Integrative Research
Using integrative thinking to improve the “heartbeat” of customer, product, and business development
In the Developer Division at Microsoft, we embrace a model of building products we call Customer-Driven Engineering. It’s a process that focuses on reducing the distance between product teams and their customers, by coaching them in the art of user research and design-thinking. The goal is to empower our product teams, by giving them these tools so they can nurture strong connections with our customers and surface meaningful insights to inform our product strategy.
To that end, we’re constantly looking for tools and methods to enhance and evolve their learning. Every tool we add to our product teams’ arsenal increases their sophistication in gathering insights and accelerates their speed of learning.
That’s why I was so thrilled when I came across the work of Roger Martin featured in his book The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking and his follow up, co-written with Jennifer Riel, called Creating Great Choices: A Leader’s Guide to Integrative Thinking. Both of these books explore the world of Integrative Thinking, a theory developed by Martin and his colleague Mihnea Moldoveanu and taught at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
The Process of Integrative Thinking
At its heart, integrative thinking promotes the notion that successful business leaders have the “predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads.” This approach to decision-making pushes us beyond “either-or” decisions and builds the creative space for us to define entirely new models that encompass the best parts of each opposing model.
In some ways, the theory of integrative thinking flies in the face of conventional wisdom, where we’ve become accustom to believing that business decisions are often made unnecessarily complex due to multiple options, signals, voices, and opinions — virtually paralyzing us in our analysis. Many leaders work against these complexities, by ruthlessly pairing down alternate paths, moving quickly toward decisive action, and committing to the decision by ignoring detractors.
Integrative thinkers do just the opposite. They welcome the complexity and seek out opposing ideas to their own thinking. They do this because they believe the answers to their hardest business decisions reside in embracing the best parts of opposing models.
The Process of Integrative Thinking
As a theory, integrative thinking is more of an art form — a mindset — rather than a rigorous formula that can be applied to any business decision. The process is iterative and often will loop back on itself as practitioners continually loop through the process.
The process is broken up into 4 stages, which is referred to as the “Choice Cascade Model”:
Stage 1 — Salience: Decision makers must first identify the variables and gather the information that is relevant to the choice being made. In our workshops, we have teams start the process of tackling a business goal by completing a “diverge” exercise — identifying their assumptions and gathering information regarding the customers and the problem space that are related to the business goal they’re working on. The goal of this activity is to identify as many factors that could affect the outcome of the decision, resisting the urge to “converge” and eliminate opposing ideas. The key distinction of integrative thinking is that it encourages us to move beyond conventional wisdom. By challenging our own assumptions, and applying different (and often unconventional) “lenses” to a problem, we can approach old problems from a new vantage point.
Stage 2 — Causality: Integrative thinkers have a unique ability to create relationships between opposing ideas and generate multiple theories for why these relationships exist. They apply a growth mindset and choose a “learn-it-all” strategy; identifying the most impactful benefits of each approach. In short, integrative thinkers are comfortable operating in a multi-directional and non-linear way. They don’t immediately dismiss ideas, due to unmovable constraints, they seek ways to capture the benefits of these ideas in entirely new ways.
The Hypothesis Progression Framework (HPF) is a tool that helps our teams formulate their hypotheses and explore customer, product, and business development in a non-linear way. Rarely will our teams work from left-to-right, but rather they will move back-and-forth through the stages of the HPF based on the gaps they want to fill in their own knowledge. The point is that the HPF isn’t a linear tool, forcing teams to explore a problem area in a rigid way.
The HPF creates a “map” where teams can layer on their learnings and evaluate their progress, regardless of where they are in their development lifecycle. Tools like the HPF can enhance integrative thinking approaches to product development.
Stage 3 — Sequencing: Non-integrative thinkers pursue decision making by breaking down problems into sub-problems and defining a manageable process; reducing the complexity of their decisions (e.g. “Let’s fix our manufacturing problems first, before we worry about our marketing strategy.”). This approach is understandable, but it we’re not careful we can produce solutions in one sphere that constrain options in subsequent areas of the problem. (e.g. “Our new manufacturing process is now incompatible with our marketing strategy; making it much harder for us to provide personalized colors for our customers to choose from. Do we go back and fix the manufacturing process, or come up with a new marketing strategy?”)
