June 13, 2024 • 46 mins
In this episode, we are joined by Wendy Smith, co-author of 'Both/And Thinking: Embrace Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems.' Wendy elaborates on the nuances between dilemmas, paradoxes, and tensions, emphasising that these terms are not interchangeable and revealing the psychological and practical implications of recognising and navigating paradoxes. Drawing from her personal experiences and research, Wendy illustrates how both/and thinking can be applied to career decisions, organisational challenges, and broader societal issues. She discusses the limitations of either/or thinking and the harmful patterns it can create, such as intensification, overcorrection, and polarisation. Using examples from companies like Lego and Gore, Wendy shows how balancing tradition and innovation, centralisation and decentralisation, and other competing demands can lead to more sustainable success. The conversation also delves into the four types of paradoxes: learning, performing, organising, and belonging, and explores strategies to manage these tensions effectively. This episode is essential for anyone facing complex decisions in their personal or professional life. 00:00 Introduction to Both/And Thinking 00:12 Understanding Tensions and Dilemmas 03:08 Defining Paradox and Its Importance 05:23 Embracing Paradoxes in Real Life 08:00 Conditions That Highlight Paradoxes 16:51 Exploring the Four Types of Paradoxes 23:28 Navigating Organisational Paradoxes 31:23 The Paradox System Framework 36:57 Lego's Journey Through Paradox 45:40 Conclusion and Further Resources
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Episode Transcript
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Aidan McCullen (00:00):
it is a great pleasure to welcome the author of "Both /And
(00:03):
Thinking" embrace creative tensionsto solve your toughest problems
Wendy Smith, welcome to the show
Wendy Smith (00:12):
me.
Aidan McCullen (00:12):
i thought a great way wendy to start the show would be to
share the language of tensions beforewe get into part one and define the
terms because we use dilemmas paradoxesintentions thinking they're the same
thing, but you educated us in the book andsay, they're not actually the same thing.
And there's a great figure in the book,figure one, one that I'm going to share
(00:34):
on the screen for those people joining us.
And I'd love you to , talkus through these.
Wendy Smith (00:40):
Yeah, maybe I could start by way of example and how I got into
this to inform those definitions.
I started thinking about this challengeissue through my own experience.
And in the book, as we say, and aspsychologists sometimes say, research is
me search, studying my own challenges.
So I, for example, confronted a numberof career questions, dilemmas, tensions.
(01:06):
It started when I was in college, and Ireally wanted to know what I was going
to be doing for the rest of my life.
And I ended up framing it as a tensionaround, do I continue to do what I thought
of as an amorphous world of leadership,practice, getting stuff done, which
is something that I had done a lot ofin high school, and then in college.
(01:26):
Or do I study?
Do I research?
Do I become an academic?
And those had very differentcareer trajectories and felt like
I had to make a very clear choice.
And then when I got into grad schooland decided to do academia, it was, do I
study innovation, which I know you speaka lot about and tensions and innovation.
(01:49):
Or do I study social responsibility,which is what was bubbling up as a
hot issue at the time but was stillnovel and that felt like an either or.
And so in the language that we use , bothof those spurred on for me a question of
not just what are these challenges, buthow did I think about these challenges?
(02:09):
We use the word tension to describethe overall experience of this
tug of war between these opposingpressures as an overarching comment.
And they show up for us as a dilemma.
And we use the word dilemma tothink about this trade off that
we have these Alternative opposingpositions, and we feel like we
(02:31):
have to make a choice between them.
So in the first case, therewas a very clear choice.
What is the career pathI'm going to follow?
Am I going to go to grad school and getan MBA or a law degree or something in
which I'm going to go into practice?
Or am I going to go to grad schoolto get a PhD and go into academia?
That was a very clear fork inthe road that needed a decision.
(02:52):
And that's the dilemma that weface and these dilemmas show up and
feel like this either or and theyfeel like once we are making that
decision, the dilemma is resolved.
And what we argue is thatunderlying each of those dilemmas.
is a pattern to those decisions that welabel as draw on use the word paradox.
(03:16):
And I say draw on because we are drawingon 2500 years of history around this word.
And the idea is that underneath thosedilemmas are competing ideas, opposing
ideas that are both in our heads.
opposition, but they are alsointerdependent with one another.
(03:36):
They reinforce, they define each other.
And we use the symbol of the yin yangto represent that idea of paradox,
because you could imagine these opposingperspectives, white and black, But
those perspectives reinforce each other.
And so in my own decision, underlying thisquestion of do I go to grad school to get
(03:58):
a PhD or do I go to grad school to get anMBA or something that is more pragmatic,
underlying that decision is an ongoingtension that I experienced of wanting to
both do stuff, get stuff done, lead, butalso and also understand, research, do it.
And so If we look at that paradox, there'sthis paradox between understanding and
(04:22):
doing, learning and developing, beingand doing, and our argument in the book
is that if we can notice the underlyingparadoxes that inform our dilemmas, it
opens up a whole new way of thinkingabout how to address and respond to them.
Aidan McCullen (04:38):
Beautiful beautiful that exactly what you're talking about is
something that so many of our audienceexperience the tug of war internally of do
i stay with the organization do i move onand both you and marianne your co author
talk about this the whole time throughoutthe book so i highly recommend getting
into the book because you will see.
That this happens the best of usthis is not you everybody faces these
(05:02):
paradoxes tensions and dilemmas.
There was a piece here i'd loveto quote because i just wanted to
show people the beautiful language.
You mentioned Yin and Yang for exampleyou go into the history including
showing how that image works and all thedifferent nuances about that image which
is beautiful but there's a piece herei'd love you to unpack for us you say.
(05:23):
"What if instead of trying to choosebetween the mutually exclusive options
we start by surfacing the paradoxes thatlurk beneath our dilemmas and recognize
that those paradoxes cannot be solved.
Instead of choosing between alternativepoles of paradox what if we ask
a different question how we mightengage both poles simultaneously."
(05:46):
i'd love you to unpack that becausereally this is the main thesis
of the book both and thinking
Wendy Smith (05:52):
I love that you notice that and say this out loud.
These paradoxes are not anomaliesand they're not problems.
They are the reality ofthe world that we live in.
And one of the experiences that we haveis that the more that we talk about this
and the more that we normalize it whenwe do workshops, when we do keynotes
and the more that we invite people toarticulate their paradoxes, the more that
(06:15):
people realize that they're not alonein them and that this is not a problem.
In fact,, not only is it not aproblem, it can be an opportunity,
a chance to move forward.
And so, just by way of example, Ithink I was saying , I initially
studied innovation and the keyquestion for these business leaders
was do I focus on the existing world?
(06:36):
Or do I focus on the new,innovative, experimental world?
And as your listeners know, there'sresource questions associated with that.
There's leadership questionsassociated with that.
There's strategic questions.
There's, questions of identity.
There's questions that feel like youneed to make a choice between them.
The invitation of paradox is tonotice that instead of pushing
(07:00):
for a clear choice immediately.
The invitation is to sit with and noticehow it is, why it is that the existing
world enables, creates resources, enablessupports, The potential to innovate.
The more successful you are, themore that you have resources to
(07:22):
be able to experiment and createthe slack to try new things.
The innovative world enables us toactually continue on going forward.
It creates energy and ideas that preventus from becoming obsolete . And so it
is that initial noticing that thereare these underlying paradoxes that
invite us into this new way of thinking.
Aidan McCullen (07:42):
there's a beautiful piece of writing about timing and so
much of success as we label success.
Has to do with timing.
You can just be lucky when youbought your Bitcoin, you can be
lucky when you started your business.
You can be lucky whenyou bought your house.
Oh, loads and loads of different thingshave a dramatic effect on success, but
(08:04):
you identify in the book, three conditionsthat make underlying paradoxes, more
salient change, scarcity, and plurality.
I'd love you to unpack those, butagain, there's a beautiful piece here.
And you can tell that Wendystudied innovation, when you
read little excerpts like this.
You write that, "the greater the rate ofchange, the quicker the future becomes
(08:25):
the present, and the more we mustgrapple with tensions between today and
tomorrow, the scarcer the resources, themore we fight for our slice of the pie,
revealing tensions between self and other.
Between competition and corporationwhich speaks to disasters from a
climate perspective to unbelievablefocus on the bottom line like Enron
(08:48):
so much in here but this idea oftiming is an underlying foundation
Wendy Smith (08:53):
people will often ask me the question, what's the difference
between a paradox and a dilemma?
And the answer to go back to what wewere saying earlier that we argue is
that they are not different problems.
They are different lenses on the sameproblem that if a dilemma is one way to
experience the problem of how do I makea choice At the level of what feels like
(09:14):
something that's demanding my choice.
Where am I going to go to grad school?
How am I going to spendmy innovation dollars?
How am I going to spend my time?
And if underlying that is the paradoxthat it is a different lens on that.
What we would argue then is thatparadoxes inform and define all of our
dilemmas, but they're not always salient.
We don't always always.
(09:34):
Experience them.
Oftentimes they are hidden in the shadows.
So the question is what makes them moresalient as opposed to latent and hiding.
And those three conditions that younamed change, plurality and scarcity.
What we argue is that it is those threeconditions that make this underlying that
(09:54):
that juxtapose the opposing perspectivesso much more poignantly, and you're
the first is to your point, Yeah.
That change is about timing.
It's about how quickly we condense or theexperience of tomorrow becoming today.
