Note: Voice-to-text transcriptions are about 90% accurate, and conversations-to-text do not always translate perfectly. I include it to provide you with the spirit of the conversation.
Scott Allen 0:00
Okay, everybody, welcome to the Phronesis Podcast wherever you are in the world. Thank you for checking in. Thank you for having a listen today. I am excited about this conversation with Dr. Wendy Smith. And she is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and faculty director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware. She earned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, where she began her intensive research on strategic paradoxes—how leaders and senior teams effectively respond to contradictory yet interdependent demands. Working with executives and scholars globally, she received the Web of Science Highly Cited Research Award (2019, 2020, and 2021) for being among the 1 percent most-cited researchers in her field. She received the Decade Award (2021) from the Academy of Management Review for the most cited paper in the past 10 years. Her work has been published in such journals as the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, and Management Science. She has taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania–Wharton while helping senior leaders and middle managers all over the world address issues of interpersonal dynamics, team performance, organizational change, and innovation. Wendy lives in Philadelphia with her husband, three children, and the family dog. So, Wendy, that is impressive. What else do listeners need to know about you before we jump into this conversation? You're not in Philadelphia right now.
Wendy Smith 1:42
Scott, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here, and I am not in Philadelphia right now. We're not with the family dog. Right now. We are inspecting for six months. So I am happy to be in this conversation around the world with you.
Scott Allen 1:56
Wendy, Okay. So two fun facts. One, if you're, I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, so if you drill a hole straight through the Earth, I think we come off just off the coast of Perth, Australia. So you're halfway around the world. I know Perth is still about five hours away. But it's pretty fascinating—that statistic. And then I'm going to be in Sydney, this summer. What's something that I need to do? While I'm in Sydney? What's something that you've stumbled upon? That maybe isn't, you know, the opera house that I'll for sure get to. But is there anything that you've stumbled upon? That was just a really pleasant surprise that I should prioritize?
Wendy Smith 2:34
Scott, it's amazing how many people are coming through Sydney; I am in the right place at the right time. I can't tell if it's because the world has opened up. Therefore people are figuring, let me travel to the farthest place possible where there is an amazing community of colleagues, scholars, and leaders, just incredible at this moment, you will be among good company. I am thrilled to be here in a home not too far from the Sydney beaches, and could not be a better opportunity for some sabbatical time. So I would say hit the beaches because that is quintessential.
Scott Allen 3:13
Okay, awesome. I'll do that. I'll do that. Well, we've got a book. And I think your area of I love the title because I love this way of thinking Both/And so talk about that, talk about the impetus of that, and how you think about this topic?
Wendy Smith 3:31
Yes, maybe as a way, and I can tell you how I was introduced to Both/And as you said, I'm an academic. I started out thinking about this at two levels, both my challenges, which I am happy to talk about, as well as the academic space that I was in, I was studying innovation, and I was studying how IBM senior leaders were navigating their space to innovate into what we now know as cloud computing. And at the same time had to manage millions, billions of dollars at the corporate level of work of current clients and customers. So how did they live in that tension and much of the innovation space? They looked at this question of how we move from the past into the future and don't get stuck in the past and stuck in inertia. But that was not the issue they were grappling with. They were grappling with not only how to move into new opportunities. They were struggling with how do I do that while at the same time living in their existing operational efficiencies and current customers, and that was the challenge that they were managing. So at the same time, I was struggling with my tug of war has challenges and competing demands; I was in a Ph. D. program, and I was struggling with this tension between Am I an academic who studies problems or am I in what in the academic world like to call the real world acting on making a change, navigating that tension. And so here I was, experiencing my tug of wars while observing how these IBM leaders were navigating their tug of wars and seeing parallels there. And the big picture idea was that whatever our challenges are, our tensions, we face lots of those in the world; we tend to face them as either/or we pull them apart and assume we have to choose between them. Is there another way? And this is what introduced me to the language of paradox, the notion of interdependent opposites, which I'm assuming we will get into, and