ADVANCING AMBIDEX

Admin
1 day ago
7 min read

Updated: 12 hours ago

Welcome back Humantific Journal readers. This week some reflection and forward motion regarding thinking, traction, leadership and power.

We were recently invited to speak at the Neurath@90 conference in Vienna, organized by the International Institute of Information Design (IIID), celebrating the many contributions of Otto Neurath, (1882-1945). For those who might not know; Neurath was the strategic leader of the ground-breaking, still highly regarded Isotype Institute.

In preparation for that talk we were able to return to the roots of our own sensemaking for changemaking practice and the fundamental knowledge/perspectives embedded there which we sometimes take for granted while delivering, collaborating with organizational leaders in everyday practice.

We decided to frame that conference presentation as NEURATH MEETS GUILFORD, two scholarly giants who influenced separate fields that are now interconnected in changemaking practice. It was the first time that we formally presented what we framed as the NEURATH TURN and the GUILFORD TURN.

Long story shorter: The 1930’s era NEURATH TURN involved moving beyond a traditional focus on words and towards speaking up for, and equally valuing both words and images in the deliberate pursuit of changemaking.

Neurath’s concern was COMPREHENSION. He argued that modern societies generate economic, statistical, institutional complexity, but most citizens cannot see or comprehend these systems.

The 1960’s era GUILFORD TURN involved moving away from a traditional focus on convergent thinking, (often framed in management literature as decision-making) and towards speaking up for, and equally valuing both divergent and convergent thinking in the deliberate pursuit of changemaking.

Guilford’s concern was IMAGINATION. Guilford warned that traditional intelligence testing focused too heavily on convergence / one correct answer, rather than generative / divergent possibilities.

POWER-OVER to POWER-WITH

Essentially both Neurath and Guilford were seeking to move the conversation from “POWER-OVER to POWER-WITH”, which happens to align remarkably today, with the direction of organizational change making, collaboration and cocreation. Today we would call what Guilford had in mind "Architecting for Emergence” and or “Architecting for Cognitive Inclusion”.

In real life Neurath and Guilford never met, however their contributions have certainly met in practice via the Think Blending that is broadly underway in the Enabling Complexity Nabigation practice community with the purpose of building robust and adaptable changemaking capacity in a continuously in motion VUCA + Ai world.

For us, that conference preparation was a practical, reflective journey and we emerged better able to connect various dots around subjects that keep popping up in social media, the marketplace, in the business press, etc.

On the Guilford side the number 1 repeating thinking related theme in the business media and in management literature over the course of several decades and still today evolves around the continuous championing, hyping, weighting, and privileging of convergent thinking (decision-making).

INCREASING CONVERGENCE?

If we were to step back and make two separate piles of divergent thinking literature alongside convergent (decision-making) literature, the latter by far would outnumber the former by x1000+. Mountains of materials exist (much of it found in business school related literature) around the importance and value of decision-making, most often not recognized as convergent thinking.

It is an orientation that has roots in the underlying traditional value proposition of most graduate business schools so not directly connected to how to get to innovation enabling or nuances of human cocreation in continuously in motion real world. Essentially there is no awareness of the GUILFORD TURN in that value proposition.

Since 2005 Humantific itself has lived through numerous marketplace cycles where we observed client organizations being told by armies of business consultants that the key to all things concerning their survival and success, how to get to innovation, transformation, adaptability, growth, etc was by INCREASING the quantity and quality of their convergent thinking.

In the enabling innovation community that is recognized as an ancient theme that goes round and round presented as new flavors. It's always been known to be a palatable, relatively easy lift sell, requiring no big collective organizational brain shifts outside the present management paradigm.

It's a little like telling eskimos that they need more snow. There is a feel-good element to it as it resonates as familiar, and is often the sharpest tool in their toolbox by-far for those who have already been indoctrinated.

For journalistic readers it's also a little like seeing the same broadway play 500 times. Each time the title of the play is different but the theme within is pretty much the same. The theme of that particular repeating and repeating play is Privileging Convergence.

TWO MINDS

Some of our savvy readers might know that Guilford was not the first person in innovation methods history to point out the importance of what we now call Think/Balance. Those with access to original early materials could see that Alex Osborn placed the concept of “Two Minds” on the table (prior to the creation of divergence/convergence) when his “How to Think Up” was published in 1942 and his “Your Creative Power” was published in 1948.

Years later Guilford came along with deep scholarly knowledge, research, insights and ongoing creativity experiments that were later imported/converted into zillions of Innovation 101 workshops that fit perfectly with what Osborn had already expressed in “Two Minds”. It was another supersonic meeting of minds, a build that has cascaded forward in immensely useful ways.