And that creates this tensionbetween the today and the tomorrow
(10:15):
in a much more poignant way.
I think that Aidan, we're seeing thatnow in issues of climate change, as
you said, or issues of large globalissues where the question about what
tomorrow will look like feels verydifferent for Our generation for my
kids generation than what today lookslike, and it's creating all kinds of
clashes between that tomorrow and today,which invites us in which demands us to
(10:41):
experience that tension more poignantly.
The second is this notion of pluralitythat when we are When we're surrounded
by lots of people that think likeus, that tensions or opposing
perspectives don't surface that often.
When we are surrounded by lots ofpeople that have different points
of view, on one hand, there isthis opportunity for creativity.
(11:06):
And on the other hand, weexperience that tension even more.
And in fact, And we can talk about this.
The call that I just got off.
It was all about polarization and theextent to which we're surrounded by
people with different points of view.
And instead of leaning into and valuingthose different points of view, we
have gone to a place where we havebasically gone to our different corners
(11:28):
and hidden away and then shot out atone another because we don't know how
to be in conversation around that.
But that pluralitysurfaces these tensions.
And then the third piece is The extent towhich there are limited resources creates
challenges over who gets the resources andit surfaces those tensions and makes them
more explicit, salient and obvious to us
Aidan McCullen (11:51):
that scarcity thing is always a problem when
you see an organization that has.
Abundance doesn't actually make poordecisions because there's enough to go
around for everybody but as soon as we'lltalk about a little while you get to the
top of that curve and things start tochange you start to worry about things etc
but i thought we'd give an example herei want to tell our audience the book is.
(12:15):
Beautifully peppered with loadsand loads of examples from personal
reinvention, to great innovators, topeople who have reinvented their origins.
So this is a great story thatyou open the book of Zita Cobb.
And I thought we'd open theshow with her as the example as
well, because I loved her story.
(12:36):
Great lady, brilliant thinker.
And she applied both on thinkingto solve a really tough problem
that she was struggling with
Wendy Smith (12:45):
This is the story of Zita Cobb.
The, quick story is that she grew up inFogo Island, Newfoundland, Fogo Island,
Newfoundland is as I say, an island offof an island in the North Atlantic seas.
And In fact, there is the FlatEarth Society that in fact
does believe the earth is flat.
(13:05):
And if you look at the Flat EarthSociety, there is a map and there is
a point on Fogo Island, which is oneof the four corners of the earth.
And if you travel to Fogo Island andyou climb that hill there, there is
a lovely sign there that says this isone of the four corners of the earth.
Watch out.
And then it notes at the bottomthe number of people that have
fallen off the earth from here.
(13:26):
Zero.
So, so they live into it.
But the bigger story is thatFogo Island is an island that was
inhabited for about eight generations.
Mostly Irish, British, Scottishsettlers came over about eight
generations ago and predominantlydevelop their main resource is cod.
They were fishermen that would day fishin these small punt boats off of the
(13:50):
coast of Fogo Island for, for centuries.
And that in the 1970s when the largetrawling boats from Scandinavia would
come out and would fish the open waters,it really dried up the cod stock.
In the inshore co stock, which meant thatthe livelihood in Fogo Island was starting
(14:10):
to, was diminishing significantly.
And then in the 1990s, the provincebasically put a moratorium on the
amount of fishing because therewas such a small resource left
and many people left and moved.
And the people of Foggo Island, manypeople had left, including Zita Cobb.
She moved to Ottawa and it turns outthat she went and got an MBA got involved
(14:33):
in the semiconductor sorry, networknetworking industry became very successful
and became the third largest paid thirdhighest paid female executive in Canada.
And then when she cashedout, I believe in her.
40s or 50s said, like, howcan I do something with this?
That is meaningful.
And what was really meaningful to her?
(14:53):
What is really meaningful to her isFogo Island, where she grew up and
had to abandon, but not just FogoIsland, Fogo Island as an island.
Emblematic as a symbol more broadly ofsmall rural communities and the fact
that we were losing the diversity ofsmall rural communities of cultural
distinctions of different ways of knowingso she went back to Fogo Island to
(15:17):
ask, how can we redevelop Fogo Island?
and develop this, this islandand a huge challenge there.
So there was a huge challenge of,well, what does it mean to honor the
traditions and the culture and the waysof life and the ways of knowing and
simultaneously modernize this islandso that it can continue to exist.
(15:40):
It can continue.
There could continue to be aneconomic possibility into the future.
So how do we deal with this ongoingtension between the old and the new,
the tradition and the modern, betweenthat which is local and unique and
connecting into the global economy?
How do we, how do we navigate thosetensions in order to be able to survive?
(16:03):
As an island and continue to beunique, even while connecting
into that global economy.
Aidan McCullen (16:09):
i love some of the language you use around this because
you just replace Fogo island for anorganization for example, you said that
Zita Said the islanders need to findnew ways with old things, and the task
was how could they honor the past whilemoving into the future, everything
that happens organizations as well whenyou're successful and will talk later
(16:31):
on about lego is an example of this.
Where your success can lead to yourfailure if you cling to the way things
were always done around here and thisis where both and thinking comes in.
The book covers a deep dive in the historyof paradox which stems right back to
the dawn of writing the duality that.
Heraclitus talked about Jung talkedabout but i wanted to zoom in on one
(16:56):
particular diagram here because youdiscussed the four types of paradox.
And I thought that would be reallyuseful if we set up today's show with
the frameworks through which you canlisten to the rest, because we're
going to do part two and part three,let's share this Wendy, and I'd love
you to take us through this Diagram.
Wendy Smith (17:14):
Well, first, I just want to reflect back to your
point about Zita because indeed.
What you noted there is that these kindsof tensions, which are highly context
specific, are also quite universal.
So here you've got this tension betweenthe past and the present tradition and
modernization in this diagram here, that'swhat we call the learning paradoxes.
(17:37):
That's the tension of short term, longterm tradition, and we see that in this
social enterprise and trying to rebuildthis rural community in the future.
Newfoundland, and I just spent sixmonths in Australia, did some work
with some schools and these schoolswere dealing with, the other corner
of the earth and these schoolsat a very different industry.
(17:59):
We're dealing with the same tension.
How do we navigate the tensions ofwho we've been while simultaneously
building out who we are?
We want to be and how do we holdon to our traditions while still
modernizing and, in these schools,as you can imagine, as soon as you
say, Oh, we've got to change things.
We've got to innovate.
We've got to modernize.
All of a sudden there's an anxiety.
(18:20):
Don't let go of our tradition.
So you could feel that there.
That is the learning paradoxes.
Just to walk through the others.
Performing paradoxes are indeedthese tensions of outcomes of
what we're trying to achieve.
We call it the tensions of why theexample we often use is this mission
(18:40):
market profit passion, which a lot oforganizations experience for Zita Cobb.
This was true and present there for her,which is the tension between how are we
going to enable our economy and buildout something that develops the economy.
And we can talk about how she did it andknow that that's in service of building
(19:02):
out and developing our community.
We, we like to use we, and in the book,we use the example of Unilever, which
is a often some of your listeners mightknow the example, the at the time Dutch
British owned packaged goods companywhere Paul Pullman came in in 2008
and made a very clear commitment tothe Unilever sustainable living plan,
(19:25):
which committed to a set of socialand environmental objectives, not
despite, not alongside, but to enable.
their financial bottomline, their profits.
So that's the performing tensions.
I can tell you just brieflyabout the other two.
The organizing tensions are whathappen when we create processes, when
(19:47):
we are trying to figure out how toget something done in organizations.
This shows up as the tension betweendo we focus on centralization in an
organization or decentralization.
I am at a university.
Our university, as many others,continually struggle with, is there
(20:08):
central decision making or do we enablesort of decentralization where other
people get to inform and enable decisions?
Where do decisions happen?
I worked with a hedge fund inHong Kong, and that was a big
question they were asking, whichis, Who makes the decisions here?
Is it in the Hong Kong office oris it all in all these distinct
offices across Southeast Asia wherethey had very different cultures?
(20:33):
And then belonging paradoxes.
And this is often the one that peoplefind most abstract, but these are
the tensions of who we are, ouridentities, how we understand ourselves.
Do we understand ourselves as distinctidentity groups, or do we understand
ourselves as part of a greater whole?
(20:54):
Do we understand ourselvesas insiders or outsiders?
And this set of tensions, whowe are and how we relate is
probably the most poignant whenit comes to our decision making.
In fact, several of the conversations,I think I was saying, I was
talking about polarization.
This comes up in the polarizationconversation a whole lot.
(21:17):
Or I just had a conversation with folkswho are navigating tensions in the
midst of conflict in the Middle East.
And what does it mean to for thosethat are connected to that to hold a
particular point of view of trying toadvance an identity, either Israeli
or Palestinian, Jewish or Muslim, andat the same time, try and hold a more
(21:42):
global identity of living into humanityand trying to create a global identity.
connections acrossthose, it's really hard.
So those tensions areparticularly pernicious.
I want to just say one more thing,which is that we think the value of
this figure here is to help us, toyour point initially, see how these
tensions show up all over the place.
(22:04):
They are so at present inour lives all over the place.
We see these paradoxes everywhere.
Sometimes people get stuck insaying, well, is my paradox in
this bucket or in that bucket?
And to us, the value of thesebuckets is to inspire us to notice
how prevalent these tensions are,but not that we have to figure out
exactly which bucket they fit into.
