Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith on Applying Both/And Thinking to Solve Your Toughest Problems EP 222

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

Today I talk to Wendy K. Smith, a professor of management and faculty director at the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the University of Delaware, and Marianne W. Lewis, the dean of Carl H. Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati, about the power of using both/and thinking to solve your biggest problems. Go here to purchase their book Both/And Thinking: https://amzn.to/3Ff0flx. What We Discuss with Marianne W. Lewis and Wendy K. Smith About Both/and Thinking Both/and thinking is a versatile thinking style that helps you look at problems from multiple perspectives and find sustainable and creative solutions. By learning to use both/and thinking, you'll be able to think outside the box and solve problems in unique and innovative ways! Likewise, the mechanisms for navigating paradoxes are paradoxical. We need tools that can be adopted on an individual level. Marianne and Wendy show us how to change our mindsets to embrace both/and thinking and shift sentiments to find comfort with the discomfort of paradoxes. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/marianne-lewis-and-wendy-smith-both-and-thinking/  Brought to you by BiOptimizers and American Giant. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/VvtLYHC8wfw  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Did you hear my interview with Robin Sharma, one of the top personal mastery and leadership coaches in the world and a multiple-time number-one New York Times best-selling author? Catch up with episode 209: Robin Sharma on Why Changing the World Starts by Changing Ourselves ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struct podcast. We found four categories of paradox that we see again and again, and they're certainly interwoven and connected. But I would call them out as we call them paradoxes of performing, learning, belonging, and organizing. We do see these all over the place. One of the reasons why we unpack these different types

is not because somebody has to say, oh, I'm experiencing this tension. What type of paradox is it? One of the reasons we unpacked it has to say, oh, I'm experiencing this tension. What type of paradox is it? One of the reasons we unpacked it is to say, actually, guys, these paradoxes show up everywhere in so many parts of our lives. And let's just remind ourselves how pervasive this is. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 222

of PassionStruck, which was recently ranked as one of the top 40 most inspirational podcasts of 2022. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you would just like to introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes

that we organize and convenient topic to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything that we do here on the show. Just go to either Spotify or PassionStruct.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed my episode from earlier this week, it was with Harvard professor Dr. Joshua Green, and we discuss a psychology of Effective Given, which was a great episode, especially for Giving Tuesday. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your continued support and all your ratings and reviews. They go such a long way in helping to improve the rating of this podcast, but more importantly, growing the passion-struck community. Now let's talk about our episode. Today's world is becoming increasingly fractured. Confirmation bias abounds, where people stay within safe circles of friends and colleagues who agree with them, and the opinions that they hear mirror their own rather than confront opposing views or invite controversy.

But what if there's a better way? Wendy K. Smith and Marianne Lewis are experts on examining paradoxes and they believe that the solution lies in both hand-thinking. Wendy K. Smith is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and faculty director of the Women's Leadership Initiative at the Loner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware. And Marianne Lewis is Dean and Professor of Management at the Lender College of Business University of Cincinnati. She previously served as Dean of CAS Business School at City University of London and as a Fulbright scholar. They are both experts in examining the management of paradoxes. Wendy and Marianne are co-authors of the brand new book, Both and Thinking,

embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. So excited today to welcome doctors Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis. Welcome Wendy and Marianne to the show. Thanks, John. It's great to be here. Yes, thank you, John. Thanks, John. It's great to be here. Yes, thank you, John. Well, I always like to give the audience an introduction to the guests. And I thought, especially since I have you both on, how did you two meet and forge this relationship and collaboration that you have? I like to start telling this story because I like to say that I stalked Mary Ann.

I had been taking a class with leadership guru Warren Benis, who talks about stalking your mentors. And at the time, Mary Ann had finished her PhD and had written a brilliant piece in our top journal about this idea of paradox. Very few people were writing about it and her article won the best paper of the year for that journal.

And I was intrigued about this notion of paradox and how it applied to the research that I was doing around innovation. But as I said, very few people were writing about this. So I read her paper, I emailed her and I said, please, can we meet? I want to know everything that you know about this. And we met at that conference and we say the rest is history we've been working together as collaborators ever since. Well, that's a great story. I had on the podcast yesterday, Scott Barry Kaufman and Jordan Finegold, I'm not sure if you guys know who they are, but

Jordan was a student in his class at Penn when he taught her human flourishing and it's kind of the same thing from that point forward their partnership has taken off. Well, since you brought up this topic of paradoxes, you both gravitated to the examination of this and have been studying it now for a few decades. And I guess I'll direct this at Marianne for the benefit of the listener. What is the study of paradoxes and why is it important? Well, the study of paradoxes, John really starts with the study of tensions and understanding kind of some of the great tug of wars

that we feel. And sometimes these can be a big organizational societal levels like do we focus on the financial responsibility or the social responsibility, do we think locally or globally, and you can feel this tug of war. But as I started exploring this early, as Wendy just said, what I found is there's something different to the nature of tensions than the way we typically think about them, because our thing, our default is when we feel that tension, we immediately go into this either or problem-solving mindset, you weigh the pros and cons, you make a choice, you move on.

