Innovation Blog

Induction?  Deduction? No!  Abduction!

By Shlomo Maital

    In the history of science,  it is known that Francis Bacon, in the late 16th C.,  urged scientists to engage in induction:    Observe carefully, then generalize and theorize based on those observations.  

    Today, that approach is the foundation of what is known as grounded theory:  deeply-engaged involvement with a company or product or team or organization, data collection, and only then, organizing the data into hypotheses and theories.[1]  This, I believe, is how management research should be done. 

    But it isn’t.   Why?

     Bacon was soundly defeated by Descartes, who preached deduction.  He  said that first one begins with a set of assumptions and hypotheses,  and only then, moves on to collect data and test the hypothesis — what is known today as the scientific method.

     Now, along comes Roger Martin, former McKinsey partner and now Dean of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.   I’ve visited Rotman several times, and find it is one of the few business schools that practices innovation, rather than simply teach it.  The reason is its Dean, Martin, and principal donor, Joseph Rotman.

     Martin urges abduction.  (No, not the kind that means to kidnap).  Abduction, to Martin, means “the logic of what could be”.   He builds on the forty-year-old concept of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, (Steps to an Ecology of the Mind, 1972), who described a form of reasoning, “this is to this, as that is to that”, that leaps laterally, through story and analogy, finding links where others see none.  Writing in Business Week, together with his colleague Jennifer Riel,   Martin uses Research in Motion (RIM), Canadian inventors of Blackberry, as a powerful example.   He notes that when an innovator comes up with an imaginative idea, those who fund and judge it often demand validation, proof — using deduction and/or induction,  “what is”.   This is often not possible, especially for truly imaginative ideas. 

     Instead, those squareheaded nay-sayers should apply a different type of logic: abduction, from the Latin “ab” , from,   and “deducto” , to carry or lead.

   Writes Margin: “….When facing an anomalous situation, we can turn to a third form of logic: abductive logic, the logic of what could be. To use abduction, we need to creatively assemble the disparate experiences and bits of data that seem relevant in order to make an inference- a logical leap-to the best possible conclusion.” 
        Martin recounts the story of RIM: 
   “At Research in Motion, makers of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, abductive logic is embedded in the culture. Mike Lazaridis, RIM’s founder and co-CEO, encourages his people to explore big ideas and apparent paradoxes to push beyond what they can prove to be true in order to see what might be true. “

         RIM began by making beepers.  Its founder pressed RIM workers to see the ultimate beeper  (abduction).  Martin urges organizations of all kinds that seek to be innovative to practice abduction, just like RIM:   

    

  “Asking what could be true – and jumping into the unknown-is critical to innovation.  Nurturing the ideas that result, rather than killing them, can be the tricky part. But once a company clears this hurdle, it can leverage its efforts to produce the proof that leaders depend on to make commitments-and turn the future into fact,”  says Martin.

[1] “Bridging the Chasm Between Management Education, Research, and Practice: Moving Towards the Grounded Theory Approach”, by Shlomo Maital, Srinivas Prakhya, and DVR Seshadri:  VIKALPA, Jan.-March 2008