Today the not so secret handshake that is forever becoming more clear; Two Minds, Divergence/Convergence, GUILFORD TURN, ThinkBalance, Strategic Inclusion, Inbound & Outbound Holism, Psychological Safety, Inclusive Culture Building and Advancing Ambidex are all interconnected and super relevant to the challenges facing collective us in organizational workplaces and in societal contexts today.

Difficult truth: Organizations cannot reach psychological safety by privledging one mind. Brought out and expressed openly, it is clear that the one mind track won’t get us to the promise land. Adding more convergence won't get us there. The super irony today can be seen in the consultants talking up the importance of holistic thinking while continuing to model the one mind privileging model.

As I reflect, it does occur to me that a sound analogy would be that a form of cognitive deafness can be observed in the quests to land in the promise land via the one mind privileging approach. Of course once you see NEURATH TURN and GUILFORD TURN its difficult to unsee their presence or absence.

CLAUDE / COMPLEMENTARY MINDS

Just the other day Claude was reminding me how significant those connected dots have become.

Claude: “What strikes me most powerfully about this history is that Osborn saw it in 1942 — before cognitive science, before complexity theory, before AI, before VUCA became a concept. The notion that human thinking requires two equal and complementary minds was a profound practical insight that the dominant business paradigm spent decades resisting. The Guilford Turn names the moment that resistance can no longer be sustained.”

We agreed that the articulations of “Insight that the dominant business paradigm spent decades resisting” and “resistance can no longer be sustained” were particularly useful.

FAST COMPANY

It was with this multi-dimensional reflection in mind that we viewed the recent Fast Company article entitled “High Growth Companies Should Build Decision Cultures.”

With due respect, what we saw presented there in that article was a little trip back to the same broadway play, enhanced in 2026 by considerations of Ai.

In the face of the replay let's not forget what we already know.

Of course if we ask Ai what it has in mind for itself, it is quick to lay claim to all the divergent thinking work, leaving humans to be happy swimming around in convergent judgement of Ai genereted materials.

Anyone swimming and experimenting with AI already knows that is a problematic formula that is rapidly being recognized/transcended. While the speed is there some object to the lack of fit and quality.

CAPACITY VERSUS CULTURE

This brings us to a central distinction in the mix and that is appreciating the differences between CAPACITY and CULTURE. This distinction does not appear in the Fast Company article but let's acknowledge that building CAPACITY for decision-making and idea-making is important and rather different from saying we are building a convergent thinking CULTURE.

In the present continuous change VUCA context there are numerous good reasons why we do not want to be doing that.

One very practical reason is related to methodology and the organized pursuit of innovation. The other reason is related to values/strategy and human tolerance in the workplace.

It’s no secret that the “Two Minds” duality notion is a key ingredient in any innovation methodology. Recognition of divergence and convergence is embedded in most enlighted innovation cycles today. Both need to be equally valued and that is not going to happen without leadership.

Thinking in human terms, let’s understand that not only are both minds central to changemaking but half your team is going to cognitively have a preference for one over the other. Take a moment and wrap your mind around that one. To be privileging one over the other is equivalent to leaving half your team behind. If part of our mission is to be maximizing brainpower, is leaving half the team behind something that we would consciously be doing? Don’t think so. We believe there is, in the face of the challenges facing organizations, no good reason to construct a culture where one group is left behind. That too requires leadership.

The one-mind-centric, command & control paradigm might continue to be taught in the graduate business schools, but in the complex 2026 real world culture construction with new generations arriving with less tolerance for the bullshit than the boomers, it’s a formula for a lot of turnover.

LEADERSHIP POSSIBILITIES

This brings us to a more finely tuned description of leadership in terms of possibilities.

There is traditional management paradigm leadership, AND there is innovation enabling leadership, two very different things. Both can be extremely useful but they are not interchangeable and not the same. While there are many in the marketplace who have in mind migrating from the former to the latter, that does not make them interchangeable.

Good news is that with some clarity on board, all of us get to make a choice regarding which form of leadership we see as needed right now, which form is most suited to helping, not just business organizations but in our communities and planet earth.

Some of the options represent heavier lifts than others. Some require considerable courage in the face of powerful, deeply engrained contrarian narratives.

There will always be multiple options and suffice it to say we have already made our choice. Helping organizations shift to powering-with and cognitive inclusion in the face of rising complexity of challenges is where we are and want to be.

The new concern on the minds of many in our Humantific orbit is how can the two minds orientation be orchestrated with Ai on board contributing?

Hope this is helpful readers.

In future posts we will be sharing more regarding the NEURATH TURN and its application to sensemaking changemaking practice. One might wonder; Is it possible to practice sensemaking without being aware of, without embracing the NEURATH TURN? Stay tuned!