But as you start to really dive into tensions, you realize most of them don't go away after that choice. There's nothing more to it. Paradox is a notion that is thousands of years old, and that is really, if you think of the Yin Yang symbol, which is a favorite of Wendy's and mine, but it's that these opposites, these contradictions actually define each other, they're interwoven. And so this notion that our greatest tensions are comprised of these contradictory but interdependent elements that persist, they don't go away, right? The short term in the long term today and tomorrow, we're going to make decisions all the time and we're going to make them again. And so understanding that these tensions, these challenges are actually paradoxical can help shift our minds that away from making a trade-off to really opening our minds to how might those interconnections enable greater creativity, more inclusiveness, and a more sustainable solution. And I guess as a follow-on to that, Wendy, Maryann just brought up that this has been studied for millennia. Why has paradoxes energized and mystified philosophers, scientists, and psychologists so much

over these thousands of years. John, I love that question. There's always, when people write a book, the chapter that gets left on the chopping block floor, and we had a chapter where we really looked at these thousands of years of history and how the notion of paradox has developed over these years. Maybe that's the foundation for our next writing.

I think that the short answer is that it is really intriguing and mystifying. And we believe that this idea of paradox is actually fundamental to the way that we experience the world. These tensions between today and tomorrow, short term and long term, self and other, that we experience them as Mary Ann said in this tug of war, this ongoing challenges, emotional challenges, and yet if we can get ourselves to think about them in a more interdependent way, we get to a better place. Now that said, we also think that now is a moment where we're seeing a resurgence of exploring tensions. People are talking about the language of both and and the language of paradox more broadly, whether it's in thinking about

our work life tensions or thinking about how we navigate issues at work, hybridity or our big global challenges. And what we say is that these paradoxes surface more, they're more salient, we're more aware of them when there is more change in the world, when tomorrow becomes today even more quickly, and we're experiencing that short-term, long-term, today, tomorrow, attention more profoundly. So change, the second is when there is more of an experience of scarcity, when it feels like there's fewer resources

than people are in that tug of war over those resources. And when there's more, we call it plurality or diversity of voices, when there's different perspectives, and there's more of them and they're poignant, and we're trying to navigate the conflicts that arise there. So even as this idea has been around for a long time, we are definitely seeing a resurgence. Now is a moment where we're seeing a lot of language

around, we see these paradoxes now. How do we navigate them better? Okay. And maybe we'll just go deep on this with one more question, Maryanne. What are the four different types of paradoxes that you guys found? John, we found four categories of paradox that we see again and again, and they're certainly interwoven and connected. But I would call them out as paradoxes of performing, learning, belonging, and organizing.

All right, so if you think about paradoxes of performing, in some ways, it really gets to the competing demands that we face. What does success look like? And it looks like a lot of different pieces. And it comes to the plurality point that Wendy just made, different stakeholders, different roles that we play in our lives pull us in different directions simultaneously and they're often very interwoven in the way that we think about them paradoxes of organizing come into play as we try to organize our lives or teams or organizations. This is the division of labor as soon as you divide your life, your work. At the same time, you have to connect it.

So you see this in systems. With belonging, paradoxes of belonging, we see this challenge of self and other. Every time we decide whether we're in or out of a group, we're setting up paradoxes. Because we could also be both at the same time, or we could have multiple memberships. And then the last one is paradoxes of learning in that as you continue to build on

the new or build new you tend to destroy the old but you also build on the old. So this new and old today and tomorrow really play into the paradoxes of learning. You know, John, I would just add to what Mary I was saying. So we do see these all over the place. One of the reasons why we unpack these different types is not because somebody has to say, oh, I'm experiencing this tension, what type of paradox is it? Because I don't think that's the useful way of being able to get into this mindset. One of the reasons we unpacked it is to say, actually, guys, these paradoxes show up everywhere in so many parts of our lives. And let's just remind ourselves how pervasive this is.

A place where people can get started is just saying, oh, I feel this like ongoing tension, this ongoing tug of war, this ongoing challenge. Or I feel stuck in a decision between two different things. In what way can looking at these underlying paradoxes, these interwoven relationships, these tensions, these ebbs and flows help us to make better decisions? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting study all together.

