articles reviewed

In the Fall 2007 version of the Rotman Magazine, in an article titled  "Becoming an Integrative Thinker" by Roger Martin, the decision making process was broken down quite carefully into four parts. Martin states that the first two parts of decision making are salience (what decision makers pay attention to in the decision) and causality (relationship between parts of the decision). With these first two, we create our model or architecture for decision making.  Then after constructing a strong enough model for making the decision, a resolution is reached. Our models are based on personal stance, individual understandings, and experiences. 

Stance is each individual’s own personal philosophy, or schema combined with the individual understanding of the daily, adaptive yet biased, and subjective ideas which when combined with experience, we use to craft or strengthen our models of thought.  

Integrative thinkers give leverage to different models to come up with the best resolution to decisions and problems. Integrative thinkers include associating constantly new and older but ever-evolving perspectives, tools, models, experiences, stances, and approaches. I agree with most of this article and I think that the best managers are integrative thinkers as well as collaborative leaders. For me it is difficult to see this in action without careful and detailed observation, Unfortunately I have not yet been able to see inside the minds of my current managers or observe enough to know if they really make decisions using these tools and methods.  I can say that they seem to adapt very well to new and difficult circumstances and see arguments with equal leverage for both sides.

I also found similar understandings in the Winter 2008 Rotman Magazine article “Point of View: Decision Making” by Mintzberg and Westley. Mintzberg and Westley wrote about three approaches to decision making, “thinking first”, “seeing first” and “ doing first”.  They argue [that different approaches work best for different kinds of decision making in different situations, and that effective decision makers integrate all three styles or methods , This is when  the verbal, factual “thinking first” works best in situations when the ideological, visual process of “seeing first” does not work as well, which in turn works best at different times from the visceral, experiential “doing first” and that all three should be integrated together into every successful and effective decision manager [This second article was important to me because it reaffirmed that no one model of decision making is inherently better than any other, Both articles talked about the need to adapt if not overhaul out dated and ineffective decision making processes.