by Jane Perdue | Bias, Leadership, Paradox & Polarity
“You can’t do that. It’s not in the plan.”
How many times have you heard that line or one like it spoken at work?
Planning is important. Business plans, contingency plans, succession plans, project plans, etc. are all good—until they aren’t.
Plans bring order and continuity. However, they can also become obstacles to innovation, inclusion, and creativity.
Think about the colleague who has a detailed plan for everything and refuses to deviate from it, no matter how compelling new information may be. Think about the company that fails to recognize the institutional bias that’s been embedded in its long-time succession and promotion plans.
It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date. ~Roger von Oech
A few years ago, I served on the inaugural steering committee for a new community conference intent on becoming an annual event. The first conference was a roaring success; the second even better. The third not so much.
One of original steering committee members who had stayed the course shared her diagnosis as to why the third event was unsuccessful. “The plan had worked well, so we relied on it too much. Because we stuck to the plan, we missed out on including some excellent panelists and speakers. No one wanted to step outside the lines and do something different.”
Ever been in that spot?
Through social conditioning, training, preference, or the desire for convenience, people fall into one of two mental traps about planning and get stuck in their thinking.
One camp frets that chaos will result if there’s inadequate planning and control. The other believes too much planning and control will stifle creativity. The concerns of both camps are valid.
If both concerns are valid, then what’s the problem?
The problem is either/or thinking—accepting the notion that planning is either about control or chaos.
Planning for and achieving successful outcomes require both chaos and control, both disorder and boundaries.
These paradoxes are equally important but essentially different management requirements according to the late management consultant Peter Drucker. Regardless of how contradictory dealing with both disorder and boundaries sounds, they’re interdependent. Like it or not, both are necessary for success. Either/or doesn’t work.
The Wright brother flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility. ~Charles Kettering
The natural tension between the disorder that improvisors thrive on and the boundaries that control freaks adore can be managed provided people are willing to be curious and flexible.
3 ways to find the sweet spot for planning
Doing three things aids us in keeping curiosity, flexibility, and success front and center as we first create and then execute our plans.
1) Have a general game plan.
Know what you want to accomplish. Have a timeline. Define roles, responsibilities, and measures of success. Think about what could go wrong and how to deal with problems. Identify resources and stakeholders. Be willing to flex or scrap it all and re-invent when circumstances shift.
2) Get comfortable being slightly uncomfortable.
Recognize that always sticking to the plan provides a false sense of security that obscures new opportunities. Learn to be flexible with “how” the “what” of the plan is implemented. Be willing to challenge the end goal. Embrace and reward purposeful discomfort. Be willing to be vulnerable and sometimes not be certain of the next step.
3) Leave room for serendipity.
Whether that interaction with an unintended outcome or moment of “aha!” realization is engineered by an app or a spontaneous stroke of fate, be open and receptive to the mad genius possibilities it presents. Don’t let existing plans become a straitjacket. Roll with the punches.
Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you’ve found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for. ~Lawrence Block
Finding the sweet spot between too much and “just right” planning takes time and patience, but it can be done.
Have how you learned to manage the tension between chaos and control?
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Leadership, Paradox & Polarity
A former boss was well-known for his flamboyant language and turns of speech. One of his favorite analogies was to compare a leader’s job in dealing with conflict with being the pooper scooper at the circus.
He’d tell us it was our job to clean up the messes people on our team made.
Even though we frequently rolled our eyes when the boss was on one of his circus rants, his point was a good one. Why? Because usually what we had to smooth over was some sort of conflict. Something that could have been avoided had the situation initially been handled more thoughtfully.
Conflict is challenging, so some people avoid it.
Others see conflict as a life-or-death scourge to be stamped out.
Some see differences of thought, opinion, perspective, and experience as deficiencies because they generate conflict.
Avoiding differences when looking to solve a problem is a glass half-empty approach.
Conflict, while often messy, actually presents opportunity to devise better solutions.
Bernie Mayer, Professor of Dispute Resolution at Creighton University, is a leader in the field of conflict resolution. In his book, The Conflict Paradox, Mayer examines seven polarities we encounter as we try to make sense of conflict.
The seven polarities are:
- Competition and Cooperation
- Optimism and Realism
- Avoidance and Engagement
- Principle and Compromise
- Emotions and Logic
- Impartiality and Advocacy
- Autonomy and Community
As with all polarities, the elements in each pair are but one side of the same coin. While the elements may sound contradictory, both of them are necessary for success and survival over the long-term.
As a team leader, one must realize the paradox that surrounds conflict. The team needs to embrace conflict as a means of generating and evaluating ideas. While at the same time, it must shy away from it to prevent frustration or alienation. The biggest challenge for the team leader is figuring out how to balance these two factors. ~Erich Brockmann, professor
It’s natural to prefer one element over the other. When we encounter a person who prefers the other element, there’s the possibility for conflict since we’re now dealing with a clash of interests. I like competition; you like cooperation. You prefer principle; I prefer compromise
As leaders, it’s our job to help those on our team transcend finger-pointing and right versus wrong arguments. Everyone is right!
So that conflict helps us grow and find the best solution, our job is to:
- Steer conflict from dysfunctional to functional, from destructive to constructive, from disregard to respect—all in pursuit of healthy conflict that facilitates innovation and openness.
- Assist people in dealing with issues as well as helping them remember the lessons learned in childhood about sharing and handling disappointment because rarely do we get 100 percent of what we want.
- Acknowledge inequity and injustice, frame solutions that draw from both poles contributing to the conflict, and assist people to recognize there’s always a greater good that transcends individual wants and wishes.