Aidan McCullen (22:27):
we might talk about a little while there are limited cognitive
capacity and cognitive dissonance andall the things that get in the way
of us even accepting that all theseparadoxes are present, what i would
love to pull on a few threads thatyou mentioned there firstly to let
you know paul Polman for audience.
Is a forthcoming guest on the show,and he's going to come on with
(22:48):
Charles Conn, who's the chairman ofPatagonia for a three way conversation.
And they're going to talk about exactlywhat Wendy's talking about here, this
paradox of profit or planet, . Solots of good stuff to come on that.
But a couple of the things you saidthere, like so many of our audience, like
you have studied and you're a scholarin innovation, you will have seen this
(23:09):
time and time again, the bureaucracy.
And the burden of bureaucracy,but the need for some bureaucracy.
So this tug of war between centralizeddecentralized decision making from
the top versus pushing decision makingdown the organization, there are huge
paradoxes with inside organizations.
And I'd love you to shed a bit oflight on that from what you've seen
(23:31):
that's successful, or what are thecompromises that you need to make
Wendy Smith (23:35):
Yeah.
One organization that we studied,and it's right up the street
from my offices, is Gore.
WL Gore and Associates.
And for those people who studyinnovation, they will know They may
know about Gore because they were soiconoclastic when it came to innovation.
Their origin story is that BillGore was working at DuPont,
(23:57):
which is also not far from me.
He felt as an engineer that he didn't haveany local decision making, any autonomy.
He felt stifled.
He felt like the layers of decisionmaking bureaucracy were so imposing
that he just felt like shut out.
And his wife, Viv Gore said, well,we could do something better.
(24:19):
And they launched and developed W.L.
Gore & Associates , and the companyreally took off when they developed
this polymer that has this properties offlexibility and properties of durability
that has now been built into everythingfrom guitar strings to dental floss, to
the jackets that military people wear.
, and the key to the company Was thatthey were going to build the company
(24:40):
around the power of small teams.
And the idea was that they weregoing to move the decision making
down so that people could reallylean into their creativity.
They could feel motivated.
It was built off of a lot of McGregor'stheory, X theory, Y, the idea that we
can invest in people and that , they'llshow up to the task and that if we
(25:00):
give people the tools in order toreally be creative and autonomous
and motivated, they'll engage.
And that was great in these small teams.
When Gore was one office in Newark,Delaware with about 200 people and
everybody knew everybody and theycould navigate these possibilities.
And as Gore grew, It became challengingfor these small teams to work together
(25:27):
and about 50 years later, a little bitless the first non Gore family member.
It's still a privately held company.
Terry Kelly.
I think she was the second.
Actually, the first person was there fortwo years, took over as the CEO of Gore.
And the issue for her was thatthese small teams were all great.
But they were all running around in somany different directions with so little
(25:49):
coordination across them that there wasno either economies of scale at the least.
And at the best, there wasno enterprise wide strategy.
They couldn't coordinate with eachother because they all had different
processes and they had differentpractices and they weren't speaking the
same language and they had differenttechnologies that they were using.
And the question that she had toask was, how do create, enable an
(26:12):
enterprise wide strategy that didnot ruin the culture of autonomy that
came from the power of small teams.
That was her both and challenge.
And it was difficult.
And to go back to this point ofidentity, she faced a whole lot of
pushback because people at Gore said,and continue to say, We are a company
(26:35):
that is built on this autonomy andmotivation and small teams, and as
soon as you start talking enterprisewide strategy, you're killing that.
And she would say back to them, inorder to live, you need to breathe.
And in order to breathe, you haveto breathe in and breathe out.
So how do we create an organizationhere where we can both have the
(26:58):
kind of coordinated possibilitiesWhile simultaneously upholding our
culture of autonomy and small teams.
Aidan McCullen (27:07):
extremely difficult?
And, It's so easy to talk about thesethings isn't it like when you when you
have a consultant who doesn't have scartissue about what it's really like in an
organization but when you try to implementsomething like that it's so so difficult.
The other thing i just want to justpull on was you mentioned there.
About on an individual level.
(27:27):
So when it comes to group, the ideaof in group, out group, we do this a
lot, people in innovation, when they'reworking in organizations, create this
divide and go, Oh, they're dinosaurs.
Those guys, they don't understand thatthey're going to kill the organization,
and in doing that, we create thedivide, which is not helpful anymore.
And one of the things you suggest webe aware of beyond the paradox is.
(27:52):
What you call the nested paradox,because you say from the individual
to the group organization and society,that paradoxes show up at different
levels, this is what youcall nested paradoxes.
I thought this was animportant thing to share.
Wendy Smith (28:07):
I love that you pulled that out.
Very few people point to that.
And we're doing some really significantwork around this with my colleagues
in Australia right now, because theidea is that it's what people like
to do is, is point to a dilemmaand then point to the paradox.
That surfaces in that dilemma, andthere's two pieces that complicate this.
(28:27):
The first is what you're talking about,which is nested paradox, which is to say,
the way that we experience the world isinformed by our personal experience is
informed by the groups that we are in.
It's informed by our society.
Our society is informed by thepeople that lead that society,
and they reinforce each other.
And so this idea of nested paradoxes isthat how we experience these tensions.
(28:53):
Like goes up and down acrossthese different levels,
and that has implications.
So one implication, for example, isthat we need to be aware, that of the
messages that we get from our societyand how it informs our thinking.
And it's hard to do that.
So my colleague Josh Keller now inAustralia had this piece of work that he
(29:15):
did with his colleagues where he lookedat the different messages that we get.
If we're living in China and thenational messages around what it's
like to live into competing demandsor living in the United States.
And he did this great studywhere he invited people in
China to look at game theory.
Can you cooperate and compete, or do youhave to choose cooperating or competing?
(29:40):
And it turns out that in theUnited States, people don't
think that cooperation andcompetition can go together.
You have to either chooseto cooperate or compete.
In China, the national myth, the nationalstory, the national zeitgeist enabled
a possibility for cooperation andcompetition to happen more simultaneously.
(30:02):
What I love about the finding, however,is that they found that was true in China,
except for those people in the businessschools in which they started to adopt
and embrace this American Approach thatcooperation competition can't go together
and they have to be one or the other.
So there's something about theway in which our national stories
(30:22):
inform our individual thinkingthat we're not always aware of.
And here I love a phrase from Zita Cobb,who we mentioned, who always says, fish
don't know that they're swimming in water.
It's a, it's a well known idea.
I tried to look up who initially said it.
It's attributed to lots of people.
But the idea that, how we thinkabout the world being informed by
(30:43):
our society, we don't even know.
And so how we think about thesetensions informed by our society,
we don't even realize, but that theycascade across these different levels.
And so that's the idea of nested tensions.
Aidan McCullen (30:56):
Beautiful, beautiful.
I often think about it.
it's like each of us see througha kaleidoscope of biases and.
Cognitive issues like limitationsbut it's a kaleidoscope kaleidoscope
when lots of people come togetherso therefore we just want people who
are like us because it's simpler andi get it i mean everybody gets that.
(31:17):
But one of the things i thought we'dshare before we go on to chapter two
which i love you talk about ruts.
And being stuck in ways of thinking, etcetera, et cetera is the paradox system.
I thought we'd share that when the, andthis is where, if you look at this system,
those of you joining us on YouTube, you'llsee how to enable both on thinking and
(31:38):
throughout the book, there's multiple
frameworks like this to help you.
It's really a decision making book helpspeople make better decisions and helps
you navigate your life better helps youmake better personal decisions but also if
you're an organizational leader, be ableto navigate big thorny issues as well so
i'm gonna share on the screen the paradoxsystem i love you to take us through,
Wendy Smith (32:03):
Sure.
And this is probably a teaser fora follow up conversation because
this is the framework that informsreally the core of our book.
And the idea is If we have convincedyou that the way we tend to deal
with tensions in this either or way,and we can talk about why that's a
problem, is a problem, and that thereis an alternative both and approach,
(32:27):
how do we implement the both and?
And so here's the big pictureset of ideas about how to do so.
We identify four buckets or what we callsets of tools for navigating the both
and, and we point to and we worked reallyhard to label them as A, B, C, D, maybe
(32:49):
to help with the mnemonics, assumptions,boundaries, comfort, and dynamics.
And here's, what's important about this.
Okay.
idea is that we also putthem on two different axes.
So on one hand, on the horizontalaxis, we point to assumptions,
which is our mindsets.
How do we think aboutthese competing demands?
And on the other side,comfort, Which is our emotions.
(33:13):
Aiden, you said earlier, these things arereally hard and we make a case for, and
we can unpack how to do this, but that inorder to navigate paradoxes, we have to
notice that discomfort, notice how hardit is and find comfort in the discomfort.
So the horizontal access is both headand heart, mind and emotion cognitive,
(33:35):
rational and emotional, intuitive.
And that's all aboutwhat the individual does.
On the vertical axis we haveboundaries and dynamics.
Those are both about how do we scaffoldthe system around us to reinforce the
both and whether it's in our personallives or whether it's in a group
(33:56):
or whether it's in an organization.
The boundaries, which is oftenthe most confusing, but really
that's the structures that wecreate to scaffold are both ending.
It's, it's the vision that we set up.
It's the rules.
It's the roles and responsibilities.
It's the processes that we put inplace to reinforce both ending.
