5
The Reconciliation Mindset
Such welcome and unwelcome things at once / 'Tis hard to reconcile.
—Shakespeare1
Bill Weldon, formerly chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, wouldn't give in to critics. People inside and outside the company said he should hire a China chief to juice the 125-year-old company's China business. Three out of four other companies in China had done so. A “Mr. China” could oversee the entire China business, talk with a single voice to regulators, and supervise the development of homegrown products. In the view of critics, the separate maneuverings of J&J's scores of decentralized product divisions were slowing business in China down.
Pressure on Weldon was intense. Not only were his people and partners in China urging him to name a Mr. Accountable, his board also wondered if a new role might clearly define people's responsibilities for the region. A China chief would help J&J act fast and step up the pace of growth.
Weldon called a time-out, however. He arranged what he called a “Chairman's Dialogue.” High-potential managers from around the world, including China and the United States, came to J&J headquarters for a day and a half of unstructured talks. Put your biggest challenges on the table, Weldon requested. Come with a narrative to describe them, and we'll talk the solutions through. No agenda.
When he convened the meeting, he brought his own challenge: How should we act on the China question? Should we reorganize with one chief? Should we stay decentralized, letting all the product divisions—Cordis, DePuy, Ethicon, Ethicon Endo-Surgery, LifeScan, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, and others—keep calling their own shots?
Weldon found plenty of his leaders on both sides of the issue. On one side were those who argued that J&J was losing focus on the Chinese customer and Chinese employees. It was too often reselling products developed elsewhere—after reducing the number of features and lowering the price. The lack of a China chief, they said, telegraphed to the Chinese government and Chinese employees that J&J was not serious enough about China.
On the other side were those who argued for the status quo, global decentralization. They complained that, if China were spun off into its own unit, product units would lose control of China product development. They would in turn lose a big slice of business. Worse, they would miss out on the low-cost drugs, devices, and services Chinese inventors would surely develop for their thrifty market—and in the process J&J's separate businesses would lose an edge in markets around the world.
During the dialogue both Weldon and the others began to see that many issues in China impeded business, but the way the business was organized was not one of them. The real issues: China needed homegrown product development to tailor products to the market. It needed a robust training program to develop managers. It needed a better understanding of diseases like diabetes in Chinese society. The “Mr. China” solution was a neat and easy solution, but not the solution that was right.
One manager after another left the dialogue making similar comments: “Wow, now I see how everyone else thinks. It's really complicated, isn't it?” Indeed, “Mr. China” was a puzzle solution, and what China needed was a solution to a paradox.
Weldon's efforts illustrate the use of the second mindset for tackling problems loaded with paradox: the reconciliation mindset. Instead of merely arguing over one position versus the next, you can lead other people into better understanding the company's interests. You can change the perception of the decision-making reality—getting people to see the validity of all sides of the story—and so change the preferred actions.
Weldon's dialogue with top-flight managers from around the world showed they could negotiate their way to a smarter right action, something in between the extremes. They didn't have to settle for the neat and easy. Interestingly, the biggest obstacle to arriving at that solution was the corporate matrix, as discussed in Chapter Three. When Weldon removed that obstacle, the right solution emerged more readily. If you are seeking similar results, ready to engage your head, heart, and guts, you can take the path of Weldon and his team.
Outlining the Mindset
You can create a reconciliation mindset in the same way as the purpose mindset: Fashion an essential question, construct the right frame, and clarify assumptions and values. You go about the process in much the same way, but you come up with very different results. Which mindset you choose depends on your sense of what kind of thinking will resolve the paradox most effectively. You might use one, two, or all three mindsets, and in different orders, to bring about the needed change in perception.
Formulating an essential question for the reconciliation mindset will again beg for fresh analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of ideas. It will have no single right answer but instead many answers—as was surely the case at J&J—and the answers will need revisiting, often with the help of new input from new people. Whereas the purpose mindset asks, “How can we resolve this paradox so it serves our ultimate purpose?” the reconciliation mindset asks, “How can we resolve this paradox so it respects the perspectives and supports the interests of multiple stakeholders to create maximum business value?”
The two go hand in hand, of course, but in discussions to stimulate new thinking about paradox, you need to separate them. Or to put it another way, the purpose mindset prompts you to ask why—Why does this organization exist? The reconciliation mindset prompts the question how—How does it create value while fulfilling the purpose? Or, How do you coordinate and align everyone's efforts to deliver premium results?
That's what Weldon was asking. To get the answer, he took the results of the dialogue back to his executive team, which fashioned a series of actions to deal with the global-local, centralized-decentralized, product-geography paradoxes. His team didn't choose an either/or position. To balance the company's global view, they launched a new, local people development center in Shanghai. They also opened a new innovation center in Suzhou.2 And they started a new diabetes institute tailored to the needs of the Chinese, which worked across all J&J businesses. They encouraged the group of J&J company presidents in China, the heads of J&J's separate companies, to get together and solve problems closer to the Chinese customer.
Framing Reconciliation
The frame for the reconciliation mindset prescribes how much of the organization's decision-making processes to embrace. It should take in less than the how-do-I-help-the-world frame of the purpose mindset, as you will want to limit it to forces within the business. But it should take a holistic view, calling on you to think beyond business and function, as did Weldon. That means broadening the frame so as not to ignore factors—politics, business prospects, the environment, competitors—that can influence later actions. That also means explicitly legitimizing each of the credible polarized positions.
You could easily make the mistake urged upon Weldon: Restricting the frame to one part of the organization, in his case, China operations. But a narrow frame puts you at risk of mistakenly reducing a paradox to a puzzle—“solve the China problem!” And then you would frame yourself out of a good solution. Going simple is tempting: You can then retreat into a comfort zone, using (or misusing) conventional solutions to unconventional challenges. You may gain shelter from the worst critics and conflicts. But conflicts form a crucible for better decisions. The Chairman's Dialogue was Weldon's crucible. In it he built up the heat to create something more nuanced than the neat and easy answer.
Taking an enterprise-wide frame, one that reconciles holistic interests, also figured into decision making in the recent changes at Illinois Tool Works (ITW). Scott Santi, who led the change as vice chairman (he's now CEO), recognized that the company's profitability and growth rate had sagged in a market flush with new low-cost competitors. For years, ITW grew with an acquisition strategy, expanding to eight hundred companies run as individual entrepreneurial enterprises. The strategy fueled growth as the small units responded quickly to customers by offering unique products. By 2012, company sales in polymers, automotive devices, industrial packaging, and many other goods rose to nearly $18 billion.
But to sustain that growth rate, ITW could no longer acquire just a few more small firms. The effect on overall growth would be trifling. Santi saw that the firm had to generate faster and more profitable sales from existing operations. He and former CEO David Speer believed they should change the company's entire business model, affecting all eight hundred units. They would back away from radical decentralization and would form larger business units that could reap economies of scale, which would lead to greater profitability, and in turn, the opportunity to fuel innovation through organic growth. An enterprise-wide frame was necessary to maintain and accelerate the company's business performance.
As with the purpose mindset, you need to clarify assumptions and constraints: the time scale, people and money committed, risks expected, and value added to stakeholders, whether customers and communities or employees and shareholders. You will also have clarify what decisions remain on and off the table, as well as what you can and cannot control. In China, few companies completely control their corporate structure, for example. They must partner with Chinese firms. Nor can they control their intellectual property—they must share it with Chinese partners. Those considerations deserve a place in discussions of how to operate locally versus globally.
At J&J, senior executives long ago abandoned the assumption that J&J units inside China would resell lower-priced, stripped-down versions of products produced elsewhere. As Weldon's successor, Alex Gorsky, later noted on a trip to China: “No longer is it sufficient in China to simply take products from other markets and bring them here. That's why more and more we're trying to have experts here in the markets, developing those unique insights around the medical need, developing the products locally. We're investing disproportionately in terms of . . . people as well as capital.”3
At ITW, Santi committed to maintaining several assumptions about the way the firm had long operated. One was an 80/20 rule. ITW uses a proprietary model to take advantage of its most profitable business. Its business units focus on the 20 percent of its customers who provide 80 percent of their business's value. Another assumption was that the company would continue to operate only where it could deliver differentiated value—in markets where its key customers prized the company's unique products. It further assumed it would recapture its slipping position as provider of best-in-class products in each market. Santi even met with shareholders to stress that, in changing its model, it would not fiddle with such core capabilities. Though Santi sought to change the business, he would not change the core underlying assumptions that had served ITW well for generations.
Values for Reconciliation
The final part of the reconciliation mindset is values. Whereas the purpose mindset focuses on higher-order values, the reconciliation mindset focuses on business-oriented values, translated into measures like profits, margins, cash flow, business growth, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction. At ITW, for example, Santi continued to nurture an entrepreneurial culture that focused on speed, quick response to customers, and decentralized decision making. Those values remained strong even as larger business units led by executive vice presidents were created.
The new ITW leadership team has also had to change the way it operates in light of the changes to the business model. Whereas in the past, the team placed a premium on autonomy of the business units, it has moved toward a much greater reliance on collaboration, in view of greater interdependence. Santi's leadership team provides the forum to cement the new behaviors and business practices in place. For example, the company is now placing greater emphasis on moving talent across its businesses in preparation for enterprise roles in the future. This was far less important when the units operated more autonomously. So the company is now focused on reconciling the need to change with the importance of retaining core values. As David Speer told the Wall Street Journal at the time of initiating the change, “We are moving to a different strategic view of our business, but not destroying the culture that has made this a strong company. We didn't get to be 100 years old by not changing.”4
Another company we worked with chose a different path when faced with similar challenges. The CEO and executive team believed they needed a culture of agility, speed, and urgency. Since the company's founding, it had relied on excellence in execution—controlling “110 percent” of everything and making everything perfect. When it held a strategic review, a hundred top managers would gather from a dozen company-wide teams. Each would present 150 slides, in an effort to leave no question the CEO might ask unanswered. They would actually read the text on every slide. That was the ritual. Top executives in the room, meticulous supervisors, checked and questioned every point. This defined the company's form of dialogue.
The company wrestled with the same paradox as ITW, but came from a different position. Its rigorous approach to execution ranked top among company values, but it needed a more radical transformation of its core values. To change things, the CEO made a point to explicitly tell the managers in attendance that the company's values were changing. He surprised his top hundred people when they gathered: Don't show me your 150 slides, he said. I know you've been slaving over them for weeks, but just tell me what you think are the most important things we as the executive team should know. The top managers gathered were both relieved and flabbergasted at the CEO's expression of trust in them. This was a sign that he had successfully and explicitly conveyed his message that the culture valued a new form of dialogue, an interactive one where everyone agrees and can learn from each other.
Decision Making with the Reconciliation Mindset
When you use the reconciliation mindset to solve a paradoxical problem, your approach to decisions differs from the purpose mindset. True, the basic steps of decision making remain the same, but several factors distinguish them: seeking the sweet spot of reconciliation, using negotiation principles for win-win actions during your collaboration with others, documenting positions to prepare for future change, and motivating people based on their desire for business success.
Shooting for the Sweet Spot
For years, a mindset focusing on balancing two right choices represented the desired state for leaders managing paradox. For those of us who teach paradox management, achieving balance, or not overly investing in one choice or the other, was the benchmark. If you're familiar with this discipline, you know that you then oscillate between opposing positions. Global-local is a classic pair of opposing, paradoxical forces in which you have to keep in mind both global efficiency and responsiveness to the needs of local markets.
In 1992, Barry Johnson published Polarity Management: Identifying and Solving Unmanageable Problems, and he argued that to balance a polarity effectively, managers must see both the positive and negative consequences of both sides of any dilemma. To have a balanced mindset, therefore, required not only that leaders keep two opposing forces in mind, but that they also navigate between the two poles, recognizing that a move in any direction elicits both positive and negative reactions. According to Johnson, the ideal is to moderate the impact of both positives and negatives. You don't lock in an unbalanced either/or way of thinking.
This classic approach to paradox management may be overdue for a redefinition in a volatile and complex world. That's because the two opposing positions that characterize the main paradox might shift overnight. That's even more so because most leaders are managing multiple paradoxes at the same time. Today leaders can't simply define the objective as moderating the impact of one side or the other. Nor can they define the objective as oscillating, as if each side gets its day in the sun. In reconciliation, leaders shoot for an optimal position among multiple forces, just as did Bill Weldon, Alex Gorsky, Scott Santi, Frank Appel, and others.
Reconciliation does not require a 50/50 balance of each set of opposing forces. Nor does it prescribe any other quantitative balance, whether 60/40 or even 25/75. As with many questions in life, you need to recognize and acknowledge the extreme positions of opposing forces. But you then search for middle ground as if searching for a golden mean among multiple polarized positions. In geometry, the golden mean sits not halfway between two polar positions but somewhat to one side. In philosophy, the golden mean lies between two extremes as well. When you handle paradoxes today, you need to find a golden mean reflecting a middle ground among multiple axes of polarized thought.
Note that neither in philosophy nor in paradox management does the golden mean fall in the same position in every situation. It varies. For example, the virtue of courage is the golden mean between cowardice and foolhardiness. But the courage you exercise may lean more toward boldness one day, more toward caution another. If your company faces a financial meltdown, courage might mean bold layoffs, even of colleagues, to save the company. If your company simply wants to reverse a mild slip in competitiveness, it may mean a more modest form of courage, allocating money to new product development instead of raising the dividend.
Consider the mean sought by Scott Santi of ITW. The entrepreneurial spirit of his company's business units is paramount to the organization's success, yet the business units must also find a way to unify with the larger enterprise. Santi says, “We love the decentralized entrepreneurial feel, but need to shape that with a cross-enterprise strategy to guide all that energy and entrepreneurial activity. We want to be sure we don't swing too hard to lose the secret sauce. . . . How do you get the best of both and the right balance? It sounds like a compromise but is not an either-or call; it's finding the right mix related to both sides of the paradox.” The sweet spot in reconciliation represents neither the excess of one nor a deficiency of the other.
Several years ago, we were asked to resolve a conflict between the two biggest Latin American divisions of a consumer goods company—Mexico and Brazil. The two general managers clashed over the upcoming implementation of an inventory control system for the region. Initially, they argued over the qualities of the proposed system. But conversations made clear that the real issue was cost. Mexico was flush with cash, Brazil the opposite. Brazil didn't want the big new investment to sour its financial results.
Ultimately, the two managers escalated the decision to the head of the Latin America region. He gave Brazil some budget relief and helped fashion a compromise on the system's implementation. He then broadened the conversation to include other general managers and used the conflict at his next regional management conference as a learning case. He went through the rationale for the implementation, conveyed his appreciation for the challenges, and detailed his expectations for a rollout that respected differences across the region.
Though most leaders think about taking a negotiating approach to decision making when working with outside parties, they seem to forget to take the same mindset with internal ones wrestling with a paradoxical problems. John Veihmeyer, CEO of KPMG, notes that teams of people often lose sight of the objective. “If you take some time on the central issue versus arguing about solutions, you may get to the answer a lot easier. It's amazing how much time is spent on questions that are really at the periphery of the problem. Both sides feel that the other is being obstinate but the reality is that they aren't even talking about the same issue.” When people talk about the real issues, their positions often change naturally for the good of the enterprise.
This of course is no different from the situation in a community, where neighbor butts head with neighbor. People may argue over the need for new soccer fields, for example, debating issues of noise and trash and traffic. But these are shadow issues. What people really care about is the takeover of sports by the community—versus sticking with private groups. Or about higher taxes from buying and developing new land—versus some pay-as-you-go approach. If people dispense with their positions for or against the fields and instead talk about the contradictions, perhaps they can find a better solution.
Documenting for Change
It may seem counterintuitive to track the upsides and downsides of an option you're not taking. Say you've chosen a Mr. India to direct all South Asia operations, so why bother to consider anything else? But a reconciliation mindset requires that you track the multiple contradictions of paradox continuously and revisit them as they shift. You don't want to swerve from ditch to ditch in your management of paradox, careening, say, from radical centralization to decentralization every couple of years. But what works today may well not work tomorrow, next quarter, or next year.
An infamous example of failure to manage paradox well emerged from the story of Al Dunlap, dubbed “Chainsaw Al” by observers. He won favor as CEO at Scott Paper in Philadelphia in the early 1990s by cutting R&D, people, and investment to boost profitability. Share prices rocketed 225 percent, and Kimberly-Clark bought the company. The board of Sunbeam then hired Dunlap in 1996 to rejuvenate its financial performance. Dunlap took the same approach, but this time it backfired. He believed the main goal of business was to make money for shareholders, and he viewed the solution in unbalanced short-run terms. He cut spending radically, instituted massive layoffs, and used questionable “bill and hold” accounting practices. Sunbeam boasted record short-term success: Earnings in 1997 reached $189 million. But by curbing long-term investments, he spurred Sunbeam's fall. By 1998, Sunbeam's stock fell from $52 per share to pennies in bankruptcy.
Like other CEOs, Dunlap faced a set of paradoxical problems in rejuvenating an ossified firm. But he tried to solve them like a simple mathematical puzzle. He would have done well to document the pluses and minuses of both cutting and investing, so he could revisit his initial draconian moves a year on. Too much of one kind of medicine nearly killed the patient—and he didn't lead his team in reconciling the shifting forces of paradox until it was too late. He showed, in a dysfunctional way, that leaders need to reestablish the golden mean as times change. Even if you believe shareholders rule the stakeholder roost, the company cannot keep creating value if the CEO ignores the paradoxes of long- versus short-term management.
In the financial services industry, even a blip in interest rates can force leaders to reassess decisions recently made. In mid-2013, as long-term interest rates spiked upward from a rock-bottom 1.6 percent, leaders had to take a new look at what products they recommended to clients, how they would develop new products, and how they would talk with both institutional and retail clients.
One executive we spoke with said, “We have great organizational tradition, with a strong connection to roots and values. We have a workforce that has had a lifetime of work with our company. However, we are at an inflection point. . . . It's a tension of [where we've been] and the need to stay relevant. Staying relevant is a challenge to the way we have been.”
Reassessing the balance is critical, and if you're armed with current knowledge about upsides and downsides of both positions, you and your collaborators are in a much better position to manage the paradox. In documenting the pluses and minuses of various actions, a note of caution: Most of us unconsciously focus on the positives of the position we're drawn to and the negatives of the position we resist, and we fail to consider the corresponding negatives and positives.
This failing was noted long ago: Psychologists have shown that people naturally process messages to support their previous position, not a new one. In one classic study, two sets of participants, one in favor and one opposed to capital punishment as a deterrent to murder, were given results from two research studies. One study supported the death penalty as a murder deterrent, the other, the reverse. How did participants' opinions change after looking at the new data? The proponents became more “pro,” the opponents more “anti.” Mixed research consistently polarized people's previous views.5
So be careful about selective judgment. The upside of decentralization, for example, is giving business units or individuals more autonomy, increasing accountability and responsiveness to customers and competitors. The downsides are higher costs, duplication, and increased need for coordination across organizational units. The upside of centralization comes from connecting different functions into hubs, resulting in higher efficiencies and reduced costs. The downside is that people at lower levels feel disenfranchised and lose their former sense of control. Like a member of a biased jury, you may find it easy to justify either viewpoint, but you're most likely to go with your initial position.
Many other biases can affect the way you assess both the consequences of various forces and the actions you propose to address them. Experiments have long shown that we neglect probability when we face too much uncertainty. We are overconfident in our own assessments. More often than not we give in to wishful thinking. And we invariably make different judgments depending on the presentation or framing of information. We tend to do all these things even though we know we are susceptible to them—no matter our education level.
One of many classic experiments shows our susceptibility to framing. Experimenters asked patients in an outpatient clinic, “Suppose you have a serious disease that needs to be treated with medication. Your risk of dying over the next year is 10 percent if you don't receive the treatment.” The subjects then learn that only two pills can treat the disease, and that both cost the same and have almost no side effects. The patients then read about medication A: “If you take this medication it will decrease your risk of dying by 80 percent (four fifths) over the next year. And for medication B: “If 100 people with the disease, like you, take this medication 8 deaths can be prevented over the next year.”6
What did people choose? Medication A, by 56.8 percent. Medication B was chosen by only 14.7 percent. This in spite of the medications having identical efficacy. People—including many who had the skill to easily convert either set of data to the other to see their equivalency—favored a presentation of efficacy in relative terms over one in absolute terms. (The rest of the participants didn't care or couldn't decide.) In this and in many other ways, the way we talk about risk and other factors, whether in business or anywhere else, dramatically alters our preference of options.
Motivate for Business Success
Whereas you can use inspiration to motivate people with the purpose mindset, you can rely on people's hunger for traditional success for the reconciliation mindset. People want to be effective, to have an impact, to have the fruit of their labors add to the bottom line. They want to fulfill their desire for competence—succeeding at challenging tasks and achieving desired outcomes.7 Nobody wants to waste time at work, and everybody wants recognition for being a hotshot.
Consider a division of a $1 billion specialty chemical company. Although the division had 80 percent gross margins, it was only breaking even. Worse, it offered lousy customer service. Product lead times averaged five weeks, half of deliveries ran late, and despite three months of average inventory, it ran out of key stock repeatedly. The division's president received orders: Boost revenues and cut costs or risk shutdown.
The incentives to manage the paradoxes of cost, quality, and customer service gave the president and his executives all the energy they needed to transform their operation. They simplified the product line so that production could focus on key, high-margin products. That markedly boosted capacity utilization and delivery performance—and that was the key to kicking off a turnaround. As a result, orders placed before noon now ship the same day. The division runs with a lean one-month inventory and operates with only two-thirds the original number of workers. The division not only escaped shutdown but also now boasts margins almost double the industry standard.
The same kind of incentives motivated success at J&J, ITW, and the other companies included in this chapter. Conventional incentives dovetail nicely with the reconciliation mindset in solving tough but common paradoxical problems.
A Final Caution
A caution about the reconciliation mindset. Individual personalities can sabotage its usefulness. Driven by traditional incentives, people default to their own interests. Money still ranks at the top—or near the top—of factors motivating people at work. This fact is borne out repeatedly in studies that track how people behave, in contrast to what they say in surveys.8 When people's bonuses and promotions have long depended on delivering results for their unit alone, whether as part of a function or operating unit, they will stand by their unit. Why would individual executives accept an enterprise-wide frame for a decision if their own division remains the star profit maker? Why would they let their pay get docked by helping other businesses?
John Veihmeyer of KPMG notes that in his experience dealing with paradoxical problems, “Motivation driven by self-interest is high . . . most of the people were driven by power, influence and money. . . . If you don't know what their motivators are, then it's a good idea to have that conversation.”
If you are driven by conventional rewards, you are probably loath to loosen control over your kingdom. You will stick with control and consistency to further your own success. Bill Weldon faced that risk in broadening the conversation in the Mr. China decision. Scott Santi faced it in transforming ITW. If you're a CEO, you have to clarify from the start that you expect everyone to take a broad frame, participating in the solution to the paradoxical problems at hand.
Ironically, even many CEOs have trouble loosening control enough to demonstrate leadership that works for the good of the whole. The CEO we spoke of earlier who wanted a culture of agility, speed, and urgency had trouble jumping over the line to manage the contradictions of paradox. When we suggested he instruct his people at the corporate strategic review, “Tell us what your most important problems are and how we can help,” he balked. “I can't go there,” he said. He was captive of his own culture and processes. He was the general. He gave orders. His soldiers executed. He didn't feel comfortable loosening control, bringing about a new balance between commanding his troops and cultivating participation.
After sleeping on that thought, however, he surprised even himself. The next day he not only stunned his top managers by telling them he trusted them to report on just their most important concerns. He told them: Let us know how we can help you. We want you to learn from each other. If one team needs help, let's see what it can learn from another team.
In the past, if people couldn't measure up with their presentations, the CEO and executives would rebuke them. (So much for encouraging collaboration.) But the CEO stepped over the line. Exhibiting the head, heart, and guts of complete leadership, he initiated new behaviors—behaviors that nurture a culture where everybody borrows each other's best practices and people pull the whole enterprise up together.
The temptation not to jump over the line is strong, both for CEOs and for everyone else. When we don't deal with a paradoxical problem, we often hope it will go away. The CEO who overcame his discomfort struggled with his executives over common yet paradoxical questions: Should we have an order-and-inspect hierarchy with perfect execution and predictability? Or should we have a learning meritocracy with imperfect innovation and energy? Reconciling the paradox would enable him to have some of both. He could have a golden mean. And that, in business and life, is the promise of the reconciliation mindset.
That leaves us with one final mindset for solving paradoxical problems. When neither the purpose nor reconciliation mindset changes perceptions to a more helpful reality, you can try the innovation mindset, the subject of the next chapter. If purpose redirects people to the high road, and reconciliation to a fresh middle road, innovation mindset redirects them to a new road altogether. An atmosphere charged with the electricity of creativity may yield just the energy you need to turn the contradictions of paradox into breakthrough solutions.