They say mistakes are key to learning. Having had my share, I couldn’t agree more. But I would say while mistakes are great learning experiences, crises exercise a unique mental capacity for (wicked) problem solving: integrative thinking.

Roger Martin defines integrative thinking as the “ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superiors to each”.

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