And we can talk more aboutwhat each of those look like.
(34:18):
And, and those are likethe set structures.
And then at the bottom, it's the dynamics,which is the practices we put in place
to allow us to continually change toinvite us to constantly be curious
to shift to look for opportunitiesto experiment to not be stuck.
And so what are the practices that createthe scaffolding that is more stuck?
(34:42):
And what are the practices that createthe possibilities that enable us to
change the stability and the change?
And I just want to say in the big picture.
That some of your listenersmight be noticing that in each of
these axes, tensions within them.
And so there's the tension on thehorizontal axis between how I think
(35:02):
and how I feel, which are, the mind andthe heart, which are often in tension.
There's the tension on the verticalaxis between the things that we do in
our systems that are stable and thethings that we do in our systems that
enable change, stability and change.
And then we have a tension across axes,which is about, and by the way, this
tension comes up all the time, whichis about changing the individual, which
(35:24):
is the horizontal axis or, and changingthe system, which is the vertical axis.
This is the individual andthe system structure and
agency and academic language.
And a key to this And the big pictureis that we say multiple times throughout
the book that if this is how we navigateparadox, then notice there's paradox
(35:46):
embedded in it or navigating paradoxis paradoxical, and so people could
lean into this figure to notice hownotice those paradoxes and navigating
paradox or lean in and focus in on oneof these sets of tools and the tools
to enable, and we would argue thatthey actually reinforce one another.
Aidan McCullen (36:06):
i was looking at this and i was thinking about how relevant
it was i was telling you before we cameon air i have a teenage son as well.
I was trying to teach him the importanceof decisions and decision trees and that
each decision opens up more decisions andwhen i saw this i was like well, this is
essentially an infinity curve of you makethat decision then you need more decisions
(36:30):
and it just it's never over which is lifeand if you can create good frameworks
to make a decision in the first place.
You just feel more comfortable i thinkin life you go through life happier
you don't have as many regrets you knowyou made the best possible decision you
could with the tools you have availableso it's one of the reasons i love
the book and highly recommend it buti thought we'd move on to ruts and.
(36:57):
You open chapter two with story oflego and many people think LEGO's always
been an extremely successful company notknowing the history about lego but i got
a few near death experiences, i'll openup a little quote here because you said
stressing only one side of a paradoxoversimplifies and narrows our options,
(37:18):
.The tricky thing is that picking one side usually offers us short term success,
comfort, respect, rewards, efficiency,joy, success, motivates us to stick
with that option until we get stuck ina rut, the greater the success of those
either or choices, the deeper the ruts.
Lego leaders.
Learn this all too well as theircommitment to the organization's greatest
(37:41):
strengths nearly led to their downfall
Wendy Smith (37:45):
I love that.
Chapter two is really all about thelimitations of the either or and why
the either or is what we say limitedat best and detrimental at worst.
And we Point to three, what we callvicious cycles or three patterns
that create these limitationsand Lego exemplifies them.
(38:06):
The first pattern we talk aboutas a pattern of intensification
or Getting stuck down a rabbithole is the metaphor we use.
And the idea is that, as you were saying,we pick one side, we get, we reinforce
that side with expertise, skills, people,both our social structures around us,
(38:28):
our identity, that it's hard to thenpull out and see the other option.
And this, to your point, as manyof your listeners will know, is
the challenge of the S curve.
You build up, in a company, for example.
You become so adept at one, particularapproach, you build up your success.
You create the scale around that youmove up the S curve, but you're so
(38:51):
successful that you don't know thatyou're about to fall off the S curve.
And it's a classicchallenge for companies.
And Lego fell into that.
They, were a family owned business.
Started in Billund, Denmark.
They came upon this brillianttoy of the interlocking brick.
They really had it down pat sothat They resisted innovation
(39:16):
significantly, and they werefour colors for a very long time.
And there's these stories abouthow George Lucas and the Star Wars
team came and said, Let's co brand.
No, no, no.
We're not about, creating Systems thattells kids what to do with their Legos
were about so so they really resisted andlike many companies They began to fail
(39:37):
And we see that story again and again.
And that is the story offalling into the rabbit hole
of inertia, of intensification.
And that happens whether it'sinnovation or that happens whether
we are intensifying around ourskills and approaches to our job.
We are in a career.
We have a way of doing things.
We are surrounded by otherpeople that do it the same.
(39:57):
It's really hard to change.
So we intensify, we fall intoa rabbit hole and it's hard
to see the other side and.
And as you noted that's not actuallywhat almost killed Lego because they
brilliantly said, Oh, they finallyrealized, , they were the toy of the year.
They were so successful, but then theystarted to see this decline and much
(40:21):
of the decline happened because the toyindustry was starting to become much
more electronic and not as mechanical.
And they said, yeah,we've got to innovate.
And so they did what we often see, whenpeople start realizing they have to
switch, which is they moved significantlyinto the opposite direction and started
(40:41):
to innovate in every possible way.
So we call this The wreckingball or overcorrection.
You go from intensification toovercorrection when you switch
into the complete opposite.
And so that's when Lego openedup , Lego lands and all of these
parks, or that's when they startedco branding with everybody.
(41:02):
There was just a whole lot of innovation.
They.
tried every type of innovation and theywere so innovative without restraint,
without discipline, that it's thenthat even though their profits, their
top line started to go up, theirbottom line started to decline because
their costs were so out of control.
And they realized that they have to moveto a different kind of innovation that is
(41:25):
both innovative and with some disciplineand with some limitations along the way.
So that is the second sort of patternthat becomes problematic in the either or.
We move from one side andwe swing to the opposite.
And again, we see thisin our personal lives.
I always say, If anybody wants to seethis in their personal life, think
about anybody who's ever been on adiet or tried to be disciplined about
(41:47):
exercise or disciplined about something.
Discipline, discipline,discipline, discipline.
And then as soon as yougive it up, forget it.
Like, you eat the chocolate croissantand everything goes out the window.
So we have these swings.
And then the third pattern, and I don'tknow, I can say two words about that
and then we can unpack any of those,but the third pattern is perhaps what
I think of as the most pernicious, andwe call that trench warfare, and we've
(42:12):
referred to this a bit over in ourconversation, and it's essentially what
we point to as polarization, right?
We have intensification.
We have overcorrection.
We have polarization.
And it's what happens when we pick a side.
We surround ourselves with otherpeople that pick, that reinforce
(42:33):
that, the confirmation bias.
And then we reject, we defend ourside and we reject to the point
of dehumanization the other side.
We don't even know what it lookslike at some point, but we just keep
rejecting it because the assumptionis, if I'm right, I'm right.
They have to be wrong, and we call ittrench warfare because you could imagine
(42:54):
the idea of one side building a trench toprotect themselves and surround themselves
with other people, but then shooting outat the other side without even knowing
who they are, without even hearing theiropinion, without even understanding.
And that, as we've said a couple of times,that comes up in companies, I did a talk
a little bit ago for a group of CFOswho said, yes, like as CFOs, we totally
(43:19):
like sustainability is really important.
And then when we started to talk aboutthose sustainability guys and how
irresponsible they are about moneyand like, it just became us and them.
And they don't, they don't haveconversation, but so we see these
kind of polarizing groups show up inorganizations, and we certainly see it
in our global politics at the moment.
Aidan McCullen (43:38):
he mentioned their confirmation bias and i thought maybe we'd
land today's ship the show on, the mindsetemotional states and behaviors that spur
these patterns because they exasperate.
Rabbit holes intensification and wreckingballs they exasperate polarization
inside organizations as well and.
(43:59):
There's a lot in that in biases andbeliefs and how we are educated what
first managers we have etc but ilove you to share maybe a sweeping
thought on that because this is whereit all forms for us and it can be
very difficult to rewire ourselves.
Wendy Smith (44:15):
Yeah, I think that's right.
And so I want to have empathythat you said this earlier.
It's easy to talk about this stuff.
It's hard to do it.
And I just want to acknowledgethat in these biases.
Are both our cognitive biases.
Our mindsets that keep us in thiseither or , we have these mindsets
that want clarity, want certainty.
(44:37):
And oftentimes when we talk about bias,we think of the cognitive biases, but
there's also these emotional biases.
We want clarity and certainty, and wefeel anxious when things are uncertain.
And I Often like reminding people togo back to March, 2020, the beginning
of the pandemic, when there was a lotof uncertainty, that uncertainty was
(45:01):
highly consequential, potentially fatal.
And what we most desperatelywanted was certainty and clarity.
Should we mask or not mask?
Should we, should, shouldwe isolate or not isolate?
Should we wash our fruits andvegetables five times or seven times?
Like we, we wanted real.
Clarity on things that thereweren't always real clarity about.
(45:21):
And so just to remind ourselves howquickly we go to those places of
wanting to have a clear decisionbecause we feel uncomfortable
and that shows up all the time.
And I have tremendous.
Empathy for how we navigatethat, but that's not easy.
Aidan McCullen (45:37):
We're going to leave it at that because there's
so much in these chapters.
We're going to do part two and partthree and follow the narrative of
the book, touching on some of thosecase studies as well, but Wendy, for
people who are interested more inyour work, you mentioned consulting,
you mentioned keynotes as well, ButI know also you just have released
a brand new newsletter as well.
Where's the best place to find you?
Wendy Smith (45:59):
The best place is our website, both and thinking.
net.
