Why Both/And Thinking Matters Now

A brief scan of headlines over recent years reminds us that tensions are the norm. We grapple daily with persistent and rising conflicts at all levels—societal, organizational, and personal. For starters, a global pandemic disrupted nations around the world, affecting physical, mental, and economic life in widely varying ways. Work-life tensions boiled over as the pandemic progressed, triggering what some call the great resignation—people’s departure from employers in large numbers, seeking better wages, greater flexibility, or deeper meaning. Pivotal incidents—from natural disasters to the murder of a Minneapolis citizen named George Floyd—sparked vital conversations on shared humanitarian and planetary challenges. Yet rather than bringing us together, these incidents instead widened political divides. Ensuring the sustainability of our habitat while ensuring justice and fairness in society and economic opportunity for all often seem like impossible dreams. Yet thoughtful business leaders, notably Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever (featured in this book), have called on businesses to support rather than denigrate our fragile environment. Nonetheless, progress is slow. The problems we face remain vexing, wicked, complicated … and diverse.

Wendy and Marianne argue that understanding paradoxes, which they define as persistent interdependent contradictions, is vital to solving such problems. As you read their ideas, you are likely to start seeing paradoxes everywhere. You will discover conflicting demands that pull in opposing directions: tensions between today and tomorrow, between ourselves and others, or between keeping things stable and wanting them to change. Whether you are a national leader seeking to respond to a pandemic, an organizational leader trying to be agile in a shifting market, or a person struggling with the next move in your career, you are encouraged to embrace tensions. Doing so, Wendy and Marianne suggest, fosters creativity and thriving amid all these challenges.

Like Wendy and Marianne, I have learned in my own research—which has focused on learning and teaming in organizations—to appreciate the challenge of crossing boundaries. Success in knowledge- and expertise-intensive environments depends on constant learning and, increasingly, on constant teaming—communicating and coordinating with people across boundaries of expertise, status, and distance.¹ Learning and teaming are both fraught with tensions. Learning requires us to honor what we know today, while also letting go in order to develop new insights for tomorrow. Teaming depends on strong individual contributions, while being willing to subsume individual needs and preferences for collective gain. These paradoxes make learning and teaming both powerful and challenging. It’s difficult to navigate them without a safe interpersonal context in which candor seems feasible. My research, extended by the research of dozens of other scholars and practitioners, shows that psychological safety—a climate in which people are comfortable expressing and being themselves—allows teams to more effectively learn.² Yet even the concept of psychological safety encompasses paradoxical tensions: it takes courage to be vulnerable. I think of courage and psychological safety as two sides of the same precious coin. On one side, psychological safety describes an environment that lowers interpersonal risk; on the other, the individuals who must take those risks must be courageous because they cannot fully know, in advance, that what they do and say will be well received. An individual who wants to contribute an idea but who fears it will be rejected by others is, in effect, in a bind. When you are in a bind, I have found, it’s helpful to name it. To call attention to the tension! In that way, you invite others into the conversation to help navigate the tension and find a way forward.

What makes Wendy and Marianne’s book so compelling is that they go beyond labeling the paradoxes we face. They also offer ways to navigate them, turning seemingly vexing puzzles into wellsprings of creativity and possibility. Drawing from more than twenty-five years of research, they present tools and show how these tools work together in an integrated system. Given the power and elegance of their ideas, I believe that their paradox system will be widely used in leadership development courses for years to come.

Why I’m Excited That Wendy and Marianne Wrote This Book

I first met Wendy when she was a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, where I had the privilege to be part of her dissertation committee. She arrived at the idea of paradox in her research by studying how IBM’s top leaders pursued innovation at the same times that they maintained the company’s existing products and services. They recognized the need to steward the revenues of the present while developing the revenues of the future. A focus on paradoxes made sense in her research but doing so was also risky. Even though ideas about paradoxes date back thousands of years, and influential management academics like Charles Perrow, Andy Van de Ven, Marshall Scott Poole, Bob Quinn, and Kim Cameron had explored paradox in organization theory in the 1970s and 1980s, this stream had largely remained silent for some years.³ Yet Wendy persisted.

Fortunately for Wendy, Marianne was also boldly paving the way to explore paradox in business research. And fortunately for me, I also met Marianne many years ago—introduced by her father, who had been a treasured senior colleague at Harvard Business School. Marianne wrote a groundbreaking paper on paradox, stitching together long-standing insights from philosophy and psychology along with a rising but still limited set of publications in our shared field of organizational behavior. That paper won the best article of the year in a top journal and was soon opening broader academic conversations.

Working together on these ideas, Wendy and Marianne made a formidable team. They first pursued the concepts intellectually, together writing an important paper that laid out the foundations of paradox and became the most cited in a particularly prestigious scholarly journal over the last decade. They then conducted research experiments to expand on and test fundamental knowledge about paradoxes and how we navigate them. Consistent with their own philosophy, Wendy and Marianne also built communities that connected academics, business leaders, and individuals interested in paradox, organizing conferences and symposia for academics in the field. In the last 10 years, we have seen extensive research building on ideas about the nature of management of paradoxes from scholars across the globe. Wendy and Marianne also worked with corporate leaders, middle managers, and frontline employees to both learn from them and help them use these ideas to further their own work. In sum, Wendy and Marianne have pushed forward paradox as a concept that will have a critical impact on research and practice, an impact that is greatly needed at this time.

Ultimately, Wendy and Marianne highlight the capacity for both/and thinking as a way to enable more creative and sustainable solutions to individual challenges and global problems alike. As already noted, whenever we dig deeper into dilemmas, we discover persistent contradictions. Paradoxes can thus vex and paralyze, but if we embrace these creative tensions they present, they also can spark energy and innovation. The tools and illustrations in this book serve as a valuable guide to doing just that. Enjoy reading about them.

Amy C. Edmondson

Novartis Professor of
Leadership and Management

Harvard Business School