20 style, leads to more business as usual.

You can't make a renaissance person anymore, because the range of what you would need to do is just impossible. But you could actually assemble a renaissance team."7 The integrative thinkers rely on their "renaissance teams" to broaden salience, maintain sophisticated causality, and create a holistic architecture in their drive for creative resolution.

It's extremely difficult—and socially risky—to question an established model that many people believe and to start building a new model from scratch.

Design for habit As we've seen, the best outcome is that your offering becomes the object of an automatic response. So, design for that—don't leave the outcome entirely to chance. We've seen how Facebook profits from its attention to consistent, habit-forming design,

Having recognized that a choice needs to be made, you can now turn to the full range of possibilities you should consider. These might be versions of the options already identified.

We push teams to specify in detail the advantage they aim to achieve or leverage, the scope across which the advantage applies, and the activities throughout the value chain that would deliver the intended advantage across the targeted scope. Otherwise, it is impossible to unpack the logic underlying a possibility and to subject the possibility to subsequent tests.

I find that most teams consider three to five possibilities in depth. On one aspect of this question, I am adamant: the team must produce more than one possibility. Otherwise, it never really started the strategy-making process because it didn't see itself as facing a choice. Analyzing a single possibility is not conducive to producing optimal action—or, in fact, any action at all.

The Chinese character for "crisis," he pointed out to me, combines the characters for "danger" and "opportunity.

The Problem-Solving Power of Integrative Thinking 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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.1 —F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mastery is an enabling condition for originality, which in turn, is a generative condition for mastery. The modes are interdependent.

Fundamentally, the conventional thinker prefers to accept the world as it is. The integrative thinker welcomes the challenge of shaping the world for the better.