What is integrative thinking?
While conventional managerial wisdom often pursues predictable and measurable clarity, the integrative stance embraces an uncommonly high tolerance for, even attraction to change, openness, flexibility and disequilibrium. Integrative decision making typically involves a predictable cascade of four interrelated steps that constitute a heuristic process: The first consideration is salience: Which information or variables are relevant to the choice? For example, when evaluating the impact of a plant closure, a manager may fail to consider the public policy impact of the closure, because it is difficult to predict and integrate the reactions of politicians, media and the community into the decision. Yet answers produced through consideration of fewer variables are misleading and irrelevant at best. The second step for the integrative thinker is to develop an understanding of the causal relationships that connect the variables and choices under consideration. Integrative thinkers create cau
