Intellectually Curious - Edition 13
Welcome to the 13th Edition of the Intellectually Curious Newsletter. I would like to thank all the subscribers and for those who are visiting for the first time do take time to read the previous editions and subscribe so that you don’t miss the future editions.
Book for the edition:
Every day from the time we wake up till we go to bed, we face problems - as an individual, as part of a community and as an inhabitant of this earth. Let us be honest, we don’t like the problems and the tensions they bring in. We get very anxious when we face them and we try to avoid them as much as possible and try to return to status quo, by taking decisions or taking actions that can really give us to a sub-optimal result from where we started.
We always think decisions are always either/or. Life is definitely not black & white, it is different shades of Gray and many other colors too if we care to observe. By treating every decision as either/or we don’t get into the pathways that can actually give us good outcomes and also help us to propel our personal/professional life forward.
So the book for this edition of the newsletter is the one that can help us to solve our toughest problems and be our guide through the entire process – Both/And Thinking by Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis.
The authors build the how to solve the problems by understanding the nature and components of the problems – it starts as a tension which has dilemmas and paradoxes.
Many problems that we face are difficult as they present us with dilemmas – choices between alternatives that we need to choose and paradox is defined as interdependent, persisting contradictions that are within the dilemmas.
An example of paradox: whether we should focus on us or others during a care giving situation – Now unless we are healthy, we will not be able to care of others and if we start focusing on our own health (going to a gym, eating healthy food and other related activities that consume time) we will not have enough time to care for others. Now if you don’t keep yourself healthy, and dedicate yourself to care giving, you may lose your health and will not be in a position to be caring for others.
Another paradox that is faced by everyone who is successful in their career of choice is to when to shift or move out of that.
Every paradox offers tension and by that friction. Leveraging that friction effectively is going to make the difference. This book aids in exactly doing that.
The dilemmas make the choices feel like they are mutually exclusive like a zero sum outcome.
So how about trying to engage both the alternatives/choices instead of just going with one and thereby enabling both/and thinking and creating more creative, sustainable and effective solutions.
Let us say your working long in an organisation and start to feel stagnant and growth is not happening. If you want to move to a new organisation you will have to prove yourself again, adapt to the culture etc., and makes you not too sure if you will be successful there. Thereby presenting a paradox. So how about trying to get best of both choices within the same organisation by moving to a different division and contributing more effectively there.
The book offers tools to understand the paradoxes behind our problems, methods that can help enabling both/and thinking and it also shows how this is applied in real life providing us with a complete guide to start solving our problems in a better way.
First let us try to understand the four different paradoxes we encounter in our life:
The decisions on strategy, investments, life path all are part of performing paradoxes.
The decisions that involve tensions across time like should we innovate or continue status quo ; should we continue the stability that we are enjoying or change it to an uncertain future – these are called learning paradoxes.
Belonging paradoxes arises when we feel the tensions in our roles, identities, values and personalities – Should I be a good parent or a good employee of the organisation ?
The decisions that are about structuring our life or an organisation gives raise to organizing paradoxes.
You can think of them as decisions related to the questions of – Why, When, Who & How – and these are the ones that create paradoxes across our professional and personal lives.
Sometimes these are also knotted like it may involve a why, who, how and when in a single problem or nested paradox like a How may keep coming at multiple levels thereby giving us more anxiety.
Let us now learn about some of the behaviors that push us towards a either/or decision making –
In our career as we grow by learning and building our strengths resulting in complacency, rigidity and even arrogance and we start missing what is happening around us resulting in total failure and many of us are not even able to comprehend what happened. So we need to keep ourselves ahead by creative exploration, bold innovation and radical changes to our lives. Never live in your current success.
I had a colleague who once told me that he attends a job interview every month just to learn what he doesn’t know. No wonder he is still a very successful person in his career path. So rather than waiting for your company to come and tell you that you are no more needed, keep scanning the horizon and always be ready to move even before that.
Another limiting behavior is assuming that our own personal experience is the only path in the universe and developing a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure that spirals out of control through consuming information that strengthens our confirmation bias.
We do not want uncertainty and try to be stable in our habits leading to poor decisions in life. I have seen many people who in their personal life try lot of new things, but when it comes to their career they are super conservative and keep making poor decisions.
Lot of either or thinking happens because of escalating commitments, the bias that keeps us invested in our previous decisions instead of moving out of it.
Sometimes we over correct and move to the exact opposite of where we were and not being able to sustain such a huge change.
Sometimes we just dig our heels and keep defending our thoughts and actions and dehumanize the people from the opposite camps.
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To be successful we need to be like what F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”.
The first pattern of both/and thinking is to integrate the opposing sides of a paradox and thereby creating a winning synergy. Humans have been breeding mules – offspring of a horse and donkey that has the best characteristics of both horse and a donkey and their disadvantages are not there in the mule.
The second pattern of both/and thinking is shifting between opposing alternatives and with every shift we move forward. Like a tight rope walker who keeps making micro shifts and keeps limited swings horizontally or vertically.
In real life these patterns are always intertwined and the authors offer us four sets of tools that help us to develop both/and thinking:
Assumptions, Boundaries, Comfort and Dynamism
We need to overcome certain assumptions like knowledge is finite. We must learn that there can be multiple truths at the same time; adopt an abundance mindset instead of thinking that resources are always scarce and learning to cope with the problem than controlling.
Making wrong assumptions with respect to the available knowledge and treating it as absolute, always complaining of scarcity and trying to control than letting it go is the cause of failure of many issues that we are currently facing from climate change to unequal economic prosperity.
Defining boundaries when we need to bring the opposite thinking groups together in crucial. It can be achieved by articulating a higher purpose that motivate long term thinking than short term; separating and connecting opposing demands; creating guardrails that prevent us from straying too far in one direction behave like a tight rope walker.
We need to find comfort in discomfort when dealing with paradoxes by slowing down, accepting the situation as it is and reaching out to positive emotions that lead to expanded thinking and creating a positive loop.
We also need to be dynamic by being open to new information, tolerate ambiguity and make necessary changes to the original decision based on the new information that is available. We can do this by doing lot of small experiments, plan our luck by putting ourself at the right place at the right time and always ready to unlearn.
The authors have also elaborated on how to apply all that we had learnt by journeying through the book for individual decisions, interpersonal relationships and organizational leadership. Very powerful case studies that have been shared act as a guide when we want to apply these techniques to your own unique situation.
The both/and thinking is a critical skill that we need to have in our inventory of skills to apply in all the situations that we find ourselves and the authors have taken lot of care to make us understand the importance of understanding the underlying paradoxes and tackling them effectively.
I recommend that this as a book that has to be read once a year to refresh ourselves and towards making sure that we are sharpening this critical skill. This can make all the difference to us, the community, the country and the world.
A book definitely worthy of your library!
Recent Technology Trend:
Space elevator – Will we have one by 2050 ?
Something new to learn:
Will Humanity adapt –
To think about how we can make our future better.
Podcast episode of this Newsletter:
Steven Johnson is a prolific writer of very interesting topics from how innovation happens to piracy. I started reading his books from 2008 – book on Joseph Priestly and have been a big fan of all his writings. All his books are enjoyable reads!
You can enjoy a good discussion of his latest book here:
Hope you enjoyed this edition!
Do share your feedback on the newsletter!
Professor | Author of Both/And Thinking | Leadership Strategist | Champion for Bold, Impactful Leadership | Director, Women’s Leadership Initiative at University of Delaware
8moThanks for such a detailed and thoughtful summary of our work. We are so thrilled to see that it resonates.