THE VALUE OF THINKING OPPOSITE

According to the Newton's third law of physic, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Can the same be said of thought patterns? Could thinking opposite solve some of the planet’s greatest challenges?

An opposite mindset is at the heart of Muhammad Yunus’ business, the Grameen Bank (GB), and his pioneering work in the field of microcredit. The economist won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for proving that lending money to the poor to run their own micro-businesses can transform lives. Yunus proposes a worldwide shakeup: solve problems by creating self-sustaining social responsible businesses.

Yunus’ own awakening came in 1974 when, as an economist at Chittagong University (Bangladesh), he took his students on a field trip to a remote village. When he met a bamboo-stool seller who was forced to pay back lenders at an interest rate as high as 10% each week, leaving her with pitiful profits, he realised that the kind of economics he taught was fundamentally wrong.

Against the advice of banks and government, Yunus arranged microloans at market interest rates and in 1983 formed the GB – “village bank” – founded on principles of trust instead of so-called collateral.

Yunus’ first battle was with other banks. Bankers told him that lending to the poor was absurd. They said, ‘Banking is a process in which you lend money to people who need it’. But Yonus replied, ‘You lend money to people who already have lots of money but you don’t lend money to people who have nothing’.”

Yunus learnt how conventional banks went about their business – and then he did the opposite. “I created a bank that was almost the mirror image of the traditional bank. They go to the rich, we go to the poor. They choose cities, we choose remote villages. They focus on men, we focus on women.”

And it worked. By 2015 in Bangladesh, GB had 2,568 branches with 21,751 staff serving 8.81 million borrowers in 81,392 villages. Of the borrowers today, 97% are women. The loans are paid back at a higher recovery rate (97%) than any other banking system.

Yunus’ work in some of the poorest villages highlighted difficulties ranging from healthcare to education. Again, he tackled each issue in a radically opposite way. “Every time I solved a problem, I did so with a business engine behind it. I wanted to avoid the charity route. Charity money has one life. Social business money has an endless life.”

Anna Johnston, from the London Business School, says that wrapped up in the characteristics of a social business is a think opposite mindset. Are you able to close the loop on your product cycles? Should profit always be your first motive? Could you fund a social business instead of offering conventional aid? Even further, can the opposite-thinking mindset help to tackle some of the organizations' biggest challenges?

What's the Question?

Too often managers come up with great “solutions” but when applied it doesn’t really solve the problem. One of the most common mistakes managers make trying to solve a problem is ask the wrong question. Great answers, but wrong questions

Hudson Guild is one of the oldest and largest non profit organizations operating in the Chelsea area of Manhattan in New York City. With a “collaborative community building” approach, Hudson Guild is committed to addressing common interests and needs based on social shared values. For more than 100 years, they work to make more accessible information, skills and opportunities to learn and grow to community members creating and strengthening “the social fabric that binds a community and enable its members to succeed in both good and bad times.” 

This organization with around 150 staff members and 250 volunteers had a problem: Only a few of its clients were taking full advantage of the services available. Day care clients, for example, might benefit from ESL programs whereas job counselling clients might benefit from family counselling. In fact, many people who may benefit from programs were missing out simply because they were unaware that the service existed. Hudson Guild’s executives believed that an advertising program might help promote the organizational services and inform the community on how they can access the many available services. 

In order to answer the question: “How might we develop an advertising program to promote our service to the community?”, Hudson Guild organized a creative thinking laboratory. As they were working on how clients could access the full range of services whenever they needed to, a side conversation developed about the variable quality of the guild’s programs. Although people were proud of their own service offering, they were unsure about the quality of the services provided by their colleagues. Furthermore, they didn’t have essential information about other services available. For example, one of the day care managers said that she would not refer Spanish-speaking clients to the mental health program because its services were available only in English. However, the director of this program said that although that had been true some years earlier, his staff now served clients in several languages including Spanish.

Further discussion revealed that each of the guild’s services, having evolved separately to meet emerging community needs, was operating with poor communication and coordination among programs and consequently with a very poor understanding of other guild offerings. Once that was revealed, a different question emerged that lead down a very different strategic path. The problem might not be that the community didn’t know enough about Hudson Guild but rather that Hudson Guild didn’t know enough about itself.

Instead of “How might we develop an advertising program to promote our service to the community?” the Hudson Guild’s team began to explore a very different question: “How might we know ourselves better so that we can feel comfortable referring clients to one another?” In a few hours, the group developed a Hudson Guild “ambassador” program, job sharing, and ongoing interdepartmental education. Instead of spending money on an external advertising campaign, Hudson Guild began a comprehensive client referral program. 

The result was a better understanding of client’s needs and expectations, more effective service offering, increased program use, and a dramatic improvement of its staff performance. 

Too often, managers ask the wrong questions. Specifying the question is the most crucial step in order to solve the problem. You can plan your strategy carefully, allocate the best resources and even spend more money than ever before. But if you are answering the wrong question, at the end you will be wasting time and resources. Spending enough time to find the right question gives you a chance to hold back and not jump to assumptions about what the problem is. It is too easy to start off with obvious and often incorrect problem statements. But, if you start with the wrong problem, it’s unlikely you’ll ever arrive at an effective solution. Tim Hurson, an expert in productive thinking and innovation says: “one of the most common reasons that programs, products, and change initiatives don’t work is that the wrong question has been asked.” 

Most of the times, solving a problem within an organizational environment requires that we do not rush to answer but to hang back, to keep questioning even when the answer seems so clear and obvious. One of the characteristics of good leaders is their ability to explore the symptoms in-depth in order to identify the right question, resisting the temptation of start working on quick answers.