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The Opposable Mind – Discussion with Heather Reisman and Roger Martin

Posted by Jeffrey on Jan 27, 2008

I had the opportunity to attend a discussion about Roger Martin’s new book, “The Opposable Mind” at Indigo the other night. [I had purchased a copy of the book but I still had not finished it when I attended the discussion.] Heather Reisman the CEO of Indigo interviewed Roger and after a exuberant introduction asked him to explain the main thrust of his book.
He responded that many business books on the market now are challenging in that they ask the reader to emulate certain behaviours shown by successful leaders. The issue with this approach is that many CEOs approached problems differently in various stages of their career and more importantly readers have a hard time internalizing many of these key behaviours because each situation is unique and readers may not be equipped to deal with subtleties particular to their challenges.

So instead of looking strictly at anecdotal situations, he went back and asked was there a common thread in their ability to think about challenging situations and resolve them to a satisfactory conclusion? After interviewing many leaders, he saw that there was a common thread to their thought process: they were able to hold two opposing ideas in their heads at the same time and think about them not in as ‘either/or’, but as a ‘both/and’ manner.

Like the concept of an ‘Opposable Thumb’ where humans and some primates can create tension between the thumb and fingers, the concept of an ‘Opposable Mind’ allows great leaders to create this ‘Idea Tension’ between two opposing ideas to create something which is better than either of the individual concepts alone.

Heather Reisman then brought up Edward deBono’s concept that “our brains are like formed Jello” and that if you pour boiling water over the Jello, it creates a ridge which water then returns to again and again. This is roughly analogous to developing and reinforcing techniques by repetition.

If this is true she asked, can using your mind “laterally” strengthen the techniques in the Opposable Mind?

Roger responded that he shared de Bono’s confidence that this is possible but added that it would not be enough to tell someone to “think laterally” but that leaders do something different; as described in the book, they use a four part thinking process (usually unconsciously). They consider:

1. Saliency - They consider more things and absorb complexity in the front end
2. Causality – How do these concepts relate? They consider increasingly complex relationships. Instead of looking at ‘A’ causing ‘B’ they also consider how then ’B’ can create more ‘A.’ He commented that “They wade into complexity to get to simplicity.”
3. Architecture - How to work their way through the problem. They hold the whole in mind while working on the parts in contrast to the tendency to break things up or parcel out the parts. He gave the example where Issy Sharp, CEO of Four Seasons Hotels emphasizes how Guest Services is a critical component of his operation, but in contrast to other organizations, there is no huge ’Guest Services’ Department. It is part of all the staff’s job description and responsibility to ensure a world class experience for all guests.
4. Resolution – They go back to the problem until they find sufficient resolution of the issues. He said that these leaders are, “Not constrained by two models but are informed by them.”

He made a good point in illustrating some issues where representatives from Herman Miller (disguised in the book as a company called VisionTech) hear two different things from a potential client based on their perspectives in the organization. “Reality seldom is,” was how he termed it, and leaders have to listen to different viewpoints of people in their organization to determine salience because some things are salient that were never in their original assessment of the situation. [Heather actually remarked that the way she remembered these steps was with a mnemonic: S.C.A.R. Roger responded that he'd never thought of it that way!]

Then Heather put out a real life challenge to the audience that Indigo faced: given the currency fluctuations and the fact that most of her inventory is sourced from the United States, when books arrive on the shelf there is often a marked discrepancy in prices in US and Canadian funds. How could Roger and then the audience use this methodology to come up with some solutions to the problem.

Roger went over the basics of the issue and then Heather asked the audience. There were a few suggestions, but one member remarked that the tendency was still to jump right to solutions without doing more listening to the different stakeholders, which is true to a point, but difficult to do in that context. [I have some thoughts on this problem... but haven't put them down in print... yet  ;> ] In the end, it seemed that this was a challenge which didn’t have any quick fixes but will require imagination and a different path to solving.

Furniture- 1 for 2

Posted by Jeffrey on Jun 12, 2005

Well I guess you can’t have everything. Just as I thought we would be able to finally start organizing and putting away all our stuff, we ran into a small snafu: I think that the designer who put together the plan for our furniture miscalculated the length and as a result, only the first bank of storage fit in, and the second one was too long.

More books, but did at least they will be well sorted.

So as you can see here we put some books in and got the bathroom cleared out (that was where we stuffed all those 7 plastic bins filled with books until the carpet installer finished laying the carpet.)
Actually it was Kim who put all the books away, by Library of Congress Heading categories. I would have just stuffed them in according to size, but apparently that is a big no-no. How was I to know?
But the furniture (from Neoset) looks good and matches the carpet and paint and the best part of it was that they send a couple of installers to put it in for you. Its actually pretty reasonable and looks more substantial than the IKEA units we looked at.
After clearing out the bathroom, I wired in the potlights and wouldn’t you know it, they didn’t work either. Couldn’t figure out why and was just about to call my friend Graham, who helped me on my earlier electrical questions, when I just decided to call it a night. I woke up thinking about why it didn’t work and was dreading the investigation: if I couldn’t get them to work, would I have to rip out the ceiling in the bathroom (again)? No way! Then I thought some more and since it’s just wire, the only place that you could get problems is at the connections (assuming that you haven’t cut the wire somehow.) So I used the circuit tester and sure enough, there was current getting to the first fixture in the circuit, but not the second.
So I pulled apart off the marettes and out drops the end of the wire. Seems that it broke off when I maretted it the first time. When I put it all back together it worked! And then I put in the bulb in the shower enclosure and it works too! Now if you shower down there you can actually see versus feeling like you are in a dark cave.