We welcome anyone tofollow our newsletter.
We just started releasingit a couple of months ago.
It's called it's not aneither or it's on Substack.
You can find it through our websitefor sure, but also for the Substack
affection autos, you can find uson Substack and we welcome people
(46:21):
to engage in conversation with us.
Aidan McCullen (46:23):
And good news as well.
I have a copy of both and thinking offor grab for those of you who are signed
up to the innovation show sub stackas well, I'll link to Wendy sub stack.
I'll also recommend it from the innovationshow sub stack as well for an extra boost.
But for now author of both onthinking, embracing creative tensions
to solve your toughest problem.
(46:43):
Wendy Smith.
Thank you for joining us.
Wendy Smith (46:46):
Thank you.
What a great conversation.
it is a great pleasure to welcome the author of "Both /And
(00:03):
Thinking" embrace creative tensionsto solve your toughest problems
Wendy Smith, welcome to the show
Wendy Smith (00:12):
me.
Aidan McCullen (00:12):
i thought a great way wendy to start the show would be to
share the language of tensions beforewe get into part one and define the
terms because we use dilemmas paradoxesintentions thinking they're the same
thing, but you educated us in the book andsay, they're not actually the same thing.
And there's a great figure in the book,figure one, one that I'm going to share
(00:34):
on the screen for those people joining us.
And I'd love you to , talkus through these.
Wendy Smith (00:40):
Yeah, maybe I could start by way of example and how I got into
this to inform those definitions.
I started thinking about this challengeissue through my own experience.
And in the book, as we say, and aspsychologists sometimes say, research is
me search, studying my own challenges.
So I, for example, confronted a numberof career questions, dilemmas, tensions.
(01:06):
It started when I was in college, and Ireally wanted to know what I was going
to be doing for the rest of my life.
And I ended up framing it as a tensionaround, do I continue to do what I thought
of as an amorphous world of leadership,practice, getting stuff done, which
is something that I had done a lot ofin high school, and then in college.
(01:26):
Or do I study?
Do I research?
Do I become an academic?
And those had very differentcareer trajectories and felt like
I had to make a very clear choice.
And then when I got into grad schooland decided to do academia, it was, do I
study innovation, which I know you speaka lot about and tensions and innovation.
(01:49):
Or do I study social responsibility,which is what was bubbling up as a
hot issue at the time but was stillnovel and that felt like an either or.
And so in the language that we use , bothof those spurred on for me a question of
not just what are these challenges, buthow did I think about these challenges?
(02:09):
We use the word tension to describethe overall experience of this
tug of war between these opposingpressures as an overarching comment.
And they show up for us as a dilemma.
And we use the word dilemma tothink about this trade off that
we have these Alternative opposingpositions, and we feel like we
(02:31):
have to make a choice between them.
So in the first case, therewas a very clear choice.
What is the career pathI'm going to follow?
Am I going to go to grad school and getan MBA or a law degree or something in
which I'm going to go into practice?
Or am I going to go to grad schoolto get a PhD and go into academia?
That was a very clear fork inthe road that needed a decision.
(02:52):
And that's the dilemma that weface and these dilemmas show up and
feel like this either or and theyfeel like once we are making that
decision, the dilemma is resolved.
And what we argue is thatunderlying each of those dilemmas.
is a pattern to those decisions that welabel as draw on use the word paradox.
(03:16):
And I say draw on because we are drawingon 2500 years of history around this word.
And the idea is that underneath thosedilemmas are competing ideas, opposing
ideas that are both in our heads.
opposition, but they are alsointerdependent with one another.
(03:36):
They reinforce, they define each other.
And we use the symbol of the yin yangto represent that idea of paradox,
because you could imagine these opposingperspectives, white and black, But
those perspectives reinforce each other.
And so in my own decision, underlying thisquestion of do I go to grad school to get
(03:58):
a PhD or do I go to grad school to get anMBA or something that is more pragmatic,
underlying that decision is an ongoingtension that I experienced of wanting to
both do stuff, get stuff done, lead, butalso and also understand, research, do it.
And so If we look at that paradox, there'sthis paradox between understanding and
(04:22):
doing, learning and developing, beingand doing, and our argument in the book
is that if we can notice the underlyingparadoxes that inform our dilemmas, it
opens up a whole new way of thinkingabout how to address and respond to them.
Aidan McCullen (04:38):
Beautiful beautiful that exactly what you're talking about is
something that so many of our audienceexperience the tug of war internally of do
i stay with the organization do i move onand both you and marianne your co author
talk about this the whole time throughoutthe book so i highly recommend getting
into the book because you will see.
That this happens the best of usthis is not you everybody faces these
(05:02):
paradoxes tensions and dilemmas.
There was a piece here i'd loveto quote because i just wanted to
show people the beautiful language.
You mentioned Yin and Yang for exampleyou go into the history including
showing how that image works and all thedifferent nuances about that image which
is beautiful but there's a piece herei'd love you to unpack for us you say.
(05:23):
"What if instead of trying to choosebetween the mutually exclusive options
we start by surfacing the paradoxes thatlurk beneath our dilemmas and recognize
that those paradoxes cannot be solved.
Instead of choosing between alternativepoles of paradox what if we ask
a different question how we mightengage both poles simultaneously."
(05:46):
i'd love you to unpack that becausereally this is the main thesis
of the book both and thinking
Wendy Smith (05:52):
I love that you notice that and say this out loud.
These paradoxes are not anomaliesand they're not problems.
They are the reality ofthe world that we live in.
And one of the experiences that we haveis that the more that we talk about this
and the more that we normalize it whenwe do workshops, when we do keynotes
and the more that we invite people toarticulate their paradoxes, the more that
(06:15):
people realize that they're not alonein them and that this is not a problem.
In fact,, not only is it not aproblem, it can be an opportunity,
a chance to move forward.
And so, just by way of example, Ithink I was saying , I initially
studied innovation and the keyquestion for these business leaders
was do I focus on the existing world?
(06:36):
Or do I focus on the new,innovative, experimental world?
And as your listeners know, there'sresource questions associated with that.
There's leadership questionsassociated with that.
There's strategic questions.
There's, questions of identity.
There's questions that feel like youneed to make a choice between them.
The invitation of paradox is tonotice that instead of pushing
(07:00):
for a clear choice immediately.
The invitation is to sit with and noticehow it is, why it is that the existing
world enables, creates resources, enablessupports, The potential to innovate.
The more successful you are, themore that you have resources to
(07:22):
be able to experiment and createthe slack to try new things.
The innovative world enables us toactually continue on going forward.
It creates energy and ideas that preventus from becoming obsolete . And so it
is that initial noticing that thereare these underlying paradoxes that
invite us into this new way of thinking.
Aidan McCullen (07:42):
there's a beautiful piece of writing about timing and so
much of success as we label success.
Has to do with timing.
You can just be lucky when youbought your Bitcoin, you can be
lucky when you started your business.
You can be lucky whenyou bought your house.
Oh, loads and loads of different thingshave a dramatic effect on success, but
(08:04):
you identify in the book, three conditionsthat make underlying paradoxes, more
salient change, scarcity, and plurality.
I'd love you to unpack those, butagain, there's a beautiful piece here.
And you can tell that Wendystudied innovation, when you
read little excerpts like this.
You write that, "the greater the rate ofchange, the quicker the future becomes
(08:25):
the present, and the more we mustgrapple with tensions between today and
tomorrow, the scarcer the resources, themore we fight for our slice of the pie,
revealing tensions between self and other.
Between competition and corporationwhich speaks to disasters from a
climate perspective to unbelievablefocus on the bottom line like Enron
(08:48):
so much in here but this idea oftiming is an underlying foundation
Wendy Smith (08:53):
people will often ask me the question, what's the difference
between a paradox and a dilemma?
And the answer to go back to what wewere saying earlier that we argue is
that they are not different problems.
They are different lenses on the sameproblem that if a dilemma is one way to
experience the problem of how do I makea choice At the level of what feels like
(09:14):
something that's demanding my choice.
Where am I going to go to grad school?
How am I going to spendmy innovation dollars?
How am I going to spend my time?
And if underlying that is the paradoxthat it is a different lens on that.
What we would argue then is thatparadoxes inform and define all of our
dilemmas, but they're not always salient.
We don't always always.
(09:34):
Experience them.
Oftentimes they are hidden in the shadows.
So the question is what makes them moresalient as opposed to latent and hiding.
And those three conditions that younamed change, plurality and scarcity.
What we argue is that it is those threeconditions that make this underlying that
(09:54):
that juxtapose the opposing perspectivesso much more poignantly, and you're
the first is to your point, Yeah.
That change is about timing.
It's about how quickly we condense or theexperience of tomorrow becoming today.
And that creates this tensionbetween the today and the tomorrow
(10:15):
in a much more poignant way.
I think that Aidan, we're seeing thatnow in issues of climate change, as
you said, or issues of large globalissues where the question about what
tomorrow will look like feels verydifferent for Our generation for my
kids generation than what today lookslike, and it's creating all kinds of
clashes between that tomorrow and today,which invites us in which demands us to
(10:41):
experience that tension more poignantly.
The second is this notion of pluralitythat when we are When we're surrounded
by lots of people that think likeus, that tensions or opposing
perspectives don't surface that often.
When we are surrounded by lots ofpeople that have different points
of view, on one hand, there isthis opportunity for creativity.
(11:06):
And on the other hand, weexperience that tension even more.