the exploration of using Both/And as another way to address these issues. Well, I love it because you hear the either/or dialogue all around you once you're tuned into it and paying close attention. It's fascinating how we, as human beings, put those two in different boxes. And that simple question of how could we do both? Thinking, you know, staying in that, that place of how I think it's, it's brilliant, it's fascinating because I don't know if we default to this either/or space based on your experience, is that human default of our minds? We do default to that. And a lot of psychology talks about why the basic idea is that when confronted with these tug-of-wars, they feel uncomfortable emotionally, leaving open uncertainty. We tend not to like that kind of uncertainty. So making a choice allows us to minimize that uncertainty. When we face these competing ideas, our brains go to this assume that they are oppositional; as soon as we see opposites, we assume they can't go together. And so we default to pulling them apart without seeing the possibilities of the interdependence; we tend to have more of a linear binary mindset rather than see the holistic interdependence between them. So there's a whole lot of reasons in psychology why we go to that either/or, and by the way, just as a bit of a footnote to that, when I started studying this, people would say to me, Well, you know, east and west, we deal with it differently. The East tends to have a more interdependent approach to these tensions. And that is true to a certain extent; what the research will say, however, is that East looks for this concessional; they don't want to conflict middle way. But that doesn't always get us to a better Both/And; we can talk a little more about that too. But even in the East, there tends to be this default to making a choice. But it's not always the better choice.
Scott Allen 7:54
Well, what is decide isn't that to "kill off one" isn't even the root of that word, decide? If we look at that, isn't it to kill one-off or something like that? We're defaulting to want that closure and get that clarity.
Wendy Smith 8:09
I love that you've said that nobody has ever said that to me. But as you say it out loud, "de-cide" makes a lot of sense. So I love that it's to assume there are opposite sides. And you have to pick one. I love that. Well, I learned that from Tony Middlebrooks, your colleague at the University of Delaware former colleague at the University of Delaware. And, of course, you'd written a section in this textbook that we just released, the second edition. So talk about where you see this in the wild. And one of the things I love about your bio is that when you talk about what do I want? Do I want to be an academic? Or do I want to be quote, unquote? In the real world, it seems that you have achieved that Both/And in a very nice way. Wendy?
Thank you, it was not easy to get to. And the path along the way was painful. Sometimes we say that research is research, and we're studying our own experiences. I also want to say, Scott, I love that. And I'm so grateful to be in the new textbook you and Tony have created. I would love to see this notion of Both/And thinking and paradox in every leadership textbook. I think it's so valuable as a lens. And I think it's valuable. It's work that I've been doing along with my co-author Marianne Lewis for years. In the wild where we see it, here's what I think is powerful about this idea or what I've learned is powerful. It is a way of approaching challenges and tensions wherever they arise. So Marianne and I started independently and then in our work together because we've been working together for about 2025 years. And we both started looking at the kinds of challenges that leaders face at the top of the organization, which have only been magnified in the last 20 years, and that could be issues of innovation, issues of sustainability issues of globalization. Each one of those and others come to present themselves as dilemmas to us present as a tug of war between opposing tensions, whether it's in the innovation tension they issue between today and tomorrow, or the sustainability tension, the issue between markets and mission, or you know, people in profits, or the globalization tension, the issue between being global and unified, or local indistinct. And those show up as opposing demands that ask us to make an either/or choice. And the invitation there is, can we think about them differently. And as you said, it shows up in our, you know, the more research that we were doing, as we progressed, this mindset, we were again, seeing it in our own lives, we were seeing it in the work that our colleagues were doing at the more micro level, at the individual level of how people think about, you know, their own career decisions, their own life decisions, work-life balance, we're seeing it and how people parent and how they partner in that kind of anywhere in our life, tensions emerge. Our mission, if you will, is to invite people to not see tensions as bad. But rather see tensions as a force of life, where we, as individuals, have the opportunity the agency to approach them differently, in our way. And if we can learn to engage with them to understand that tension is just our, it's not if we face tensions, but how then we invite ourselves into thinking about different ways to navigate them.
