This is the second part in a series on how leaders can effectively navigate the complexity of today’s business world for their organizations. Read the first post here.

In a previous post, I shared that navigating complexity requires us to trade in our traditional cause-and-effect, problem-solving mindset map for something that accurately depicts the new territory of complexity. Today, I want to dig into one of the best examples of the new territory — managing polarities. Thinking in terms of polarities is a critical shift leaders need to make to navigate complexity, and is an important element of any leader development strategy.

Polarities and Paradox

So what is a polarity? A polarity, or paradox, is a situation in which opposing forces within a system, pull at each other to keep things balanced. But, like inhaling and exhaling, each “pole” can’t exist without the other. Polarities are everywhere, because we live in a complex world. In business, centralization versus decentralization, or growth versus profit maximization, are common examples of polarities. In life, think work/life balance, or liberal versus conservative. There’s a natural tension that exists between the two that will always be there – it’s an attribute of the system.

But we humans are uncomfortable with that tension. In fact, it makes us so uncomfortable, we see it as a problem. And what do we do with problems? We solve them. For example, a new HQ executive sees too much inconsistency in the field, so she starts a “One[Insert Company Name]” initiative to centralize decision-making. Consistency improves, but the company gradually loses connection with local markets. Three years later, a new executive comes to headquarters from the field, and, seeing this new “problem,” he embarks on a “By the Field/For the Field” initiative to empower local leadership to drive decisions. And, inevitably, this new “solution” results in creative approaches that work in isolation but don’t scale across the business. I bet you can guess what the next leader does. And so the pendulum swings, from one pole to the other, as each new leader tries to “problem-solve” away what is just the natural tension in the system.

When you first begin to understand polarities, it’s kind of like when you buy a blue Honda. You never really noticed them much before, but now you’re seeing blue Hondas everywhere. Because polarities are embedded in the landscape, we tend to think their symptoms are just traditional problems. As leaders begin to see how pervasive they are, and that they bring tension and bad outcomes but cannot be solved as problems, it can leave them more than a little unsettled.

Addressing Polarities with Both/And Thinking

To help, we as learning leaders can begin to bring to our organization a new way of thinking and leading. In their August 2022 article for Harvard Business Review, Solving Tough Problems Requires a Mindset Shift, Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith discuss the necessity to shift from “either/or thinking” to “both/and thinking.” They state that great leaders “recognize the paradoxes that underlie their tensions and instead adopt both/and thinking. Rather than choose between the options, they embrace competing demand simultaneously.” In the article, they outline three key shifts in a leader’s approach to polarities and paradoxical situations:

• Surfacing Tensions: People with a “paradox mindset” know that tensions exist in the landscape, and actively seek them out. Smith and Lewis recommend that a good way to surface these tensions is to “surround yourself with people of varying, even opposing views.”
• Embracing Tensions: Polarities and paradox require leaders to tolerate the discomfort that goes along with the natural tension in the system, avoiding the pull to make a decision just to get closure. Even when decisions get made, new information may require new thinking. “Both/and thinkers often are very clear about the big picture and an overarching higher purpose, but they know that achieving this aim requires some consistently inconsistent decision making.”
• Processing Tensions: Managing tension is an ongoing balancing process, requiring scanning for information “to see how opposing ideas are distinct and different, while at the same time, looking to identify how they can be linked and synergistic. They separate and connect.” In their 2022 HBR Press book, Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve your Toughest Problems, Smith and Lewis point to the Polarity Mapping process from Barry Johnson as an approach to clearly define a polarity and manage it over time.

I personally have had the opportunity to work through polarity mapping processes with teams in conflict, and the results can be eye-opening. In one exercise, I was helping a group of field technical leaders to help define how to balance centralized and decentralized management of their technology platform. As they worked through the process, it was as if they started to see the situation clearly for the first time and understand why all their previous efforts had failed.

Both/And Thinking as Part of Leadership Fitness

In a recent Harvard Business School Publishing study on Human-Centered Leadership (HCL), four leadership capacities were identified that, taken together, are referred to as the four dimensions of Leadership Fitness – dimensions that not only were key to HCL, but also to overall leadership effectiveness in times of challenge and complexity. This “both/and thinking” approach is central to the capacity of Balance – a critical mindset to see and manage the complex dynamics in organizations that have become commonplace today.

Paradoxical leadership feels very different to the uninitiated. And if you think I’m asking you to tell leaders to go out and create a little “crazy” in the organization, you wouldn’t be completely wrong. It’s our job to help them see that the crazy has been here for a while, it isn’t planning on going anywhere, and it offers new opportunities if we see it through the right frame of mind. If we stick to our old ways of problem-solving our way through paradoxical situations, we aren’t just ineffective — we lose out on the opportunity to create value in ways that our current approaches could never achieve.