I’m eager to dive back into this newslettere by sharing a topic that’s been invigorating my work lately: polarity thinking.
For those that are not familiar, polarity thinking is a framework created by psychologist and organizational consultant, Barry Johnson, in 1975. Polarities are interdependent pairs. A more simplistic understanding would be that these are opposites. But they challenge our human instinct to believe that we must choose between them. A classic example is inhale and exhale; we innately understand that these two phenomena are inextricably linked and vital for human life. Polarity thinking calls us to consider other pairs in the same way.
Let’s take leading and supporting. Many of us are tempted to view our role in groups or organizations and ask: am I a leader or a supporter here? We may also attach positive or negative value to these roles. We probably catalogue our co-workers’ actions to drop them into one of two boxes. However, if we think of any member of a collective who we admire, we would surely recognize how they both lead and support, irrespective of their title or official position. We’d likely also notice the natural way that leading and supporting flow into and out of each other: part of what makes leaders great is how they support those around them and those who work to support others organically display leadership.
One polarity I’ve been considering a lot is realism and idealism. When I facilitate trainings on restorative justice, I sometimes feel like I’m describing a fantastical world to people. I wonder whether everyone is thinking, she’s living in la-la land, she’s totally disconnected from reality. But I steady myself with the reminder that reality is always shifting. I look to the lessons of social change and the historical and contemporary abolition movements, in particular, to remember how a status quo that appears inevitable in its time can be undone by what appears to be a pie in the sky idea. Our current carceral system may seem inescapable, a necessary evil, but it was once seen as a humanizing alternative to extreme public punishment like whippings and burnings, as Fania Davis deftly documents in The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice.
If I apply polarity thinking to realism and idealism, I understand that what feels “realistic” is constantly changing and being shaped by what feels “idealistic.” I appreciate how idealism pulls realism out of a stuck-ness that would accept an unjust status quo at the same time as I appreciate how realism tethers idealism to the ground to help it come into being. They are not sides to choose between or a problem to be solved. One is not good and right while the other is bad and wrong. They are a complex and ever-interacting pair.
The world of polarity thinking, polarity management, and polarity mapping offers exciting opportunities to re-envision what seem like intractable conflicts in our workplaces, movements, and groups. One polarity that I’ve seen cause a lot of tension in organizations is flexibility and consistency. Often this is telegraphed as a battle of newer employees who want to innovate and shake things up against older employees who want to keep doing things how they’ve always been done. A narrative circulates the halls of the office or through text threads that one of these two camps is going to win and that choice will consequently determine the organization’s success or failure. If you recognize some facet of this example in an organization or community you’re part of, take a moment to pause before reading ahead and ask yourself, how would polarity thinking reframe this for me/us?
For one, it would probably knock us out of an either/or assessment and bring to mind the question: what does it look like when flexibility and consistency are interacting in a healthy and balanced way? It might cause us to recognize the strengths of each, as well as the dangers of one without the other: all flexibility with no consistency becomes scarily chaotic without a sense of boundaries or predictability. Meanwhile, all consistency with no flexibility leads to rigidity and stagnancy that jeopardizes the core purpose or mission of whatever we’re trying to do together. These two need each other. Likewise, those who are viewed as enemies because they seem to represent one pole or the other may actually make the best collaborators because, together, they can foster that vital balance.
Here are some other polarities that it may be interesting and – dare I say – fun to explore:
· Activity and rest
· Task-focused and relationship-focused
· Being planful and improvising
· Trust and skepticism
· Caution and courage
· Moving away from resistance and moving toward resistance
Think about a community you’re in and pick one to consider: how can we resist the false choice between the two? How are we embodying and embracing both? And how can we continue cultivating the essential and beautiful interdependence of this pair?