Scott Allen 11:42
Say more about "force of life." I love that. Say a little bit more about, okay, how do we approach these "forces of life," so to speak?
Wendy Smith 11:51
Well, here's where we could get a bit abstract. So I'll invite you to pull me back to the mat. We would argue that paradox is the substructure of our life, or what we say in the book; what we see in Both/And thinking is that paradoxes underlie all of our dilemmas. And here's what we mean by that, which is that we can, in our lives, as individuals, as employees, as parents, as partners, as leaders, confront on an ongoing basis competing demands and tensions. They feel they present to us like a dilemma that we define as something that requires a solution or a resolution from us. And that often pulls us into either/or decision-making. And so that dilemma could be for a leader, how do I allocate my engineers and reduce, you know, my engineers to today or tomorrow projects, innovation? Or existing projects? Or how do I think about my strategy regarding breadth or depth? Or how do I navigate my organization in terms of how collaborative we are, how competitive we are, and how centralized or decentralized are in our personal lives? Am I spending my time right now with work versus life? And how am I navigating that tension? Or, again, in our parenting? Am I being more disciplined-oriented or more empowering and autonomous? All of those choices come up for us or in our leadership. I mean, this is, you know, to groundlessness the leadership conversation and leaders are constantly confronted with in my leadership, should I be more democratic, and enabling an invite in more ideas from everybody or autocratic or more definitive and come up with a definitive answer? Or, you know, a big tension, particularly, as you said, I run a Women's Leadership Center. This one is global but particularly poignant for women. Am I, as a leader, am I more compassionate or more competent - for women, that's seen as a trade-off; it's seen as if you want, if you're more compassionate, you're seen as not competent. And so the invitation there is to say, we confront these tensions as either oar, but underneath them is a substructure in which they are more holistic and interdependent. They are paradoxical. So if we think about compassion and competency, we face this question of, you know, if I'm going to be nice to my co-workers and kind people will see me as incompetent. Well, how to get to your point? How do our competencies, demonstrating our success, actually allow us to be more compassionate, connected, and collaborative? And then what are how collaboration enables us to get more done to be more competent to be more effective? If we start looking at that interdependency, then we're looking at the problem through a very different lens, and it offers up a huge path to the civility of new ways of engaging in that problem. I'll give you one more very briefly. And then I'll pause, please; I was conversing with somebody about some of the work around vulnerability. And I know you have had some conversations on vulnerability at the core of this work of vulnerability. And this is, I think, an important conversation that people like Brene Brown put on the table. We have seen vulnerability and strength as being two opposites, you know, two opposing pressures. Brene Brown and others have reminded us that it is through vulnerability and openness, and the willingness to recognize our weaknesses or uncertainties that we can reach greater strength rather than seeing them as pitted against one another. And so we see this in so many places where it feels like a trade-off, but there are these interdependencies.
Scott Allen 15:55
Well, I love the phrasing. I mean, as you were speaking, an image opened up for me that our thinking can get so binary and truncated into this either/or space that once we see the Both/And, there's a whole world of possibilities that potentially open up, right? And just the question and the framing of, well, how could we achieve incredible culture and cost savings? I mean, whatever it is, how can we and again, then take people's minds to a place of possibilities versus keeping it locked into two separate options?
