Productive Thinking Model

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What is Productive Thinking Model?

Productive Thinking Model is a six-step method that sets a success test, turns a messy trouble into a question, lists answers, strengthens one, and then assigns people and time.

Reproductive thinking is a way to refine what is known; it aims for efficiency. Productive thinking is a way to generate the new; it aims for insight.

Hurson draws that line in Think Better (McGraw-Hill, 2007). The six steps are his way of doing the second kind on purpose. The first kind still belongs wherever a known sequence is the right tool. A tight knot in a shoelace does not open because you pull the whole mass. One free strand lets the others move, and the question you choose is that strand. Creative Thinking still has to ask whether the new idea is useful. Divergent Thinking fills the list, and Convergent Thinking cuts it. Productive Thinking Model runs those two passes at each step, and it starts before the answer.

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Productive Thinking Model in 3 Depths

• Beginner: If your first sentence is already a fix, such as “we need an ad,” you are holding a guess. Write what hurts, in one line, before you name a remedy.
• Practitioner: Before the idea list, write what the solution must do, what it must not do, what you can spend, what you will not betray, and what would count as done. Then ask one “How might we” question, and keep listing past the obvious.
• Advanced: A polished plan for the wrong question is the expensive failure. The steps can change the question. They cannot, by themselves, prove that the later program worked.

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Origin

Productive Thinking Model comes from Tim Hurson, and he set the six steps down in a 2007 book. Hurson was born in 1946 in Johannesburg, grew up in New York City, and later worked from Toronto as a Canadian writer and consultant. He was a founding partner of Manifest Communications, a firm focused on social-change strategy, and its president until the firm was sold in 1996. After several independent years he became a founding partner of ThinkX Intellectual Capital. The six steps are the sequence that firm used in client sessions. In the preface of Think Better, Hurson says the work began about fifteen years before the book, after an online argument about whether creativity can be taught. He went to the Creative Education Foundation, which Alex Osborn established in 1954, and to its Creative Problem Solving Institute. Osborn, an advertising executive, and Sidney Parnes, a psychologist, built Creative Problem Solving around a simple order: list ideas first, and judge them only afterward. Hurson writes that the lists were useful and the judging was too thin, and he calls Parnes a mentor. Beside those conversations, he read engineering methods and borrowed their stricter checks. One method was a modeling family he calls Integrated Definition, or IDEF, and he says NASA used it. That family began in the late 1970s as ICAM Definition, inside a United States Air Force manufacturing program. He writes that the ThinkX sequence stands on Creative Problem Solving, plus his own sessions and the contributions of his business partner, Kristen Peterson. On 12 August 2005, the Globe and Mail already had him, as a ThinkX partner in Toronto, telling managers that leverage comes from catalytic questions, asked before anyone chases an answer. The book then names the six steps: what is going on, what is success, what is the question, generate answers, forge the solution, and align resources. McGraw-Hill published it in 2007, and a 2018 reissue added a new preface. Hurson is plain there: much of the client work is confidential, so several illustrations hide the company name. The sequence is teachable, and it is not a published experiment with a control group.

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Key Points

The steps earn their keep when listing and judging stay apart, and when the question is allowed to change. These four moves are the part you can run in one sitting.

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Applications

Use Productive Thinking Model when the problem is fuzzy and a familiar fix is already in the room. Each move below can start in a single meeting.

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Case Study

Hudson Guild, a settlement house in Chelsea, Manhattan, used a two-day lab to drop an advertising plan and sketch a referral program among its own services. Hurson tells the story in Think Better. He describes a guild of about 120 staff and about 250 volunteers, reaching more than 10,000 people a year. A 30 May 2006 report in amNewYork, on a later leadership change, said the guild served more than 11,000 people a year, so the scale is not only his recollection. Clients were using one service and missing others that might have helped. Day care sat near English classes, and job counseling sat near family counseling. The opening idea was an advertising campaign, so the neighborhood would learn the menu. The lab included the person charged with that marketing plan, the operations director, and fourteen representatives of different services. Hurson writes that his colleague Paul Groncki, a guild board member, assembled the team through Facilitators without Borders, the pro bono group he describes. On the first morning the room set a target future: clients should reach the full range of guild services when they needed them. During the success step, a side conversation changed the work. A day-care manager said she would not send Spanish-speaking clients to the psychiatric program, because she believed it operated only in English. The mental-health director said that limit had been true years earlier, and that staff now worked in several languages. The services had grown up apart, and people at the table did not know, or did not trust, one another’s offerings. Hurson writes that the facilitators stopped and spoke with Brian Saber, who had been asked to build the marketing plan. Saber agreed to leave the advertising question. The question that replaced it asked how the guild might know itself well enough that staff would feel comfortable referring clients to one another. Over the next day and a half the group sketched three moves: an ambassador program, shared jobs, and ongoing teaching between departments. Hurson says the guild then began a referral program inside the staff, rather than spending what he calls hundreds of thousands of dollars on an outside campaign. He reports a clearer view of client needs, fuller use of programs, and higher morale. He also reports Saber’s later view that the program had transformed the organization. In May 2006, amNewYork reported Saber’s appointment as executive director. He had joined the guild in 2000 and had served as deputy executive director. The book, published in 2007, speaks of him in that later role. The lesson sits in the question. A campaign would have bought attention for services the staff were not yet ready to recommend, while the referral question aimed at the crack clients were falling through.

In my experience, one of the most common reasons that programs, products, and change initiatives don’t work is that the wrong question has been asked.

The boundary sits in the evidence. These outcomes are the facilitator’s account in his own book. The book dates neither the lab nor a count of referrals before and after, and it does not attach a budget document to the campaign that was not bought. A two-day lab can change the question on the table, and it does not, by itself, measure the program that follows.

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Boundaries and Failure Modes

Productive Thinking Model loses its job when a known procedure is the right move, and it misleads when a workshop story is treated as proof. A payroll close, a medication check, or a fire drill needs the sequence people have already learned. A fresh list of ways to count the cash is the wrong kind of effort. Hurson’s contrast gives this its name: reproductive thinking aims at efficiency, and sometimes efficiency is the whole task. Use the six steps when the old path is what hurts. Keep the checklist when the old path is what keeps people safe. The six steps end in a plan with names and dates. They do not run the trial, keep the ledger, or announce that the plan failed. If the decision needs a measured change, you still need a record after the meeting. Creative Problem Solving, the older process under this model, has a long teaching history. That history is not a test of these six steps, and a facilitator’s story is not that test either. A common misuse is to walk the steps in order while protecting the answer you brought into the room. The guild’s advertising plan would have survived a polite meeting. It moved because the group could hear that staff did not know their own services. Another misuse is to treat a long exercise in the same book, an invented airline and its middle seats, as a result a carrier achieved. The load factors and sales targets in that exercise are teaching numbers. Hurson also says much real client work cannot be shown. An unnamed success is not a figure you can cite.

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Common Misconceptions

Three confusions make the model either too magical or too small. Each one skips a part of the sequence.

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Related Concepts

These pages sit beside the model. Each one does a job the six steps only borrow.

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One-Line Takeaway