Here is an excerpt from an article written by Roger Martin for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

* * *

In another blog I shared Martin’s ideas about how in some situations you can combine two strategic logics to create a best of both by “doubling down.” In this integrative approach you produce the key benefit of the one logic by heavily emphasizing a key component of the other.

The second way to combine two logics is to disassemble the problem in such a way as to enable the use of both logics simultaneously.

This is what Bruce Kuwabara, principal of the architectural firm Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects did when he led the design team that faced a trade-off of opposing strategy logics in designing the new head office for Manitoba Hydro — a building that went on to win the prestigious award for the Best Tall Building in the Americas in 2009 by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

The client had two different and potentially conflicting goals for the building. On the one hand they wanted a high level of energy efficiency in order to demonstrate Manitoba Hydro’s commitment to conservation and sustainability. On the other hand they also wanted a livable and enjoyable building for Manitoba Hydro’s workers.

But these translated into difficult opposing strategies for Kuwabara. Conventionally, high energy efficiency called for keeping the same air in the building so that it could be raised or lowered to the desirable temperature once and then kept there.

Recycling air in an energy efficient building could only be feasible if the external air was more or less the same temperature as the internal — hardly the case in Winnipeg, a city famous for its deadly cold winters and ripping hot summers.
A livable, enjoyable building called for exactly the opposite: loads and loads of fresh air, with each batch requiring heating or cooling to get it to the right temperature, which in a place like Winnipeg would be expensive.

Kuwabara, working with Thomas Auer who was the energy engineer for the project, realized pretty quickly that you couldn’t achieve both goals if, like most architects, you considered Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) as a single system: if your HVAC system brought in a lot of fresh air, it would be expending energy at a fierce rate heating and cooling it; if instead your HVAC system brought in little fresh air, it would save lots of energy but would produce a stale air environment.

So Kuwabara’s team asked the question: Did HVAC have to be one system? Or could V be considered distinctly from H&AC? And if so, could the optimizing models for each co-exist in one building?
As soon as the self-imposed constraint of a single system HVAC went away, intriguing possibilities emerged.

* * *

To read the complete article, please click here.

Roger Martin (www.rogerlmartin.com) is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada. He is the author of The Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking, followed by The Design of Business: How Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. His most recent book is Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works (February 5, 2013), co-authored with A.G. Lafley. All were published by Harvard Business Review Press.