Integrative Thinking

How to Think
for maximum personal productivity

…And why it will be your number one advantage for your professional development.

The number one secret to professional productivity is not about any one technique like breakthroughts in time management, getting organized, efficiency, effectiveness, energy balance, or process management.

It is something much more complex and difficult to explain.

Let's call it Integrated Thinking.

This is the stuff that industry legents are made of. It's about integrating all of your experiences, your skills, and your values into an interconnected framework that you use to achieve maximum productivity far beyond your peers.

Not something that has any one single tool, technique or principle. But something that will evolve by pursuing each of the other secrets to productivity…

Roger Martin writes, “More salient features make for a messier problem. But integrative thinkers don’t mind the mess. In fact they welcome it, because the mess assures them that they haven’t edited out features necessary to the contemplation of the problem as a whole. They welcome complexity because they know the best answers arise from complexity.”

External articles on Integrated Thinking

(links open new windows)

Highly recommended somewhat esoteric article on Integrated Thinking.

Interview with Margin Rogers on The Opposable Mind

How to Develop Integrative Thinking

The Art of Integrative Thinking (pdf)

Three Thinking Techniques

6 Beliefs of an Opposable Mind

How Integrative Thinkers Think Things Through

List of other references

In the near future I will be able to share much more on this number one secret to professional success.

Try to become ever more aware of using questions to spark creative thinking that remains honest and grounded in reality whilst reaching for new connections between thought, theme and thing.

Consider:

• How long would you stay in business without new thinking every day?
• Who owns the thinking in your business?

(Update: I have been given the go ahead to begin introducing people to a society that has been kept under wraps for years. It's the group that I originally learned Integrated Thinking from. And to introduce it, as well as some other advantages for integrated thinkers, I have initiated a Lifestyle Alliance.)