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Taking a holistic path.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

You won't resolve problems creatively by using the time-honored but unimaginative reductionist approach of patterning new solutions on past successes. Research shows that leading solution creators use an intuitive, holistic method that can be described as a smart questions approach.

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Knowledge is power. Unremarkable statement. Yet it is also insufficient if not dangerously misleading.

You have plenty of knowledge about lean management, Six Sigma, activity-based costing, total quality management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and on and on. Surely, the goals and objectives of such knowledge are very worthwhile, so why are you so often disappointed with the results obtained when you and your organization apply this knowledge as you plan, design, develop, improve, solve problems, or create systems and solutions?

My message is simple-sounding, yet it can change your work and life to be more creative, effective, and enjoyable: Knowing how to use knowledge is power. Having knowledge is indeed important but insufficient.

Ever since I started my professional career more than 50 years ago, the emphasis in industrial management has been on problem solving, efficiency, and improvement. And definitions of the field even today say something like "Managers are prepared with many tools to help organizations be efficient." But managers use these problem-solving tools within the conventional approach. And the conventional approach is a major factor that vexes organizations and individuals, causing business leaders, managers, politicians, workers, and parents to miss intelligent, cost-effective, creative, and continuing solutions to their problems.

Problems with problem solving

Research in problem-solving methodologies has been extensive over many decades, involving thousands of individuals in hundreds of different circumstances, including corporate, governmental, and personal. My research with William J. Chandon indicates that around 8 percent of the population are the leading creators of solutions, and they use a different approach to creating solutions than the other 92 percent.

This huge number of people using the conventional problem-solving approach is a cause of the ineffective and unproductive results that so often occur. You may be wondering how that could happen, how so many people could be using ineffective methods. The main reason is that they are taught (and almost all organizations use) reductionism to solve problems.

The reductionist (or "rational") approach derives from the Cartesian scientific thinking paradigm that took root in European society in the 1600s. Named after French philosopher Rene Descartes, the Cartesian method of thinking was originally an attempt to expand human knowledge beyond the dogma of the Church, which dictated and controlled what people believed about everything, from astronomy and medicine to social relations and politics.

Descartes created an approach that relies extensively on empirical evidence, logic, and reason. Problems, in the reductionist approach, are solved scientifically: Identify a key part or assumption, collect data about the part, analyze the data, propose a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, evaluate the results, and make a conclusion.

Consider how the following...

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