Wendy Smith 16:39
I love that you asked the question, how do we do this? Right? We jumped into, like, okay, all right, I'm in. Yes, it takes a while to convince people that this is a valuable lens, right? And you're saying I'm in how do we get there, and one of the number one stress, so we wrote the book to do a deep dive into that question. And we frame the middle content of the book really around sets of tools that enable us to get their tools about how we shift our mindset and how we manage our emotional experience, how we manage the context around us, and how we enable to be more dynamic. And to your point, the entree into this kind of thinking, the first step, we say, is exactly what you just said; you have to change the question. And that invites us into a whole new set of possibilities. And we find that in our work. And, you know, I run this Women's Leadership Center with my colleagues on an ongoing basis. Know that if they put out an either/or should we be more focused on the students. Or the executives? Okay, how can we bring those together to bring the students in conversation with the executives and the executives in conversation with the students? How can we do that? You know, and it's true in my classes, too, when I teach my MBA classes; in fact, it's almost a default. For those of us that are professors, and in particular Business School professors, we tend to frame a class; we often will put up a case study and say, Okay, should they go with strategy A, or approach a or approach B, let's vote and start with that. And oftentimes, I will do that, to invite people to remind them of this either/or thinking, and then pause and say, Okay, well, what about options? See, yes? Is there an option in which we can say, how can the protagonist do Both/And that is the first step into thinking into changing our mindset around these issues?
Scott Allen 18:38
I was just in a conversation the other day. So I'm at a Jesuit institution. And at this Jesuit institution, we talk a lot about Ignatian pedagogy, which is a kind of experience reflection act in a very simple way. To me, it's almost similar to Kolb's Learning Cycle in certain ways. You know, this individual was a colleague, and they said, well, we can't achieve some of the principles of Ignatian pedagogy when it's an asynchronous course. And in my mind, I immediately went to Well, how could we? How can that happen? How can we achieve an asynchronous course? And ignite Ignatian pedagogy and get both because there's the recipes out there or a recipe of how to do that work? How do we frame...is it a mindset in your experience? Is it a habit of mind that we can build in people's way of being?
Wendy Smith 19:37
Yes. Yes/And I think it is a mindset. Yes.
Scott Allen 19:42
You're doing it to me now, aren't you?!
Wendy Smith 19:46
It's a bit of a professional habit, Scott, I'm sorry to say. Yes/And - actually, this is what we say in the book, right? So a lot of the research has been around the mindset Of cognition, the way we think about issues, and it with our colleagues, Marianne and I, with our colleagues LM around specter and Amy Ingram and Josh Keller, we did some work on this notion of paradox mindset. We have a paradox mindset inventory; it's in the back of the book, we have a website, it's free, it's available, and people are using it for research. How does this mindset help us in terms of changing things? And that mindset, and by the way, it's one of these mindsets that requires us to consistently remind ourselves, you know, it's not like you're in or out. And most personality scholars want to know, Well, do you have a personality? That's yes or no. And in fact, it is an ongoing practice of reminding ourselves, how can we get back into the Both/And because we are so drawn into the either/or so? So yes, it's about constantly reminding ourselves to ask
"how we can" question rather than "is it A or B?" And one of the reasons we're constantly drawn back into the either/or where and this is where we started is because, emotionally, it's hard to live in the Both/And it requires, again, that we leave open uncertainty. And if anybody wants to remind themselves about how much we do not like uncertainty and how much we'd like answers, I sometimes like to transport us mentally back to March 2020, when there was so much uncertainty as the pandemic was starting and we wanted clear answers about things that there were not clear answers for, like vaccines, no vaccines, masks, no masks, isolate, don't isolate it, you don't touch my groceries, don't touch my groceries, like there was just so much uncertainty and that anxiety is real around it. So that's one thing to contend with is that it's both a mindset, and we have to manage those emotions. And by the way, the other set of emotions that I think are worthy of noting is that Both/And invites us also into a perspective that says, How do I honor and engage people who have a different point of view than I do, often an opposing point of view, and legitimate that point of view. Now, that's hard because we have this defensive reaction that as soon as I hear something opposite from me, the assumption is, well, if I'm right, you have to be wrong and get super defensive there. And if that's the case, we stop listening, we start fighting for a point of view, but then we don't get to see the whole picture. And so that happens; we see that poignantly right now around political issues. And the assumption that we are on politically opposite sides, when in fact, in many issues, what has been pitted as complete opposites. If you dig deeper, people overlap, which is hard to get to that deeper space. It's true in our organizations; as soon as one person takes one point of view on a strategic issue, and another takes another, we don't dig deeper into understanding and trying to see where the overlaps compromises are. So I think there is that defensiveness that we have to grapple with in realizing, you know, in the end, we don't have to necessarily agree with one another on what has to happen. But suppose we can start by respecting, honoring, and listening to one another. In that case, we can get to a more rich, more generative, and more creative set of solutions to the problem that we're facing rather than one that ping-pongs us back and forth between extreme opposing perspectives. And I'm happy to unpack some of that as well. But I think there's an important insight there around that idea.
