Tony Golsby-Smith says that universities need to teach managers to think clearly and creatively, to communicate persuasively and to focus on customers and purposes if they are going to produce real leaders, not just more managers.

Over twenty years ago I was a secondary school teacher, and as such I found myself inadvertently contributing to one of the major problems facing organisations today: ‘silos’ of expertise that don’t communicate, don’t collaborate, and don’t understand each other. Here is how you define most secondary school curricula…

They are silos of subject matters that don’t connect and don’t talk to each other. It doesn’t matter what names you put in these silos (eg economics, history, mathematics), it still leaves you with the problem that plagued me as a young teacher. What connects the silos?

Fast forward twenty-five years, and I find the same problem exists in organisations. Most CEOs emphasise ‘collaboration’ as one of the key goals for their organisations and teams. But they are fighting the habits of a lifetime instilled by our education system and perpetuated in the way we structure our organisations. We structure our organisations just like those silos in the education system, and then we divide accountability accordingly. So what is the answer? What connects the silos and the organisation?

There is one simple answer to this question: the customers. Customers don’t understand and don’t care about how the organisation is structured or about its technologies, or specialisations. They rightly assume that all of these are not ends in themselves but a means to an end. And they rightly expect that the goal of the organisation is to create a meaningful and valuable experience for them.

That is why the customer and their experience has become a symbol for integration. This shift adds a second vital dimension to integrative thinking: purpose. Purpose defines what the whole system is about not just its parts.

In simple terms, the two questions that integrate a system or an organisation are WHY? and WHO?  Why do we exist? And who do we seek to serve?

This shift redefines the nature of management because it focuses attention outside the organisation. In the past, Taylorist thinking demanded that management look inward, and focus on efficiency and resource allocation. Now the new integrative thinking subordinates these questions to the bigger questions of customers and their experience; the value we are creating for that experience, and our broader purpose and goals within the ecosystem of our market.

Design thinking and organisations

To address these questions, people are turning to ‘design’ thinking as the new competency of organisations and leaders. Design thinking is what integrates customers with the organisation’s expertise. The Apple iPod has become the symbol of just how powerful this thinking can become. None of the technology in the iPod is new, and arguably others have supplied more robust products to the market. But what Apple did differently was to start with the customer and their experience and think backwards from that. Where others were asking themselves, ‘What new technology or features will give us a competitive advantage?’, Apple was asking, ‘What are the customers’ problems, irritations and desires and how can we give those customers an undreamt of experience in ease of use and access?’

This meant that they had to integrate technologies seamlessly to provide that experience. And they committed themselves so radically to the customer experience that they did not stop the integration at their own organisational boundaries but reached outside their own technology platforms and into the world of the music providers. In the end, they did not just create a cool product; they rewrote the rules of the industry.

This is the same answer that I stumbled on as a teacher: you won’t find integration in specialisations or details, but in a common way of thinking that does not change, no matter what the problem or the expertise. That common way of thinking has to focus on the problems not the solutions, and on the ultimate outcomes.  This thinking has to be agile, creative and outcome-focused. It also needs to be humanistic not just mechanistic. As a teacher, I reasoned that if students are taught how to think clearly and creatively, then they can apply that no matter what specialised area they end up in.

The same applies to our management disciplines today. It does not matter whether we study accountancy, finance, operations, strategy, IT management, project management, law, treasury or marketing. None of these subject matters will provide the integrative thinking we need. What we need is a common approach that can run across all of these disciplines. If we can teach managers to think clearly and creatively, communicate persuasively and focus on customers and purposes, then we will produce integrative thinkers – and as Peter Drucker used to stress tirelessly, that means we will produce leaders, not just managers – since it is the prime job of leaders to think about the whole system not just the parts.

Tony Golsby-Smith is the founder and CEO of 2nd Road, as well as the architect of the tools and methods that lie at the heart of the firm. Consulting and training over the past 20 years, he has broad experience in transforming corporate cultures to become more creative and more open in their thinking and communication.

Learn more…

The Rotman School of Business’s definition of integrative thinking