Many of us envy leaders who see everything in black or white, an easy choice between alternatives. But tough, messy problems usually involve an internal tug of war because the alternatives involve sorting through tensions, dilemmas and paradoxes. Black-or-white thinking might be disastrous.
Wendy Smith, a professor of management at the University of Delaware, and Marianne Lewis, dean of business at the University of Cincinnati, have spent two decades studying such difficult decisions. We will often describe such problems as presenting tensions, dilemmas or paradoxes for us, but they argue there is a difference worth understanding between the three types of challenges.
Tension is the overarching term to describe when alternative expectations and demands are in opposition. Tensions are not necessarily good or bad; they can drive innovation or cause defensiveness.
Dilemmas are deeper, when the tension involves two opposing alternatives, each offering a logical solution to the problem at hand.
“The pros of one option define the cons of the other. We chase our tails looking for the clear, right and lasting solution, but it often doesn’t appear,” Ms. Smith and Ms. Lewis wrote in their book, Both/And Thinking. Worse, when we decide between the options, we often get stuck in a rut that leads to a vicious cycle as we flip back between the alternative paths over time.
Paradoxes are even deeper: They are the interdependent, persistent contradictions that lurk within a dilemma. The opposing forces are interlocked in a circular ebb and flow, defining and reinforcing each other.
Take an example: The paradox between focusing on ourselves and focusing on others, which comes up in many ways throughout life but was particularly troubling during the pandemic for parents dealing with the dilemma of working remotely at home alongside their children.
“The healthier we are, the more effectively we can engage with and support others. The more we are supported by others, the healthier we are. Similarly, organizations with a strong centralized core can better empower distinct decentralized units and vice versa. These competing demands reinforce one another,” the academic duo wrote.
Paradoxes confound us because we believe there should be one right answer – one side in a choice is correct, or, at least, better. It’s our job to pick it and move on, the inferior choice left to history. That’s the rational linear thinking we are schooled in.
But you actually can’t move on by picking one over the other: Oppositional yet interdependent relationships, the academics stress, never go away; they persist. The details of the dilemma that presents itself may change down the road, but the underlying paradoxes remain.
An excellent description of this comes with the yin-yang symbol, which shows how two elements work together, combining in harmony. It exemplifies the three core features of paradoxes: Contradiction, interdependence and persistence. A surprising number of business and personal challenges have those elements, but we fail to recognize that and we make poor choices when we try to pick sides.
The two academics say we must embrace both options, transcending either/or thinking by applying both/and thinking. Instead of choosing between alternative poles of the paradox, you need to engage both poles simultaneously.
So support ourselves and support others. Find a way to centralize and decentralize, simultaneously, rather than centralize now and inevitably decentralize in a few years’ time when that doesn’t work out. The academics argue moving beyond binary thinking leads to more creative, effective and long-lasting solutions.
“Ignoring paradoxes will only cause them to come back stronger. A better approach, we think, is to effectively engage them,” they wrote.
Organizations, for example, tussle with whether they are about profit – serving shareholders – or something broader. Barclay’s launched a campaign – called AND – which argued that for the bank to survive it must be relevant to shareholders and stakeholders by focusing on markets and mission.
The academics have identified four types of paradoxes:
- Performing: Competing demands in our goals, outcomes and expectations. Corporate social responsibility is the classic, a solution to what in the past were seen as opposites, profit versus doing good. But paradoxes also come up in developing strategy, choosing initiatives to invest in and determining our life path.
- Learning paradoxes: These are about how we grow over time. You have probably struggled with today or tomorrow, new or old, stability or change, tradition or modernization. Substitute “and” for “or” and you will recognize the paradoxes those situations represent, ongoing and interconnected. You need synergy between the alternatives.
- Belonging: These highlight tensions in our roles, identities, values and personalities. Are you a committed organizational leader or a good parent? Are you available to others or are you focused on your own needs? Are you an extrovert or introvert, leader or follower? Again, it need not be either/or.
- Organizing: This deals with structuring organizations and our own lives. Among the tensions might be spontaneity and planning, risk taking and risk avoidance, control and flexibility.
Paradoxes pervade our lives. Managers must grapple with them. That means recognizing them, not feeling frustrated at the inability to pick between the alternatives, and embracing both alternatives in some fashion.
Cannonballs
- Consultant David Burkus suggests adding an “enterview” to the first day of onboarding for new recruits, the opposite of the interview process they have been through. Instead of the new hires telling about themselves, it involves your team telling them how excited you are to welcome them.
- Futurist Jim Carroll warns assumptions are dangerous illusions that provide a mirage of future predictability. The future is faster than you think, bigger than you think, involves trends you aren’t aware of yet and will challenge every single assumption you have.
- Which is more important to your organization: The big, headline-making strategy resource allocation moves, typically handled by senior executives, or the day-to-day, project-level decisions generally carried out at lower levels of the organization? The first study of that duality, by PWC, found it essentially even: Project-level decisions accounted for 51 per cent of later performance variation, and overall business-wide allocation for 49 per cent.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
Harvey Schachter