Trim work takes forever…

I also put the piece of trim on the edge of the stairs and painted it out to match all the trim in the rest of the house. Now I have to finish the baseboard around the rest of the room while we wait for the furniture guys to come back. They will take out one of the sections and replace it with a shorter one so that the entire thing will fit.

Finally, less crap, more light

Posted by Jeffrey on Jun 4, 2005

Finally, I moved all of the crap out of the main room so that the carpet installer could come on Saturday. As you can see, the room looks much bigger!

Now where did I hide all that junk?

I also installed all the recessed halogen lights this week which was a bit of a pain, but I wanted to do it before the carpet went in. I made a detailed drawing of where the lights should go in so that after the drywall went up, I would know where to put in the holes. I used a 3″ hole saw to cut out the holes and then wired up the lights to the 14/2 wire that the electricians fed.
The GU-10s look really good and they throw off a nice bright light. The one’s I got have a gimbaled head so that you can use them as wall washers as well or just to target the light. I haven’t really fiddled with that yet, I have just put in the last 2 Friday night so the next task is to put the two in the bathroom to complete the circuit for the one that is in the shower stall.

Oh yeah, all the junk is in the back room.

Paint, paint and more paint.

Posted by Jeffrey on May 29, 2005

The task for last weekend was to make sure I painted the entire room and bathroom on Saturday. After doing some final sanding near the stairs the area had to be primed and the beam painted with ceiling paint. While that was drying, I went around and cut in with the brush so that I could start on the other walls. I had put up the tape the previous few days so that I could make sure that the painting got done on Saturday.

I hope this is the last of the painting.

We got some help in choosing the paint color for the basement walls from Debra who is an Interior Designer. She really helped us in choosing the other colors that we painted the rest of the house. Again, it was a catch 22 situation as you are looking at colors and materials for a room. Do you start with the carpet and match the paint or vice versa? In this case, since it was a basement we didn’t want to go too dark but we still wanted to avoid the opposite effect of just white-bombing the entire room. Blah.
When I first put on the paint, I though “Well, it is pretty much yellow and it will match the walls in the main room of the house”, but I found that when it dried it had a more grassy green color than I had originally thought that really looked good so far, with the limited amount of lighting that is put out by the single clamp lamp I am moving around the room. Once I get the recessed halogen lights in (which is this week’s task) you will really get a sense of the color. [In fact the color looks much, much greener in these photos than what it actually looks like in real life, probably part of the effect of the flash on the camera.]
The west wall (which also goes up the side of the stairs)

It is hard to see but the post and the wall beyond are both painted the same color.

used to have awful stucco on the surface which was applied in the 70s. It was actually on every surface in the room, except the floor before I gutted the room. This wall was the last holdout. I was thinking about drywalling over the stucco, but more sanding and taping didn’t seem appealing. So I tried something else; I knocked down the surface of the stucco with a scraper to smooth it out somewhat. Then I applied a skim coat of drywall compound with a 7″ drywall knife which took rather a long time.
After all this dried I lightly sanded it to take off the high points and primed and painted it. It looks lightly textured, but not like those fussy ‘faux-finish’ treatments that can be kind of cheesy. All told it probably took less time than putting up new sheets of drywall on the wall and actually looks pretty good.
Now along with installing the lighting, I have to rip out all the ugly carpet on the stairs and get all the stuff out of the room so the carpet installers can come on Saturday and do the carpet. I bought about 75 feet of baseboard that has to be painted as well, but I might do that after in the back room if I can find some space back there.
[PS for those who can stand it I have put up a picture of the room after I ripped out all the old walls and primed the foundation wall.]

I have new respect for drywallers – Part 3

Posted by Jeffrey on May 23, 2005

So a lot has happened over the past few days. That’s what happens when you work for 3 days on something for about 12 hours a day. But the work needed to get done and now that the ceiling paint is on, you can get a real sense of what the final room will look like.

With the primer and ceiling painted it is starting to look like a room.