And in fact, And we can talk about this.
The call that I just got off.
It was all about polarization and theextent to which we're surrounded by
people with different points of view.
And instead of leaning into and valuingthose different points of view, we
have gone to a place where we havebasically gone to our different corners
(11:28):
and hidden away and then shot out atone another because we don't know how
to be in conversation around that.
But that pluralitysurfaces these tensions.
And then the third piece is The extent towhich there are limited resources creates
challenges over who gets the resources andit surfaces those tensions and makes them
more explicit, salient and obvious to us
Aidan McCullen (11:51):
that scarcity thing is always a problem when
you see an organization that has.
Abundance doesn't actually make poordecisions because there's enough to go
around for everybody but as soon as we'lltalk about a little while you get to the
top of that curve and things start tochange you start to worry about things etc
but i thought we'd give an example herei want to tell our audience the book is.
(12:15):
Beautifully peppered with loadsand loads of examples from personal
reinvention, to great innovators, topeople who have reinvented their origins.
So this is a great story thatyou open the book of Zita Cobb.
And I thought we'd open theshow with her as the example as
well, because I loved her story.
(12:36):
Great lady, brilliant thinker.
And she applied both on thinkingto solve a really tough problem
that she was struggling with
Wendy Smith (12:45):
This is the story of Zita Cobb.
The, quick story is that she grew up inFogo Island, Newfoundland, Fogo Island,
Newfoundland is as I say, an island offof an island in the North Atlantic seas.
And In fact, there is the FlatEarth Society that in fact
does believe the earth is flat.
(13:05):
And if you look at the Flat EarthSociety, there is a map and there is
a point on Fogo Island, which is oneof the four corners of the earth.
And if you travel to Fogo Island andyou climb that hill there, there is
a lovely sign there that says this isone of the four corners of the earth.
Watch out.
And then it notes at the bottomthe number of people that have
fallen off the earth from here.
(13:26):
Zero.
So, so they live into it.
But the bigger story is thatFogo Island is an island that was
inhabited for about eight generations.
Mostly Irish, British, Scottishsettlers came over about eight
generations ago and predominantlydevelop their main resource is cod.
They were fishermen that would day fishin these small punt boats off of the
(13:50):
coast of Fogo Island for, for centuries.
And that in the 1970s when the largetrawling boats from Scandinavia would
come out and would fish the open waters,it really dried up the cod stock.
In the inshore co stock, which meant thatthe livelihood in Fogo Island was starting
(14:10):
to, was diminishing significantly.
And then in the 1990s, the provincebasically put a moratorium on the
amount of fishing because therewas such a small resource left
and many people left and moved.
And the people of Foggo Island, manypeople had left, including Zita Cobb.
She moved to Ottawa and it turns outthat she went and got an MBA got involved
(14:33):
in the semiconductor sorry, networknetworking industry became very successful
and became the third largest paid thirdhighest paid female executive in Canada.
And then when she cashedout, I believe in her.
40s or 50s said, like, howcan I do something with this?
That is meaningful.
And what was really meaningful to her?
(14:53):
What is really meaningful to her isFogo Island, where she grew up and
had to abandon, but not just FogoIsland, Fogo Island as an island.
Emblematic as a symbol more broadly ofsmall rural communities and the fact
that we were losing the diversity ofsmall rural communities of cultural
distinctions of different ways of knowingso she went back to Fogo Island to
(15:17):
ask, how can we redevelop Fogo Island?
and develop this, this islandand a huge challenge there.
So there was a huge challenge of,well, what does it mean to honor the
traditions and the culture and the waysof life and the ways of knowing and
simultaneously modernize this islandso that it can continue to exist.
(15:40):
It can continue.
There could continue to be aneconomic possibility into the future.
So how do we deal with this ongoingtension between the old and the new,
the tradition and the modern, betweenthat which is local and unique and
connecting into the global economy?
How do we, how do we navigate thosetensions in order to be able to survive?
(16:03):
As an island and continue to beunique, even while connecting
into that global economy.
Aidan McCullen (16:09):
i love some of the language you use around this because
you just replace Fogo island for anorganization for example, you said that
Zita Said the islanders need to findnew ways with old things, and the task
was how could they honor the past whilemoving into the future, everything
that happens organizations as well whenyou're successful and will talk later
(16:31):
on about lego is an example of this.
Where your success can lead to yourfailure if you cling to the way things
were always done around here and thisis where both and thinking comes in.
The book covers a deep dive in the historyof paradox which stems right back to
the dawn of writing the duality that.
Heraclitus talked about Jung talkedabout but i wanted to zoom in on one
(16:56):
particular diagram here because youdiscussed the four types of paradox.
And I thought that would be reallyuseful if we set up today's show with
the frameworks through which you canlisten to the rest, because we're
going to do part two and part three,let's share this Wendy, and I'd love
you to take us through this Diagram.
Wendy Smith (17:14):
Well, first, I just want to reflect back to your
point about Zita because indeed.
What you noted there is that these kindsof tensions, which are highly context
specific, are also quite universal.
So here you've got this tension betweenthe past and the present tradition and
modernization in this diagram here, that'swhat we call the learning paradoxes.
(17:37):
That's the tension of short term, longterm tradition, and we see that in this
social enterprise and trying to rebuildthis rural community in the future.
Newfoundland, and I just spent sixmonths in Australia, did some work
with some schools and these schoolswere dealing with, the other corner
of the earth and these schoolsat a very different industry.
(17:59):
We're dealing with the same tension.
How do we navigate the tensions ofwho we've been while simultaneously
building out who we are?
We want to be and how do we holdon to our traditions while still
modernizing and, in these schools,as you can imagine, as soon as you
say, Oh, we've got to change things.
We've got to innovate.
We've got to modernize.
All of a sudden there's an anxiety.
(18:20):
Don't let go of our tradition.
So you could feel that there.
That is the learning paradoxes.
Just to walk through the others.
Performing paradoxes are indeedthese tensions of outcomes of
what we're trying to achieve.
We call it the tensions of why theexample we often use is this mission
(18:40):
market profit passion, which a lot oforganizations experience for Zita Cobb.
This was true and present there for her,which is the tension between how are we
going to enable our economy and buildout something that develops the economy.
And we can talk about how she did it andknow that that's in service of building
(19:02):
out and developing our community.
We, we like to use we, and in the book,we use the example of Unilever, which
is a often some of your listeners mightknow the example, the at the time Dutch
British owned packaged goods companywhere Paul Pullman came in in 2008
and made a very clear commitment tothe Unilever sustainable living plan,
(19:25):
which committed to a set of socialand environmental objectives, not
despite, not alongside, but to enable.
their financial bottomline, their profits.
So that's the performing tensions.
I can tell you just brieflyabout the other two.
The organizing tensions are whathappen when we create processes, when
(19:47):
we are trying to figure out how toget something done in organizations.
This shows up as the tension betweendo we focus on centralization in an
organization or decentralization.
I am at a university.
Our university, as many others,continually struggle with, is there
(20:08):
central decision making or do we enablesort of decentralization where other
people get to inform and enable decisions?
Where do decisions happen?
I worked with a hedge fund inHong Kong, and that was a big
question they were asking, whichis, Who makes the decisions here?
Is it in the Hong Kong office oris it all in all these distinct
offices across Southeast Asia wherethey had very different cultures?
(20:33):
And then belonging paradoxes.
And this is often the one that peoplefind most abstract, but these are
the tensions of who we are, ouridentities, how we understand ourselves.
Do we understand ourselves as distinctidentity groups, or do we understand
ourselves as part of a greater whole?
(20:54):
Do we understand ourselvesas insiders or outsiders?
And this set of tensions, whowe are and how we relate is
probably the most poignant whenit comes to our decision making.
In fact, several of the conversations,I think I was saying, I was
talking about polarization.
This comes up in the polarizationconversation a whole lot.
(21:17):
Or I just had a conversation with folkswho are navigating tensions in the
midst of conflict in the Middle East.
And what does it mean to for thosethat are connected to that to hold a
particular point of view of trying toadvance an identity, either Israeli
or Palestinian, Jewish or Muslim, andat the same time, try and hold a more
(21:42):
global identity of living into humanityand trying to create a global identity.
connections acrossthose, it's really hard.
So those tensions areparticularly pernicious.
I want to just say one more thing,which is that we think the value of
this figure here is to help us, toyour point initially, see how these
tensions show up all over the place.
(22:04):
They are so at present inour lives all over the place.
We see these paradoxes everywhere.
Sometimes people get stuck insaying, well, is my paradox in
this bucket or in that bucket?
And to us, the value of thesebuckets is to inspire us to notice
how prevalent these tensions are,but not that we have to figure out
exactly which bucket they fit into.
Aidan McCullen (22:27):
we might talk about a little while there are limited cognitive
capacity and cognitive dissonance andall the things that get in the way
of us even accepting that all theseparadoxes are present, what i would
love to pull on a few threads thatyou mentioned there firstly to let
you know paul Polman for audience.
Is a forthcoming guest on the show,and he's going to come on with
(22:48):
Charles Conn, who's the chairman ofPatagonia for a three way conversation.
And they're going to talk about exactlywhat Wendy's talking about here, this
paradox of profit or planet, . Solots of good stuff to come on that.
But a couple of the things you saidthere, like so many of our audience, like
you have studied and you're a scholarin innovation, you will have seen this
(23:09):
time and time again, the bureaucracy.