Scott Allen 23:39
Please do. Please do go there. Yeah, one of the things
Wendy Smith 23:43
You know, one of the reasons that either/or thinking, you know, we in the book, we talk about three reasons, either/or thinking can be problematic, and we speak about them as vicious cycles. So I'll lay them out. And the first is that we tend to take a point of view. And then because we are stuck in inertia, we want to be seen as consistent, we want to be seen as right, and we tend to go down that point of view and maintain consistency with it, even if the other point of view is both valuable or even if the situation changes. So we talked about that as intensification or falling down a rabbit hole. And we see that, for example, in companies, we see that when they fall down a rabbit hole of their existing product and cannot shift. In our leadership, we see that when leaders become so stuck in their expertise, they cannot be open to alternative points of view. We can talk about the S curve of innovation both at the individual or the organizational level, where you end up too stuck on one S curve, which is the idea that you increase your expertise and efficiency over time. Still, if you don't make a change, you fall off the end of that S curve. So that's the intensification. But then what ends up happening as we tend to fall off that S curve and the environment around us changes, and we need new perspectives is that we ping pong to the complete other side. And so organizations, for example, tend to be so team-oriented. Everybody's sitting in a fishbowl, open concept, physical space, you know, and they realize, oh my god, nobody's getting any work done because we're too teammate, and they switch. And so essentially, what's their solution? They switch completely to the other side; everybody's doing their own thing, individual space, or, you know, this hybrid conversation, this extreme between, totally at home versus everybody's got to come back fully. But we play ping-pong between the two. In the ping pong space. What is so poignant to people is anyone who's ever personally dieted, right? So discipline, so discipline, and then you fall off the wagon once, and you're like, oh, and you give the whole thing up. Because so, we call that the wrecking ball, what you do is you lose the good with the bad, right, the throw out the baby with the bathwater, if you will, for a metaphor, or, you know, you sort of you swing to the opposite direction. So we see that happening in organizations where people are pitted against one another and opposite perspectives, or in our political environment, where we've moved too far to one and left or right. Then we swing back, rather than looking in between and seeing if there are ways for understanding and unpacking that in between. And I'll say the third place, where we see most of this pernicious problem of opposite perspectives, is that we talked about it as trench warfare or polarization. And we call it trench warfare because we see people digging in on their perspective and simultaneously shooting out at the other. And so the image of the trenches, like we each digger on trenches, surround ourselves by other people that reinforce our point of view, and then almost dehumanize the other side without really understanding what it's about shooting out against it. And this polarization is partially what's limiting us from getting to better solutions, again, whether it's in our personal lives, whether it's in our organizational lives, or whether it's in our political lives, the fact that we, as individuals, as leaders do not know how to sit and listen. Again, we don't have to agree with somebody, but at the very basic, have the respect to listen to an alternative perspective; maybe we'll learn something, maybe we'll open up new possibilities in service of better solutions, which is unto itself Both/Anding - Both/And approaches.
Scott Allen 27:46
Well, and I love that phrasing this opens up new possibilities, right, that he, you know, "every system is perfectly designed for the results that it achieves," here we are. And if it's not yielding the results we want, and on any, whether it's the diet, or how do we shift? And how do we open up possibilities for new paths to get somewhere new? And when we're navigating the complexity of organizational life today, you mentioned globalization, digitization, and COVID. Work from anywhere; I mean, we can go down the list of topics. Again, I have that view of how this Both/And thinking opens up versus truncates. And that either/or truncates me into some pathways that limit me; just bottom line, they limit the options when we are in a situation where we need as many options as possible. Right? Yeah, bottom line.
