Playing with paradoxes
An alternative to absolute thinking
A big part of my personal and professional practice this year has been about embracing the paradoxes that make up the world we live and work in.
Most of us spend our lives grasping for absolutes—certainty, stability, approval, control—and I am no exception. This desire, this drive has been fostered and rewarded by every organization I’ve ever encountered. We design our strategies and deploy our plans and defend our structures because we think that’s the way. We believe these are the things that will get us there. To solid ground. To safety.
But I’ve been discovering the opposite is true. Or rather, also true. And as I’ve leaned into the complexity of um, everything, I’ve come to realize that the either/or thinking that purports to be the way isn’t so much a strategy as it is the primary source of my suffering. All this grasping is immensely painful, it turns out.
The good news is that there is an easier way. A more joyous, playful, creative way, which also happens to be more effective. It begins with embracing the mess we find ourselves in. Shifting out of either/or thinking and mining the magic that exists in both/and.
The following are some of the paradoxes I’ve been playing with. Which ones are speaking to you right now?
An organizational culture is an infinitely complex ecosystem but we attempt to engineer and operate it as if an orderly machine.
The ecosystem produces itself, and will only change in order to preserve itself.
The conditions for the ecosystem are set by a leader, but the leader cannot control the culture.
Each member of an ecosystem makes a unique contribution to the ecosystem while being influenced and developed by their engagement with it.
In unhealthy cultures the members become more like one another. In healthy cultures the members become more fully themselves.
In every ecosystem, there is an interplay of order and chaos. They are inextricably linked, and both are essential.
Order is not the end goal. Disorder is what yields growth. An ecosystem that is off-balance will innovate and evolve as needed, leveraging disruption to create a more advanced level of order to thrive in new conditions.
Even in apparent chaos, there are simple patterns repeating in ways that are both unpredictable and exactly what we’d expect.
A purposeful vision and a few core principles are all that is needed to bring order (and not control) to chaos.
The more freedom exists in an ecosystem, the more order there will be.
The more control a leader exerts over an ecosystem, the less order there will be.
A healthy ecosystem is continuously iterating, feeding back to itself as its members seek and integrate new information.
An ecosystem that does not seek and integrate new information is not intelligent, cannot innovate and will not survive.
Amid infinite complexity, not knowing is more intelligent than the alternative.
Not everything that matters can be measured, and not everything that can be measured matters.
Every time we attempt to measure an ecosystem, we disturb it.
Every time we measure anything, we lose more information than we collect.
Strategic planning is almost certainly a massive waste of time. Better to focus on embodying the culture’s core principles, offering a purposeful vision and helping the ecosystem self-reflect in order to evolve in the direction of that vision.
We don’t need bosses. We need leaders.
If you are intrigued by what you find above, I highly recommend the work and writing of Margaret Wheatley, who inspired this post.
Breaking Open is now open for registration. Join us for the next online course on mindfulness for this modern world, starting July 6 (six Tuesday evenings). All proceeds will be donated to the Loveland Foundation and the AAPI Community Fund.