Integrative thinkers are able to hold the entire causal model in their minds as they explore how decisions in one sphere can have a positive or negative impact in another. They’re adept at picking the right entry points to a problem to maximize their impact.
We use tools like the Impact/Effort Matrix to help product teams plot out their solution ideas. With this tool, teams can assess the impact of a solution on the customer and compare that impact with the amount of effort that’s required for us to bring that solution to market. The Impact/Effort Matrix encourages teams to explore the impacts of multiple solutions, rather than becoming fixated on just one idea. It helps them to look for solutions from multiple vantage points — a key feature of integrative thinking.
Stage 4 — Resolution: Integrative thinkers avoid framing decisions into either/or solutions (e.g. “We can improve service quality or we can lower prices.”). Instead, they seek to find solutions that imbue the best parts of opposing ideas (e.g. “We should remove waste from our internal processes, so that we can improve service quality and lower our prices.”).
Integrative thinking embraces an iterative, on-going, process where decision makers must accept a high amount ambiguity and uncertainty. It also requires a willingness to reject previously understood constraints in a pursuit of out-of-the-box solutions. For Integrative thinkers, the obstacle is truly the opportunity.
The Next Level of Customer-Driven Engineering
It’s rewarding to see how the tools we’re using in Customer-Driven Engineering can already help drive us toward more integrative thinking. However, integrative thinking can provide us so much more.
When I’ve described the process of Customer-Driven Engineering in the past, I’ve used the analogy of a heartbeat. The idea is that our product teams ebb-and-flow between qualitative and quantitative data. For example, a program manager might identify a consistent customer behavior through our analytics (e.g. clicking on a new feature) and use customer interviews to determine the motivation behind that behavior (“What motivated you to try this new feature?”). To help product teams understand this continuum, we’ve visualized it as a constant heartbeat, or rhythm.
After reflecting on the power of integrative thinking, my mentor and partner-in-crime Monty Hammontree and I have come to appreciate that this visualization is incomplete. It’s certainly adequate for newcomers to Customer-Driven Engineering, but a more advanced illustration is needed to encompass how integrative thinking can be applied to our biggest customer, product, and business development challenges.
…and if you’ll allow me to thoroughly exhaust this analogy, I think the answer still lies in the heart.
A more integrative view of the heartbeat accounts for the 4-chambers of the heart, working in unison to move our bodies forward.
By extending the analogy, the 4-chambers of the heart map to the 4 distinct methods we use to gather customer insights: observing, tracking, polling, and listening. These 4 methods are the source for integrative thinking within our Customer-Driven Engineering process — essentially, they represent integrative research.
Integrative research surfaces research methods that product teams can employ to help better navigate quantitative and qualitative explorations. This moves them beyond thinking of user research in the abstract (e.g. quantitative vs. qualitative) into a richer, more accurate, model.
Rather than making decisions from one method, they can operate like integrative thinkers by making use of data pulled from multiple methods.
Product teams have already begun to use the illustration above to help them identify where there may be gaps in their learning. Essentially, they use this illustration to determine how healthy their “heartbeat” is.
For example, a team can map all their customer, product, and business research efforts on the integrative research model and identify areas of their product “heartbeat” that are weakest. Perhaps the team has spent most of its resources on an in-product survey, but have little-to-no behavioral data; where they’ve observed customers using the product. This can inspire the team to spend a week-or-two working with our research team, as we coach them through running their own usability studies or help them organize an unmoderated study on UserTesting.
In essence, integrative research helps product teams become better integrative thinkers by empowering them to diversify their approach. Bringing in multiple sources of data that span from what people say, to what they do, to why they do it, and how often they do it.
By using integrative thinking and plotting their research efforts along the integrative research model, our product teams can illuminate our customers’ behaviors, motivations, and aspirations.
And at the end of the day, it’s those signals that are at the very heart of the product making process.