Wendy Smith 28:50
Yeah. I mean, it's got I can give you, you know, a bit of a story to ground this, please, yes, we are going, we're moving across the spectrum of different types of issues. But I gave a talk to a corporation a couple of months ago, and at the end of this talk, it was about innovation. And it was about a tech company; at the end of the talk, someone came up to me and said, Oh, my goodness, I think you just gave me therapy for navigating my issues with my ex-wife. So I took that as a huge compliment. And, you know, I find that that's true. I mean, my husband and I - we're constantly reminding ourselves what's the Both/And we have a very similar set of values. We have a collective goal of raising productive, healthy kids. I have two 16-year-olds and an 11-year-old. That's our goal. And based on our backgrounds based on our approaches, we tend to have some nuanced distinctions in places in which we would inform more discipline in our conversations or more empowerment for our kids, and this would come up came up when the kids were younger in terms of sleep management, it comes up now in terms of chore management or Homework management. And you know, a couple of months ago, we were conversing, and we both just got superheated. It was like, here, you know, and by the way, in marriage, it's like, Ah, here's that conversation again. And it's always on the I mean, at least for us, it's always on the boundaries. I mean, in the big picture, we take this higher purpose; one of the things that we talked about in Both/Anding is reminding ourselves of the higher purpose; we are fully on board with our big picture vision in our parenting. Yeah. And then the details it's about, well, there's just nuance in the details. And again, and you know, I made the strategic error of saying to him, wait a minute, I wrote a whole book on Both/And I know how to do this stuff, which was probably the worst thing I could say to him. It is true that we still have to remind ourselves, even in this relationship that we have built around these issues for a very long time, that we are in the same global picture. There is value and listening to one another, maybe opening up the possibilities in the conversation before we get to the should we do X or should we do Y? Or should we do A or B? What's the C? And I think that's a skill that translates into all experience in all walks of life. I believe that is a skill we can lean on in all walks of our lives.
Scott Allen 31:23
Yes. Well, two things come to mind. One, I wrote a book about emotional intelligence and my wife. You write about this?! Research is "mesearch". And then I think your phrase was C, the C, can we see the C or the A and the B can we see the C? I just love that phrasing. I do. And again, yeah. So as we begin to wind down our time together. What other items would you like listeners to know about the work? Are there any other items? What things do you want them to know that stand out for you?
Wendy Smith 32:05
Yeah, you know, Scott, I love that question. One of the things I've just been thinking about over the last couple of days. So I've been in conversation with a consulting firm about how we, how do we invite more people into this approach. And one of the tensions that I have been navigating is that, on the one hand, some basic tools invite people into thinking this way, and we want to open that up and give people the basic tools. And there is something potentially deep and mysterious about living in paradox, complicated, complex, and emotionally challenging. And how do we live in that space between the two of those in some ways? No, I think about this as similar to the experience of meditating; you know, meditating is an invitation for all of us to enter into a different level of consciousness; it's a way to shift our thinking and invite us into a different way of engaging in the world. It can be complex and mysterious, and what it invites us into, but there's also an entry point there. And the entree point for meditating is to focus on your breath. And to continually come back to that practice of, if I am feeling my mind jumping around all over the place, focus on one thing, which is often focused on your breath. I think that's true with Both/And think that when Marianne Lewis and I get into conversation, there are moments where, "Oh, we got this, we understand this." And there are moments like, oh my gosh, our minds are all over the place, as we think about nested interdependent opposites in a holistic synergistic way like, like mind blown in terms of where we understand that kind of relationship at a global level. And then we come back to okay, change the question, continue to shift up, and change the question to invite us into this kind of thinking. And so, you know, and again, we wrote the book to be mid-range between that to invite us into Both/And thinking, the reason we wrote the book was that when we first started thinking about these issues, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, organizational scholars leadership was very much about either/or thinking it was about making rational decisions. And many people said to us this Both/And stuff, it belongs in a yoga studio, or it belongs in a philosophy course. But like it doesn't belong in Rational organizational thinking, well, as we did the research for the book, or for overtime, not even for the book, you know, it's not just that we see this kind of thinking show up in our fellow academic domains of physics and quantum theory. We see it show up in psychoanalysis and how we understand like we are late in organizational scholarship and in psychology and sociology. We are late to the paradox party. It is a movement that has been happening over Time. And over the last 20 years, we have seen both academics and a huge community of scholars and colleagues working on this idea. And we have seen again the real world, we have seen leaders and consultants say, Whoa, like this complexity that we are facing in the world, we have to understand this holistic, interdependent notion of paradox, we have to understand the Both/And so we wrote the book, partially to capture the research of this expanding community over the last 20 years and personally to say, look, we get the people are moving from either/or to Both/And thinking, how do they do it? And so the first part of the house has changed the question, but then there's, you know, just greater depth into how can you get there?
