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Dr. Keller received her Ph.D. in biophysical chemistry from the University of New Mexico in 1992.
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Can integrative thinking provide a powerful science education?
I recently came across an amazing little book by Roger Martin called The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking. It’s a business book but as I flipped through the pages I realized this was exactly the type of thinking we need to teach our kids.
Martin defines integrative thinking as:
The ability to face constructively the tension of opposing ideas and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generate a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new idea that contains elements of the opposing ideas but is superior to each.
Martin goes on to describe how leaders use integrative thinking to create ingenious solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems. Take for example, the story of A.G. Lafley at Procter & Gamble. When “Lafley took the helm” Martin says, “seven of it’s top ten brands were suffering market-share declines.” One viewpoint held that costs were out of control and needed to be reduced, and the other viewpoint held that innovation had stopped and needed to be expanded. These opposing viewpoints were in competition with each other, but rather than settle for second best, Lafley chose neither and both. Within four years Lafley doubled the company’s stock and took Proctor & Gamble to double digit profit growth and “in so doing, Lafley established himself as one of the finest CEOs on his era.”
Integrative thinking is powerful and if it can work for business how much better can it work for science? Scientists are continually faced with opposing viewpoints. Because scientists are in the business of building models there is always disagreement. As Martin points out, it’s easy to get stuck on a particular model and fail to see that “opposing models, in fact, are the richest source of new insight into a problem.” Don’t we want our kids to grab the richest source of insight to solve their problems? Isn’t this the kind of thinking we need to encourage in our students and isn’t this the kind of science education our kids need?
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I had heard Obama quote something similar when talking about the differences in opinion between he and former-primary-competitor, now running mate, Joe Biden. He said that he wanted to surround himself with people other than yes-men, so he could hear and debate thoughts different from his own.
Exactly!