And earlier this week, I had on Dr. Cassie Holmes, who's at the Anderson School of Business. She has this new book, Happy Hour, but when we were talking about this, and she focuses on time and happiness and how they come together, she really dove into human connection and how human connection is the root

of a lot of the happiness or non-happiness that we feel. And how often we treat our happiness and those human connections in an either or way instead of a both. And so I was hoping you all could introduce this concept of both and how you define it, what it is, so the audience can understand it through that lens that I just gave.

Well, I love that. And again, it speaks to this idea that, and I'll just take a step back, we love, we see so much people using this label of both. And we love it because when we first started out writing about these ideas, people would use a lot of either or, and we would say, well, maybe there's a both, and it took a lot of work to help people see well Maybe there's another way to think about it now what we suggest is The reason we wrote the book is because more and more people are using the label of both and what does it really mean and how do we get there? And I think that's the question you're asking what we mean by that is that we face all of these kind of by that is that we face all of these kind of choices. We feel this tension, we feel this tug of war, we face these dilemmas or these choices about how to spend our time and how to spend our resources

or what career should I choose or how do I navigate a difficult boss or how do I go in and ask for more money and we pit them as one against the other. Both anding starts with saying maybe that there's something interwoven about these opposite ideas. Can we look at that interwovenness and use that to enable us to get to better decisions? When I hear this example of like happiness and of human relations, I think one thing that one one underlying tension there is this ongoing tension between, am I doing stuff for myself to take care of myself or am I creating the conditions where I'm reaching out to others? And when it comes to the sort of feeling like I need more happiness,

sometimes we hunker down and get really focused in and we don't reach out to others. When in fact reaching out to others being in connection, which is what I think she's saying, reinforces or enables us to be more happy ourselves and feel more fulfilled. And the more fulfilled that we feel personally, the more that we can actually give to others, the sense of self and other, it's in conflict when it feels like, where am I going to spend my time and my resources? And yet, if we take a step back, we see this kind of reinforcing cycle between how I take care of myself and how I take care of others that just continues over time. And the more that we can see that reinforcing cycle, the more that we can realize, actually reaching out to others is going to help me along the way, help me be more happy.

Well, I wanted to go into a couple of things that you just said. I've been lucky to have a number of behavioral scientists on this show. And the topic that keeps coming up. Every time I talk to one of them is choice. And that it's the thousands of choices that we make every single day, which are the inputs in our life that determine the long term outputs. the inputs in our life that determine the long-term outputs. And I think as you just laid it out, many times we look at these choices in a binary way. And I think on top of this, we're now living in this world where technology has all forcing us to be more individualistic, which is causing us not to have this human connection, or to become more linear in what we're following and how we're letting ideas hit us. So I think it's a really interesting dynamic that we have going in the world right now. And I want to talk about this throughout the episode today. So I'm glad you brought that up because ultimately this all comes down to intentional choices that you make. So I think

what you're talking about is there are times where you want to ask yourself, is building self-esteem or building self-awareness? The right thing to do, am I going to be labeled as being selfish or being narcissistic? If you're someone who wants to build more self-awareness, how do you do this using more of the but-and formula instead of the either or approach? Yeah, and I'll just, I'll start and then maybe, Mary, I'll turn it over to you. I think that what we're arguing here is that we can change the way

we approach the choices. Someone asked us the other day, so are you trying to obliterate either or and making choices? No. What we're trying to suggest is that there's a different framework, a different mindset, a different overall approach, that enables us to get to better choices that are more sustainable. And it's not about what choice you make, it's about how you approach that choice

to enable more creativity before making the choice. Well, and maybe I completely agree. And I would add some concepts that we talk about in the book is you said that these are choices in their purposeful. And we agree. But we also think that this default of either or thinking can lead us into traps that our choices become almost automatic. That we tend to lean into what's become comfortable, the direction that we tend to emphasize. You just gave the example with technology and to be connected and have a sense of belonging and want to be focused on ourselves and getting things done and feeling a sense of individual purpose. But we can increasingly lean so much on the individual side, using technology that we forget, well, I'm not building those connections the way I should. And it becomes this automatic response

that when faced with what do I do in this moment, we keep reinforcing, call this digging deeper ruts, or going down a rabbit hole. So you lean toward this preferred site until you've gotten so far down the hole, you realize, oh my goodness, I haven't been out of my home or I haven't been off this screen all day. And then sometimes you can over-correct and actually swing the pendulum quite hard, we call it the

