Humantific just released a chapter of their forthcoming book “design thinking made visible”.

Within this chapter, it seems, they somehow redefined what “integrative thinking” is:

“Integrative Thinking (and it’s cousin integrated innovation) is the disciplined ability of recognizing, orchestrating and integrating the diverse brainpower of cross-disciplinary teams as they grapple with and navigate complex innovation challenges.” [Humantific, 2010]

This was formally done by Roger Martin who defines integrative thinking a this way:

“…the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative resolution of the tension in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superior to each.”[Rotman 2008]

If you compare the two, the main difference is that Humantific looks into diversity as in the “diverse brainpower” of teams while Martin looks into them as “opposing models”. In a way, Humanific’s explanation re-frames integrative thinking a bit closer to the team approach and therefor towards design thinking.

Never the less, with this new publication Humantific enters the “Design Thinking” discourse which will give great new inputs for the community. For those who aren’t familiar with them, check out Humantific website or this publication NextD: Understanding Design Futures That Have Already Arrived!