Scott Allen 35:45
Yeah. And what are a couple of other elements of how you get there? You know, I get the changing question; I love that.
Wendy Smith 35:52
We frame this idea. We talked about a paradox system, and we labeled four buckets, A, B, C, D, and I'll just say we spent a lot of time on those labels for ABCD. So I'll tell you them, it's "Assumptions," how do we change our mindsets? And they're like the very specific practices things like how do we change the question? How do we change our assumptions that resources are limited and zero-sum and scarce, which leaves us into either/or thinking to resources are abundant and can be expansive, which leads us into Both/And thinking, so that's the assumptions piece, B is "Boundary." Boundaries are the structures that are the scaffolding. And here, a key practice is when we confront these either/ors or these dilemmas or these tensions, can we what we call separate and connect, pull them apart to understand what is engaged with each one, what each one is about, understand each one in service of finding the synergies connections and interdependencies so separate and connect, as a practice of scaffolding structures, but also, can we come up with a higher purpose. And so again, as I was saying, with my husband or with organizations, if we can articulate the long-term bigger picture purpose, we can see better how these things fit together, rather than the short term, I got to decide on this. So that's the boundaries and scaffolding. C is "comfort." That's the emotions piece; we talked about the importance of finding comfort in the discomfort. The important piece here is we are not asking people to sweep away or hide or pretend that the discomfort doesn't exist because what we know from research is that the more that we pretend that the difficult emotions aren't there, the more powerfully they come back at us, the more that they take hold of us. So it's being able to say yes to the uncomfortable emotions and still move forward amid those. And then D is "Dynamics" or the ongoing agility, change, experimentation, and shifting that happens around Both/And thinking. And here, I'll say one thing that I think is an important thing, an important practice for Both/And, and oftentimes, when people think about the Both/And, they think there's going to be this ideal win/win solution. And so we talked about that, as the creative integration, we're going to find the win/win. And the metaphor we use for that is the mule. And we use the mule because the mule is one of the oldest biological hybrids; it is smarter than a donkey and stronger than a horse. We've been breeding them for, for millennia, for like 3000 years. And the idea is that we find this like a great place where we can both find work and life and its integrative, you know, format. And what I found to go right back to the beginning of this podcast to talk about, you know, what I found in this IBM study was that the great leaders that we're navigating the Both/And rarely found this, like the ideal synergy between their existing product and their innovation, it wasn't about the win when it happened. It just didn't happen often. But instead, what they were doing is that they were making these small micro choices between the existing product and the innovation. They were sometimes putting more resources here; sometimes they are they were oscillating. And so I had talked about this as dynamic decision making, or we talk about this as being consistently inconsistent, or the metaphor we use here is tightrope walking, okay? Because to go forward on a tight rope, and you're not stuck on the tight rope, but to go forward, you have to be able to you're never balanced on the tight rope, you're always balancing making these sort of micro shifts between left and right. To stay on the tightrope. Now you're not over-emphasizing one side or over-emphasizing the other your micro shifting, so in the innovation space, these leaders were micro-shifting, and the decisions that they were making are in the work-life space; we might not find this ideal work and life you know, I used to say, when my twins were born, the ideal work-life creative integration was that I opened up a daycare, work becomes life, life becomes work, it's all good. And I would hate that some people would love that; I would hate that. But in the micro shifting, sometimes I'm home for dinner. And sometimes I need to do a work night. And it's not over-emphasizing work that I burn out or over-emphasizing life that makes my work falls apart. It's micro-shifting. And that's a dynamic practice along the way.
