Creating Great Choices: A leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking

Move Beyond Trade-Off Thinking. When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable.

Creating Great Choices: A leader's Guide to Integrative Thinking

Jennifer Riel

Harvard Business Review Press

2007

Abstract

Move Beyond Trade-Off Thinking. When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable.

But what about those crucial times when accepting the obvious trade-off just isn't good enough? What do we do when the choices in front of us don't get us what we need? In those cases, rather than choosing the least worst option, we can use the models in front of us to create a new and superior answer.

This is integrative thinking. First introduced by world-renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin in "The Opposable Mind," integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in "Creating Great Choices," Martin and his longtime thinking partner Jennifer Riel vividly illustrate how integrative thinking works, and how to do it. The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. And it lays out the authors' four-step methodology for creating great choices, which can be applied in virtually any context.

The result is a replicable, thoughtful approach to finding a "third and better way" to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade‐offs. Insightful and instructive, "Creating Great Choices" blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.