But just a bit of background; after the first coat of taping and mudding (which seemed to take forever) I went around with a scraper to take off the high points on the joints before sanding. Yes I did finally use that tool which attaches to the shop vac and it worked pretty well, but the simple $4.95 abrasive foam sanding pad actually seemed to work better. It is flexible so it can get into corners (and I tell you there are a lot of corners in this basement), where the pole sander is good for more of the straight runs. It does seem to suck up a lot of the dust, but by the time I was done, I was still covered in dust. I tell you, good thing I was using the mask.
It took a fiendish amount of time to go in and sand and then put on the second coat of drywall compound. I thought I could get by with a couple of the 7kg tubs in addition to the half empty 20kg pail leftover from an earlier job. No way. I kept going back to the Depot every couple of days or so to get a couple of additional tubs. Now I bet you’re thinking, “There’s no way you can use all that material.” Well yes you can. And you will. I went through over 50 kg of compound on this job and I tell you, it didn’t all end up as dust, although at times it did seem as if there was a fog bank in the basement. The fan in the window did a good job of exhausting the air and when the back window was open even got a fairly brisk cross breeze going.
After the sanding I realized that I should construct the door for the storage area under the stairs so I had to cut down the old opening with the sawzall and build a frame and set the hinges for the door. Then I had to cover over the old wood with drywall cut to the angle of the stairs.

The under-stair storage compartment door. I really should install that insulation instead of moving it around the room.

At the same time I also drywalled the post beside and put in corner bead and slapped more (!) drywall compound on it to set up overnight. Unfortunately it hadn’t set up properly to sand, so it will have to wait for the final sanding and priming.
Priming new drywall is important as the boards tend to suck up paint and also because of banding where the areas with joint compound will appear lighter than the surrounding wall if not properly primed. I used Para Primetech^TM which seems to work ok although it did require two coats to be effective. I say 2 coats because the “1 Coater” is the biggest lie in the paint industry. I have never found a paint / roller combo that can deliver this holy grail of paint nirvana. Maybe under ideal conditions when the sun is at the correct angle and the planets align but who has time to wait for that?
So after priming every surface which took a long time, I called it a night.
Then today was just doing a bit of light sanding on the storage area and the post and putting on the final coats of compound to ready for priming that later on. The main task was rolling the ceiling with this paint that comes out of the can pink and dries white. It is CIL Smart paint and it sure was pink. It was a bit disconcerting as I was putting it on but indeed it did dry up to a nice flat white. And it covered pretty well so that whole thing only took a few hours. Now the next task will be installing the recessed lighting so I can actually see what’s going on without having to move a clamp lamp around the room.

I have new respect for drywallers..

Posted by Jeffrey on May 1, 2005

I was putting up the drywall to cover the walls (5/8″ Type ‘X’ Drywall for those who care), and soon realized that the pros make it look way too easy. Even though they have probably better tools than what I have, they have years of experience so can figure out the best way to for example, hang drywall around a window rather than having to think about it for a while like I do. I guess if I was doing this day in and day out I’d get better too. Maybe I should get them to come to my office and see how they do with Powerpoint?

Got the drywall over the rigid insulation; I was getting tired at looking at pink walls.

Other than the walls, I hung the wallboard on the ceiling in the bathroom which was kind of challenging as there is not much room to move around in there, so I had to bring the pieces in to test the fit, then back out to trim, then back in to test… You get the idea.
Before I could finish the ceiling in there, I had to fish the wire for the light which went in the shower stall. I had the electricians leave enough so that I could fish it along the joist space over the shower stall to hook up to the fixture, but I had to leave off a sheet so I could get my hand in there to fish.
I also had to cut through the ceramic tile ceiling so I was at the Depot last week (see previous post) and bought a carbide tipped hole saw. I wasn’t sure it was going to work so I tested it out on a scrap piece of tile and it seemed to be doing an OK job. I then marked the ceiling and started cutting. Man, there was dust everywhere! After the tile was finished, I got through the drywall (2 layers!). I did a pretty good job but when I test fitted the fixture (good for the diameter), I found that the part of the fixture that extends out at a 90 degree angle (the part on the left in the photo),

The part that sticks out on the left prevented the rest of the can from fitting through the hole in the ceiling.

couldn’t fit through the hole since the thickness prevented pushing that part of the light up and through. Out came the sawzall to trim the thickness out just enough so I could slide it up and through. Attached the wires and siliconed it in place. Now I just have to wait until I power up the rest of the lights in the bathroom to see if it all works! Hopefully that will be soon.

Framing is a drag

Posted by Jeffrey on Apr 13, 2005

I have spent the past couple of days framing in the ductwork along the ceiling.

Roughed in bulkhead to contain main supply duct.

The original plan, last year was to relocate all the ducts to the side wall so we would have the full height ceiling but when I found out that the price tag on that event would be several thousand, that quickly dropped off the scope of work. So now I am enclosing with some G1S ply so that I can get a bit more height under the ducts and it is a bit more durable than drywall.
Of course as I was going along putting up the 2 x 2s I found the place where the former owners had hacked out a section of the main duct run, because, well, I guess because they could… Maybe it was the supply to the sauna which they later covered up because there were no registers in the sauna before I took it out. No matter, I had some sheet metal left over from the first patch job I did (which incidently increased the amount of heat we got in the Master bedroom), so I just bent it up and used some self tapping screws to fix it in place. Then I taped the seams with some of that metal duct tape. BTW, the traditional “duct tape” is good for everything but ducts. It dries out so that makes it useless for patching ducts. Who would have guessed?
The next task is to get the plywood cut and secured into place.

Roughed in bulkhead to contain main supply duct.