‘Welcome to the Paradox Party’: How Both/And Thinking Can Solve Your Toughest Problems

In the December 2022 Skoll Centre Insights for Action research seminar Professor Marya Hill-Popper Besharov spoke with Professor Wendy K. Smith and Charmian (Char) Love (Zooming in from COP 15 in Montreal) about the book Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems (Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis , 2022), to understand how organisations can manage competing?demands, and find creative and impactful solutions to the paradoxes we all face:

‘It’s not if we face tensions, but how’: Everyone faces competing demands in their lives and work – for example, the tension between social mission and profit. Either/or thinking assumes we need to choose between options. Both/and thinking shifts toward a more holistic approach to embracing both options simultaneously. Drawing on concepts from disciplines like physics, psychology and philosophy, both/and thinking begins with identifying underlying paradoxes. Like the yin and yang, when we have two ideas in conflict they also define and reinforce each other. Both/and thinking allows us to move away from the binary choice of either social mission or profit, helping us to find solutions that achieve both.

?? Watch Smith’s TEDx talk ‘The Power of Paradox’ to hear more!

Organisations embodying both/and thinking in practice: The B Lab UK movement offers a good example. B Corps must amend their businesses’ legal constitutions to make the leaders’ duties explicitly consider both shareholders and stakeholders (workers, members of the communities in which the business operates, future generations). They embed both/and thinking in the highest levels of their business governance, which becomes part of their decision-making processes. The growing B Corp movement shows it is possible to embrace both/and thinking to lead in business. Natura &Co , the world’s largest B Corp embeds both/and thinking in the company’s mission, structure, culture, and decision making.

Both/And thinking also surfaces for individual members of Natura & Co.?Love reflected on her leadership role as the Global Director of Advocacy at Natura & Co, where she is both a person working within business, and an activist, and needs to draw on both identities and experiences together. In the seminar, Love showed off the jacket she wears to symbolise this integration: her black business suit jacket, with a pink butterfly on the back made by art blocking at a climate protest.

?? Watch Love’s TEDx talk ‘How to Be Both In Business And An Activist’ to hear more!

Four tools to take away with you: Smith offered four tools to help navigate these tensions at the individual, organisational and systems levels framed within The Paradox System.

A. Assumptions: To change our mindsets, we need to change the questions that we ask, to open more possibilities. Rather than ask whether you are an activist or someone working in business, ask how you can be an activist within business, or how you can draw on business practices within activism.

B. Boundaries: Create organisational structures to hold both/and possibilities. Maintain a clear higher purpose to stay committed to the bigger picture, and guardrails to stay on track. ?

C. Comfort: It can be emotionally uncomfortable to navigate these tensions. It is important to recognise and honour this discomfort and move forward despite it, rather than sweep it under the rug.

D.?Dynamic: Ideal moments where you can bring together the best of both sides are wonderful but few and far between. What is more common is ‘tight rope walking’: making micro shifts between competing demands over time. You are able to move forward on the tightrope not by balancing fully, but by continuously shifting left and right to stay balanced. In practice, as we hold competing ideas, we will sometimes need to make decisions that tilt more in one direction or another, but the boundaries that we set will keep us from tilting too far in one direction and falling off the tightrope.

Missed the main event? No problem. You can watch the recording online: Insights for Action: Both/And Thinking.

Want to hear even more? You can read more about the book Both/And Thinking here, and listen to Smith’s interviews with HBR IdeaCast and Hidden Brain podcasts.

Want to hear more from the Skoll Centre? Register for the Skoll Spires newsletter, and email Jessica Jacobson ([email protected]) to sign up for the mailing list for future Insights for Action research seminars.?Our next seminar is this Friday! We'll be discussing Professor Akshay Mangla's new book, 'Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India' (November 2022), to understand what makes bureaucracy and the state work for the least advantaged. Register for this Friday's event.