And the burden of bureaucracy,but the need for some bureaucracy.
So this tug of war between centralizeddecentralized decision making from
the top versus pushing decision makingdown the organization, there are huge
paradoxes with inside organizations.
And I'd love you to shed a bit oflight on that from what you've seen
(23:31):
that's successful, or what are thecompromises that you need to make
Wendy Smith (23:35):
Yeah.
One organization that we studied,and it's right up the street
from my offices, is Gore.
WL Gore and Associates.
And for those people who studyinnovation, they will know They may
know about Gore because they were soiconoclastic when it came to innovation.
Their origin story is that BillGore was working at DuPont,
(23:57):
which is also not far from me.
He felt as an engineer that he didn't haveany local decision making, any autonomy.
He felt stifled.
He felt like the layers of decisionmaking bureaucracy were so imposing
that he just felt like shut out.
And his wife, Viv Gore said, well,we could do something better.
(24:19):
And they launched and developed W.L.
Gore & Associates , and the companyreally took off when they developed
this polymer that has this properties offlexibility and properties of durability
that has now been built into everythingfrom guitar strings to dental floss, to
the jackets that military people wear.
, and the key to the company Was thatthey were going to build the company
(24:40):
around the power of small teams.
And the idea was that they weregoing to move the decision making
down so that people could reallylean into their creativity.
They could feel motivated.
It was built off of a lot of McGregor'stheory, X theory, Y, the idea that we
can invest in people and that , they'llshow up to the task and that if we
(25:00):
give people the tools in order toreally be creative and autonomous
and motivated, they'll engage.
And that was great in these small teams.
When Gore was one office in Newark,Delaware with about 200 people and
everybody knew everybody and theycould navigate these possibilities.
And as Gore grew, It became challengingfor these small teams to work together
(25:27):
and about 50 years later, a little bitless the first non Gore family member.
It's still a privately held company.
Terry Kelly.
I think she was the second.
Actually, the first person was there fortwo years, took over as the CEO of Gore.
And the issue for her was thatthese small teams were all great.
But they were all running around in somany different directions with so little
(25:49):
coordination across them that there wasno either economies of scale at the least.
And at the best, there wasno enterprise wide strategy.
They couldn't coordinate with eachother because they all had different
processes and they had differentpractices and they weren't speaking the
same language and they had differenttechnologies that they were using.
And the question that she had toask was, how do create, enable an
(26:12):
enterprise wide strategy that didnot ruin the culture of autonomy that
came from the power of small teams.
That was her both and challenge.
And it was difficult.
And to go back to this point ofidentity, she faced a whole lot of
pushback because people at Gore said,and continue to say, We are a company
(26:35):
that is built on this autonomy andmotivation and small teams, and as
soon as you start talking enterprisewide strategy, you're killing that.
And she would say back to them, inorder to live, you need to breathe.
And in order to breathe, you haveto breathe in and breathe out.
So how do we create an organizationhere where we can both have the
(26:58):
kind of coordinated possibilitiesWhile simultaneously upholding our
culture of autonomy and small teams.
Aidan McCullen (27:07):
extremely difficult?
And, It's so easy to talk about thesethings isn't it like when you when you
have a consultant who doesn't have scartissue about what it's really like in an
organization but when you try to implementsomething like that it's so so difficult.
The other thing i just want to justpull on was you mentioned there.
About on an individual level.
(27:27):
So when it comes to group, the ideaof in group, out group, we do this a
lot, people in innovation, when they'reworking in organizations, create this
divide and go, Oh, they're dinosaurs.
Those guys, they don't understand thatthey're going to kill the organization,
and in doing that, we create thedivide, which is not helpful anymore.
And one of the things you suggest webe aware of beyond the paradox is.
(27:52):
What you call the nested paradox,because you say from the individual
to the group organization and society,that paradoxes show up at different
levels, this is what youcall nested paradoxes.
I thought this was animportant thing to share.
Wendy Smith (28:07):
I love that you pulled that out.
Very few people point to that.
And we're doing some really significantwork around this with my colleagues
in Australia right now, because theidea is that it's what people like
to do is, is point to a dilemmaand then point to the paradox.
That surfaces in that dilemma, andthere's two pieces that complicate this.
(28:27):
The first is what you're talking about,which is nested paradox, which is to say,
the way that we experience the world isinformed by our personal experience is
informed by the groups that we are in.
It's informed by our society.
Our society is informed by thepeople that lead that society,
and they reinforce each other.
And so this idea of nested paradoxes isthat how we experience these tensions.
(28:53):
Like goes up and down acrossthese different levels,
and that has implications.
So one implication, for example, isthat we need to be aware, that of the
messages that we get from our societyand how it informs our thinking.
And it's hard to do that.
So my colleague Josh Keller now inAustralia had this piece of work that he
(29:15):
did with his colleagues where he lookedat the different messages that we get.
If we're living in China and thenational messages around what it's
like to live into competing demandsor living in the United States.
And he did this great studywhere he invited people in
China to look at game theory.
Can you cooperate and compete, or do youhave to choose cooperating or competing?
(29:40):
And it turns out that in theUnited States, people don't
think that cooperation andcompetition can go together.
You have to either chooseto cooperate or compete.
In China, the national myth, the nationalstory, the national zeitgeist enabled
a possibility for cooperation andcompetition to happen more simultaneously.
(30:02):
What I love about the finding, however,is that they found that was true in China,
except for those people in the businessschools in which they started to adopt
and embrace this American Approach thatcooperation competition can't go together
and they have to be one or the other.
So there's something about theway in which our national stories
(30:22):
inform our individual thinkingthat we're not always aware of.
And here I love a phrase from Zita Cobb,who we mentioned, who always says, fish
don't know that they're swimming in water.
It's a, it's a well known idea.
I tried to look up who initially said it.
It's attributed to lots of people.
But the idea that, how we thinkabout the world being informed by
(30:43):
our society, we don't even know.
And so how we think about thesetensions informed by our society,
we don't even realize, but that theycascade across these different levels.
And so that's the idea of nested tensions.
Aidan McCullen (30:56):
Beautiful, beautiful.
I often think about it.
it's like each of us see througha kaleidoscope of biases and.
Cognitive issues like limitationsbut it's a kaleidoscope kaleidoscope
when lots of people come togetherso therefore we just want people who
are like us because it's simpler andi get it i mean everybody gets that.
(31:17):
But one of the things i thought we'dshare before we go on to chapter two
which i love you talk about ruts.
And being stuck in ways of thinking, etcetera, et cetera is the paradox system.
I thought we'd share that when the, andthis is where, if you look at this system,
those of you joining us on YouTube, you'llsee how to enable both on thinking and
(31:38):
throughout the book, there's multiple
frameworks like this to help you.
It's really a decision making book helpspeople make better decisions and helps
you navigate your life better helps youmake better personal decisions but also if
you're an organizational leader, be ableto navigate big thorny issues as well so
i'm gonna share on the screen the paradoxsystem i love you to take us through,
Wendy Smith (32:03):
Sure.
And this is probably a teaser fora follow up conversation because
this is the framework that informsreally the core of our book.
And the idea is If we have convincedyou that the way we tend to deal
with tensions in this either or way,and we can talk about why that's a
problem, is a problem, and that thereis an alternative both and approach,
(32:27):
how do we implement the both and?
And so here's the big pictureset of ideas about how to do so.
We identify four buckets or what we callsets of tools for navigating the both
and, and we point to and we worked reallyhard to label them as A, B, C, D, maybe
(32:49):
to help with the mnemonics, assumptions,boundaries, comfort, and dynamics.
And here's, what's important about this.
Okay.
idea is that we also putthem on two different axes.
So on one hand, on the horizontalaxis, we point to assumptions,
which is our mindsets.
How do we think aboutthese competing demands?
And on the other side,comfort, Which is our emotions.
(33:13):
Aiden, you said earlier, these things arereally hard and we make a case for, and
we can unpack how to do this, but that inorder to navigate paradoxes, we have to
notice that discomfort, notice how hardit is and find comfort in the discomfort.
So the horizontal access is both headand heart, mind and emotion cognitive,
(33:35):
rational and emotional, intuitive.
And that's all aboutwhat the individual does.
On the vertical axis we haveboundaries and dynamics.
Those are both about how do we scaffoldthe system around us to reinforce the
both and whether it's in our personallives or whether it's in a group
(33:56):
or whether it's in an organization.
The boundaries, which is oftenthe most confusing, but really
that's the structures that wecreate to scaffold are both ending.
It's, it's the vision that we set up.
It's the rules.
It's the roles and responsibilities.
It's the processes that we put inplace to reinforce both ending.
And we can talk more aboutwhat each of those look like.
(34:18):
And, and those are likethe set structures.
And then at the bottom, it's the dynamics,which is the practices we put in place
to allow us to continually change toinvite us to constantly be curious
to shift to look for opportunitiesto experiment to not be stuck.
And so what are the practices that createthe scaffolding that is more stuck?
(34:42):
And what are the practices that createthe possibilities that enable us to
change the stability and the change?
And I just want to say in the big picture.
That some of your listenersmight be noticing that in each of
these axes, tensions within them.
And so there's the tension on thehorizontal axis between how I think
(35:02):
and how I feel, which are, the mind andthe heart, which are often in tension.