- Weave connection and humanize the difference. “The other” has a name, a face, and feelings, too.
- Build an environment where it’s OK to disagree, but it’s not OK to fail to listen and learn, or label “the other” as being wrong.
All legislation, all government, all society is formed upon the principle of mutual concession, politeness, comity, courtesy; upon these, everything is based. ~Henry Clay, 19th century lawyer and stateman
Sometimes the contents of the pooper scooper get heavy and smelly. However, that’s when we—if we want to call ourselves leaders—do our best, and most meaningful, work.
Image source before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Leadership, Paradox & Polarity
If you knew a replacement part would add an extra 90 cents in costs and yield only ten cents in warranty savings, would you authorize use of the more expensive part?
Probably not. Managers would crunch the numbers and find the spending increase unjustified since only a correlation exists between the increased costs and accident prevention.
If you ran Starbucks, would you have made the decision to close 8,000 stores, put 175,000 employees through racial bias training, and forego an estimated $16.7 million in lost sales?
Both/and or either/or?
The leadership team at GM focused on costs in making their decisions.
Those at Starbucks measured both costs and benefit (which has yet to be determined)—they practiced the business of business as BOTH watching the bottom line AND doing the right thing.
Some are passionate that the sole responsibility of business is making money. Others say business should measure a triple bottom line, focusing on environmental and social dimensions as well as financial ones.
Friedman’s focus on economics is measured by profit and loss, which is fairly clear-cut and unambiguous. Elkington’s push for the triple bottom line is more complicated. As he says, “success or failure on sustainability goals cannot be measured only in terms of profit and loss. It must also be measured in terms of the wellbeing of billions of people and the health of our planet.”
Friedman’s approach can work with mostly an either/or style of thinking; Elkington’s requires the use of both/and paradoxical thinking. Either/or thinking is less complicated and more explicit. Both/and paradoxical thinking is more involved and requires deeper analysis.
Managing a paradox requires managing conflicting yet complementary forces, dynamics like cost and benefit, results and relationship, competition and collaboration, and so on.
Today’s successful business leaders will be those who are most flexible of mind. An ability to embrace new ideas, routinely challenge old ones, and live with paradox will be the effective leader’s premier trait. Further, the challenge is for a lifetime. New truths will not emerge easily. Leaders will have to guide the ship while simultaneously putting everything up for grabs, which is in itself a fundamental paradox. ~Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos
4 ways to be a better thinker
In “Learning to Thrive on Paradox,” Peter Stroh and Wynne Miller outline four ways to manage a paradox, all of which require moving beyond the simplicity of either/or thinking. Here’s how they describe the four methods:
“Managers must continuously brainstorm the question: “How can two incompatible values be true?” For example, increasing quality in the long run requires a short-term investment; therefore, improving quality costs money while it saves money.”
“Managers must strive to create conditions that allow simultaneously for the emergence of contradictions through creative tension. Examples are loosely coupled structures, controlled entrepreneurship, and conservative innovation. The idea is to make personal values explicit by inquiring into both the positive and negative qualities of two seemingly contradictory paradigms and to develop a synergistic solution or a synthesis.”
- Expanding the construct space and time of a paradox
“When profits are down, managers tighten controls, and when sales are up and profits are soaring, managers increase responsiveness to customers. Thus, current market conditions require that managers simultaneously use belt-tightening and creative responses. Similarly, expanding the time frame should help managers optimize the management of paradoxes by concentrating on aligning short term with long term goals.”
- Neither/nor thinking or choosing a third option.
“Paradoxically, this way of thinking replaces “both/and” by focusing on the outcome instead of the choice. Should management base its product development decisions on existing organizational technologies or on customer needs? Sometimes companies understand what will best serve customers before the customers know it themselves. In these cases, technology pushes the company. The paradoxical forces of both “technology push” and “market pull” help drive the company along the road.”
Either/or thinking will always have a place in our management practices. However, it shouldn’t be the default method for critical thinking, decision-making, and problem-solving.
The art of managing and leading organizations today lies in embracing incompatible forces, rather than choosing between them. Organizational leaders must learn to deal with ambiguity and paradoxes through a new mindset; one that combines and optimizes rather than splits apart and differentiates. ~Alan T. Belasen, management professor SUNY
Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be. ~Gary Hamel, Professor, consultant, and Director of the Innovation Lab
Ready to expand your styles of thinking repertoire and make better decisions?
Image credit before quote added: Pixabay
by Jane Perdue | Leadership, Paradox & Polarity
For sure, our brains prefer simplicity. I know mine does!
In a world where we’re pressed for time and performance, we instinctively look for ideas and solutions that support how we think—and ignore evidence to the contrary (the dreaded confirmation bias at work).
Deciding “either/or” is quick, easy, and sometimes an enormous mistake. (more…)
by Jane Perdue | Paradox & Polarity
If you knew a replacement part would add an extra 90¢ in costs and yield only a dime in warranty savings, would you authorize use of the more expensive part?
Probably not.
Managers would crunch the business case and find the spending increase unjustified.
But suppose you knew the additional cost would prevent costly accidents and even save lives. Would your decision be different? (more…)
by Jane Perdue | Paradox & Polarity
At the time I thought it was the coolest thing, ever. Mostly because I wanted my Mom to treat me the same way.
Our next door neighbor let her son, Grant, choose between different options.
Would you like macaroni and cheese or a hot dog for lunch? Will we read a book today or go to the movies? Do you want to sign up for riding camp or take piano lessons this summer?
There was no picking lunch food or activities at our house. (more…)
