Being a business leader, imagine you’re faced with a tough decision at work and you need your innovative thinking hats on. Should you focus on short-term profits or long-term growth? Traditionally, you might feel pressured to choose one over the other. But what if there was a way to do both?

In a recent podcast on Harvard Business Review, the co-authors of book Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis discussed how a shift in thinking can solve complex problems.

They said, entering “both/and thinking,” is a refreshing approach to problem-solving. It’s like being asked to choose between chocolate and vanilla ice cream, and realising you can have a swirl of both.

This method isn’t about compromise or finding a middle ground. Instead, it’s about embracing the tension between opposing ideas and using that creative friction to spark innovative solutions. It’s like being a tightrope walker, constantly adjusting to maintain balance while moving forward.

Think about the challenges of hybrid work. Instead of fixating on finding the perfect mix of office and remote days, both/and thinking encourages us to dig deeper. What do we value most about each environment? How can we blend these elements to create something even better?

They further discussed, both/and thinking approach isn’t just for boardrooms. It can transform how we handle personal dilemmas too. Wendy shares how it’s improved her parenting discussions with her husband. Instead of butting heads over different approaches, they’ve learned to pause, listen, and combine their perspectives for more creative solutions.

Leaders like Paul Polman at Unilever have used both/and thinking to great effect. He’d challenge his team to find more tension in their proposals, believing that discomfort often leads to breakthrough ideas. It’s like purposely adding a dash of spice to a recipe to elevate the flavour.

Other leaders get creative with metaphors to explain the concept. Terri Kelly at WL Gore compared balancing global and local needs to breathing – you need both inhaling and exhaling to survive. Zita Cobb on Fogo Island used a cauliflower to illustrate how local communities can maintain their uniqueness while still being connected to the global stem.

Now, both/and thinking isn’t a magic wand. It requires practice and can feel uncomfortable at first. It’s not about finding perfect “win-win” solutions every time. More often, it’s a constant dance of balancing different viewpoints.

But by embracing this approach, we open ourselves up to a world of possibilities we might have otherwise missed. It’s about seeing the forest and the trees, having your cake and eating it too. In a world that often pushes us to choose sides, both/and thinking reminds us that sometimes, the best path forward is the one that brings opposing ideas together.

Learn more about Innovative thinking and strategies in the first module of Help to Grow Management Programme at Kingston University. www.kingstonuniversitybusinesstraining.com

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In the quest to create new wealth, world top businesses have applied unconventional strategies and innovative approaches. This would not have been possible without questioning the existing business strategy frameworks and radically changing the basis of their competition in their industries.

But what motivates a leadership team to get on a strategic transformation in the first place?

For some businesses, it is a threat from a disruptive competitor or environment such as Covid-19 and sometimes, businesses get on the bandwagon of global megatrends – one of those roadblocks when you are forced into a certain direction to survive.

However, strategic thinking and systematic planning for the future are perhaps one of the most imperative driving forces for wealthy companies why they introduce a core business to disruptive transformations while paving a path for new growth. It is surely an uncomfortable place for a business and its people to be in but it is also the most fertile.

In order to better understand the transformations and the derivatives behind them, the Innosight research team came up with a methodology to evaluate strategic change efforts. In their research, they aimed towards the best practices across industries instead of being blindfolded by the metrics such as market value, revenue, or subjective and generic assessments such as ‘most innovative’. They name 3 methodologies to determine the legitimacy of innovation and transformation a business has achieved.

The first of them is New growth. Investigating quantifiable growth and questioning, has the business achieved measurable success at creating new products, services, markets and new business models? Using their primary metric which is the percentages of revenue outside the core, they look at the percent of revenue that falls out of their existing core growth areas.

Second of that is Repositioning the core. As the title suggests, it is to investigate whether the transformation reflecting from what the numbers has come from the applied change or is it still stinking old? An important question, how effectively the company transformed its old and core into a disrupted and new.

Lastly, Financials. If the numbers are not proposing the new growth, we may have a problem there in the long run if not the short. Has the return rate been reflected in the new areas? What is their market performance? Have losses been recovered? Is it on a slow growth to revive the business? How are their new products or services performing on their balance sheet?

What questions are you asking?

Tag: innovation

“Both/and Thinking – Using innovative thinking to solve toughest business problems

Leading by changing the rules of the games