There's the tension on the verticalaxis between the things that we do in
our systems that are stable and thethings that we do in our systems that
enable change, stability and change.
And then we have a tension across axes,which is about, and by the way, this
tension comes up all the time, whichis about changing the individual, which
(35:24):
is the horizontal axis or, and changingthe system, which is the vertical axis.
This is the individual andthe system structure and
agency and academic language.
And a key to this And the big pictureis that we say multiple times throughout
the book that if this is how we navigateparadox, then notice there's paradox
(35:46):
embedded in it or navigating paradoxis paradoxical, and so people could
lean into this figure to notice hownotice those paradoxes and navigating
paradox or lean in and focus in on oneof these sets of tools and the tools
to enable, and we would argue thatthey actually reinforce one another.
Aidan McCullen (36:06):
i was looking at this and i was thinking about how relevant
it was i was telling you before we cameon air i have a teenage son as well.
I was trying to teach him the importanceof decisions and decision trees and that
each decision opens up more decisions andwhen i saw this i was like well, this is
essentially an infinity curve of you makethat decision then you need more decisions
(36:30):
and it just it's never over which is lifeand if you can create good frameworks
to make a decision in the first place.
You just feel more comfortable i thinkin life you go through life happier
you don't have as many regrets you knowyou made the best possible decision you
could with the tools you have availableso it's one of the reasons i love
the book and highly recommend it buti thought we'd move on to ruts and.
(36:57):
You open chapter two with story oflego and many people think LEGO's always
been an extremely successful company notknowing the history about lego but i got
a few near death experiences, i'll openup a little quote here because you said
stressing only one side of a paradoxoversimplifies and narrows our options,
(37:18):
.The tricky thing is that picking one side usually offers us short term success,
comfort, respect, rewards, efficiency,joy, success, motivates us to stick
with that option until we get stuck ina rut, the greater the success of those
either or choices, the deeper the ruts.
Lego leaders.
Learn this all too well as theircommitment to the organization's greatest
(37:41):
strengths nearly led to their downfall
Wendy Smith (37:45):
I love that.
Chapter two is really all about thelimitations of the either or and why
the either or is what we say limitedat best and detrimental at worst.
And we Point to three, what we callvicious cycles or three patterns
that create these limitationsand Lego exemplifies them.
(38:06):
The first pattern we talk aboutas a pattern of intensification
or Getting stuck down a rabbithole is the metaphor we use.
And the idea is that, as you were saying,we pick one side, we get, we reinforce
that side with expertise, skills, people,both our social structures around us,
(38:28):
our identity, that it's hard to thenpull out and see the other option.
And this, to your point, as manyof your listeners will know, is
the challenge of the S curve.
You build up, in a company, for example.
You become so adept at one, particularapproach, you build up your success.
You create the scale around that youmove up the S curve, but you're so
(38:51):
successful that you don't know thatyou're about to fall off the S curve.
And it's a classicchallenge for companies.
And Lego fell into that.
They, were a family owned business.
Started in Billund, Denmark.
They came upon this brillianttoy of the interlocking brick.
They really had it down pat sothat They resisted innovation
(39:16):
significantly, and they werefour colors for a very long time.
And there's these stories abouthow George Lucas and the Star Wars
team came and said, Let's co brand.
No, no, no.
We're not about, creating Systems thattells kids what to do with their Legos
were about so so they really resisted andlike many companies They began to fail
(39:37):
And we see that story again and again.
And that is the story offalling into the rabbit hole
of inertia, of intensification.
And that happens whether it'sinnovation or that happens whether
we are intensifying around ourskills and approaches to our job.
We are in a career.
We have a way of doing things.
We are surrounded by otherpeople that do it the same.
(39:57):
It's really hard to change.
So we intensify, we fall intoa rabbit hole and it's hard
to see the other side and.
And as you noted that's not actuallywhat almost killed Lego because they
brilliantly said, Oh, they finallyrealized, , they were the toy of the year.
They were so successful, but then theystarted to see this decline and much
(40:21):
of the decline happened because the toyindustry was starting to become much
more electronic and not as mechanical.
And they said, yeah,we've got to innovate.
And so they did what we often see, whenpeople start realizing they have to
switch, which is they moved significantlyinto the opposite direction and started
(40:41):
to innovate in every possible way.
So we call this The wreckingball or overcorrection.
You go from intensification toovercorrection when you switch
into the complete opposite.
And so that's when Lego openedup , Lego lands and all of these
parks, or that's when they startedco branding with everybody.
(41:02):
There was just a whole lot of innovation.
They.
tried every type of innovation and theywere so innovative without restraint,
without discipline, that it's thenthat even though their profits, their
top line started to go up, theirbottom line started to decline because
their costs were so out of control.
And they realized that they have to moveto a different kind of innovation that is
(41:25):
both innovative and with some disciplineand with some limitations along the way.
So that is the second sort of patternthat becomes problematic in the either or.
We move from one side andwe swing to the opposite.
And again, we see thisin our personal lives.
I always say, If anybody wants to seethis in their personal life, think
about anybody who's ever been on adiet or tried to be disciplined about
(41:47):
exercise or disciplined about something.
Discipline, discipline,discipline, discipline.
And then as soon as yougive it up, forget it.
Like, you eat the chocolate croissantand everything goes out the window.
So we have these swings.
And then the third pattern, and I don'tknow, I can say two words about that
and then we can unpack any of those,but the third pattern is perhaps what
I think of as the most pernicious, andwe call that trench warfare, and we've
(42:12):
referred to this a bit over in ourconversation, and it's essentially what
we point to as polarization, right?
We have intensification.
We have overcorrection.
We have polarization.
And it's what happens when we pick a side.
We surround ourselves with otherpeople that pick, that reinforce
(42:33):
that, the confirmation bias.
And then we reject, we defend ourside and we reject to the point
of dehumanization the other side.
We don't even know what it lookslike at some point, but we just keep
rejecting it because the assumptionis, if I'm right, I'm right.
They have to be wrong, and we call ittrench warfare because you could imagine
(42:54):
the idea of one side building a trench toprotect themselves and surround themselves
with other people, but then shooting outat the other side without even knowing
who they are, without even hearing theiropinion, without even understanding.
And that, as we've said a couple of times,that comes up in companies, I did a talk
a little bit ago for a group of CFOswho said, yes, like as CFOs, we totally
(43:19):
like sustainability is really important.
And then when we started to talk aboutthose sustainability guys and how
irresponsible they are about moneyand like, it just became us and them.
And they don't, they don't haveconversation, but so we see these
kind of polarizing groups show up inorganizations, and we certainly see it
in our global politics at the moment.
Aidan McCullen (43:38):
he mentioned their confirmation bias and i thought maybe we'd
land today's ship the show on, the mindsetemotional states and behaviors that spur
these patterns because they exasperate.
Rabbit holes intensification and wreckingballs they exasperate polarization
inside organizations as well and.
(43:59):
There's a lot in that in biases andbeliefs and how we are educated what
first managers we have etc but ilove you to share maybe a sweeping
thought on that because this is whereit all forms for us and it can be
very difficult to rewire ourselves.
Wendy Smith (44:15):
Yeah, I think that's right.
And so I want to have empathythat you said this earlier.
It's easy to talk about this stuff.
It's hard to do it.
And I just want to acknowledgethat in these biases.
Are both our cognitive biases.
Our mindsets that keep us in thiseither or , we have these mindsets
that want clarity, want certainty.
(44:37):
And oftentimes when we talk about bias,we think of the cognitive biases, but
there's also these emotional biases.
We want clarity and certainty, and wefeel anxious when things are uncertain.
And I Often like reminding people togo back to March, 2020, the beginning
of the pandemic, when there was a lotof uncertainty, that uncertainty was
(45:01):
highly consequential, potentially fatal.
And what we most desperatelywanted was certainty and clarity.
Should we mask or not mask?
Should we, should, shouldwe isolate or not isolate?
Should we wash our fruits andvegetables five times or seven times?
Like we, we wanted real.
Clarity on things that thereweren't always real clarity about.
(45:21):
And so just to remind ourselves howquickly we go to those places of
wanting to have a clear decisionbecause we feel uncomfortable
and that shows up all the time.
And I have tremendous.
Empathy for how we navigatethat, but that's not easy.
Aidan McCullen (45:37):
We're going to leave it at that because there's
so much in these chapters.
We're going to do part two and partthree and follow the narrative of
the book, touching on some of thosecase studies as well, but Wendy, for
people who are interested more inyour work, you mentioned consulting,
you mentioned keynotes as well, ButI know also you just have released
a brand new newsletter as well.
Where's the best place to find you?
Wendy Smith (45:59):
The best place is our website, both and thinking.
net.
We welcome anyone tofollow our newsletter.
We just started releasingit a couple of months ago.
It's called it's not aneither or it's on Substack.
You can find it through our websitefor sure, but also for the Substack
affection autos, you can find uson Substack and we welcome people
(46:21):
to engage in conversation with us.
Aidan McCullen (46:23):
And good news as well.
I have a copy of both and thinking offor grab for those of you who are signed
up to the innovation show sub stackas well, I'll link to Wendy sub stack.
I'll also recommend it from the innovationshow sub stack as well for an extra boost.
But for now author of both onthinking, embracing creative tensions
to solve your toughest problem.
(46:43):
Wendy Smith.
Thank you for joining us.
Wendy Smith (46:46):
Thank you.
What a great conversation.
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