Scott Allen 40:40
I love it. So if I can mirror back a little bit of what I just heard, I think sometimes we might think of this panacea of a win/win there where everything is going to solve everything. And that's an unrealistic expectation as well. It's these micro shifts that make it smaller in some ways. And in some ways, also running some experiments to see, do these shifts help us? Is it moving the needle? Are we getting closer to, again, it's not going to solve or fix sometimes, quote, unquote, but these micro shifts are experiments that can help us get closer to, right?
Wendy Smith 41:19
Yes, and I love your word around experimentation because that is what we're doing. We're constantly experimenting, trying new things open and dynamic to what's possible. Absolutely. And, you know, again, I would say that it's not an either/or between creative integrations. And, you know, between the mule and the tightrope walker, the creative integrations and consistent inconsistencies. It's both like; sometimes there are these great win/wins. It's not that they never happen. Yeah, that's not the only way to navigate this. And often, it's the, you know, and sometimes we find that these oscillations will lead us to the possibility of finding a win/win.
Scott Allen 42:01
Well, you have given listeners plenty to think about. And I will put a link to the book in the show notes so that they can click on that and purchase the book or the audible. And I think it's just such a fun conversation. And I love the work that you're doing. And I appreciate your time with us today. As we wind down our conversation, I always ask, what are you listening to? What are you streaming? What have you? What are you reading? What's something that's caught your attention lately? It may have to do with Both/And thinking or paradox, but it could have nothing to do with that. And so, what's something that's caught your attention recently?
Wendy Smith 42:45
Most recently, and I am grateful to colleagues who have turned me on to David Whyte's poetry, I have been listening to his book "Consolations" which has invited me to think about words and ideas in very paradoxical ways. However, that's not the language that he uses. I am intrigued by and starting to read Adam Kahane's "Collaborating With the Enemy" to think about what it means to live in a cooperative, competitive, cooperative, coopetition world in terms of how we think about our broad level of politics, and I am always a fan of my colleague and friend, Dolly Chugh's work in how she thinks about these kinds of issues in the context of diversity, equity and inclusion and her new book A More Just Future, in which she explores what does it mean to both love our country, particularly in the United States, although being in Australia, I think there's a similar conversation, love our country, and recognize and be able to confront and face some of the sordid parts of its past. And so I think there's a Both/And in that conversation that's quite powerful.
Scott Allen 44:06
And I'll put a link to all of those, and I'll put a link to Dolly's newsletter because she always has just a wonderful newsletter that is so engaging; it's always she brings you in with some type of story or some stimulus that I never think of where it's going to go and then it goes somewhere really, really cool with her. I love when her newsletters show up in my inbox...
Wendy Smith 44:29
And often, it has to do with her puppy, Coco. So, yes, for the dog lovers out there...
Scott Allen 44:39
Wendy, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you checking in from Sydney. And, you know, I am so thankful that you took the time to contribute to the textbook. I'm so thankful that you do the work that you do. And thanks for challenging us to think differently. I appreciate it
Wendy Smith 45:00
Well, thank you for bringing these ideas to your community and audience, and I look forward to hearing how people are engaging with these ideas!
Scott Allen 45:09
For sure. For sure. Okay, be well! Bye bye!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai