The Power of Polarity Management
If you’re like our clients here at KONU, it’s likely you’re facing increased polarization in your organization, team, or community. These polarizations show up in questions like these:
Should we lean into change? Or focus on stability?
Do we let ourselves get messy and innovate? Or should we focus on improving efficiency?
Are we more productive with a distributed, work-from-home workforce? Or do we need everyone back together again so we can rebuild our sense of team and culture?
Can we get more agile, increasing freedom and autonomy? Or do we need to centralize, ensuring consistency and quality?
Should we welcome dissenting points of view from across the aisle? Or rally together to strengthen our shared identity?
Polarities like these feel like a zero-sum game. One side wins and the other loses. But they’re all rooted in an assumption. A way of thinking so common, it pervades virtually every aspect of our culture: “Either/or”
Either we lean into change, or we batten down the hatches and play it safe. Either we open ourselves to dissenting points of view, or we close ranks and protect our own. Either we decentralize and become more agile, or we centralize and become more consistent.
This way of thinking can tear a group apart at the seams. We need only look around us to see plenty of evidence for that. One of our favorite tools for navigating these polarities – which, in turn, can reduce polarization – is polarity management.
Polarity management is an approach to these questions that is rooted in a more sophisticated ‘both/and’ way of thinking. Where ‘either/or’ offers us only binaries, ‘both/and’ invites us into complexity, paradox, and nuance.
This kind of thinking is often counter-intuitive, but it allows for new kinds of questions:
How might we welcome dissenting viewpoints and strengthen our shared identity?
How might we increase agility and ensure higher quality and consistency?
How might we make space for change and provide more stability?
Human beings love solving problems. The satisfaction that comes with a job well done is perhaps one of life’s great pleasures. But polarities aren’t problems! They are dynamic, interconnected forces that can and should be engaged, managed, and allowed to weave together.
This aligns with one of the core tenets of Adaptive Leadership – an innovative framework for leadership pioneered by Ronald Heifetz and his colleagues Riley Sinder, Marty Linksy and Dean Williams at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government:
True Leadership is the repeated act of mobilizing a group of people with a collective challenge to make meaningful progress on that challenge. Adaptive Challenges can’t be solved. They can only be evolved. For progress to happen, people must shift their hearts and minds so that new, more productive behaviors can follow. In other words, people have to adapt.
Polarity management offers us a path towards that adaptation.
If you’re wrestling with polarizations in your work, and you’d like to explore how polarity management might help, reach out to us.
And for a deeper dive into polarity management, I highly recommend Dr. Barry Johnson’s fantastic book ‘Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems’, Brian Emersons / Kelly Lewis: ‘Navigating Polarities: Using Both/And Thinking to Lead Transformation’ as well as the Certificate on Managing Polarities at Georgetown University.
References
https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/are-you-facing-a-problem-or-a-polarity/
https://www.harvardbusiness.org/navigating-complexity-managing-polarities/