wrecking ball, and go just the opposite direction. Man, I need to get out there. I need to spend more time thinking about others. Where's my volunteerism? Where are my personal preferences and opportunities to be social? And then you go, okay, and I'm now spending so much time thinking of others. I need to put on my gas mask myself as well. So how do we build this balancing? And I don't think it's a static balance. People say, what's the balance? It's not a balance. It's this iteration between these elements and understanding that they work together. Yes, and this is the core reason why I was so excited to have you both on this podcast because whether we're acting as a partner, a parent, an employee, or a leader, we are caught almost every single day in these constant tug of war. And so I love that the core issue or one of the core issues that you're dealing with throughout this book is, what underlies our toughest problems and how can we deal

with it? And things where that occurs is how do you prioritize work and family, current targets that you're trying to achieve versus learning new skills? Do you stay in the career that you're in and the comfort of it or do you go to another one? But it's all these AMB choices. What happens is then we end up sticking with the choice. But what you guys are proposing is a different way that involves valuing rather than vilifying

differences, which I think is so important for all of us to hear. In your 25 years of research, you ended up finding that there's significant differences and how people understand these problems and these tug of wars. What were some of the biggest differences that you found in that research? Well, maybe I'll start with that.

We've done this work, We call it the paradox mindset. And now we've studied thousands of people. We have it. It's the instruments translated into multiple languages. So it's fascinating to see whether there are cultural differences as well. The paradox mindset approach basically says we see two differences in people. And they're interwoven. The first difference is some people are much more sensitized to tensions. They see them everywhere. Wendy and I see them in our sleep, right? But other people may just either they're ignoring them

or they have a particular context where they just don't feel those tug of wars and those people exist. And it's either something that they've trained their mind to do or again, that they've put themselves in positions to not feel that. But the second piece is really how they approach tensions, right? Those with a more either or mindset have this tendency to view them as problems to be fixed

and to move as fast as you can away from versus those with a both-and or a paradox mindset really see them as opportunities. There is space in that creative friction between those tensions for new possibilities, for learning, for growth. And it's that combination. So at our best, we are both, we think paradoxically, we think both and we see them in the tensions. And what we found in our research with tremendous colleagues around the world, but particularly the lead colleagues are Elima-Rone Spectre

and Josh Keller and Amy Ingram is that people who have this paradox mindset, they perform better, they are more creative. This is according to their supervisors and personally their own reflections they are more satisfied. Their well-being is greater. That's a really powerful outcome to say, you're doing better and you're feeling better. That combination can do all sorts of things for the individual. Wendy, anything you want to add to that? Well, John, maybe I can just add an example to bring how this idea of paradox mindset shows up. We like to say or researchers sometimes say that research is me search and and certainly we both tell stories. Certainly so many of the stories that I tell is just how unparadoxically I thought about so many of my career decisions along the way

and in some ways studying paradox was trying to figure out and make better decisions on my own. And one example of that, when I went to grad school, it was around the time that Enron had fallen, that businesses for social responsibility was gaining traction. And I thought I was going to go to grad school to study social responsibility and weather companies

at the time we were just asking, like, is this possible for companies to focus on a bottom line and profits while simultaneously thinking about a social mission? Or are these things really just to trade off? And when I got to grad school, I was working with a brilliant and fabulous advisor who was working with top leaders at IBM, studying innovation, and he was studying how these leaders thought about the potential for them to innovate, change, do new things while simultaneously thinking about their current products and the current revenues

they had on the table. And the question was, do I continue to do my dissertation on innovation or do I switch and say to him, thank you very much, but I really want to study social responsibility. And I will tell you, I spent years agonizing because it felt to me like an either or decision. It felt to me like I had to make a clear choice

and it felt to me because we get into this kind of consistency mindset that once I went down a path, I was locked into a particular way of thinking around issues. And so it took me years to, this was very much this either or thinking, the we like to quote the poem by Robert Frost, the road less followed, like you've got to make a choice between one path

or the other. Well, that's not paradoxical thinking. I think that the both and thinking invites us to say, what is it that I get and I can access by studying leaders and innovation? What is it that I get and I can access by studying leaders and innovation? What is it that I get? And then I'm interested in studying leaders around this topic of sustainability. And how can I think about how they reinforce or can come together? And truly, I think this kind of magically fell into my lap more than I was so paradoxically thoughtful about it. But by studying innovation, that's what turned me to thinking about this notion of

paradox, because what was happening is that the best leaders at IBM were the ones that were able to hold the both and able to live paradoxically in navigating the tension between today and tomorrow. That's what introduced me to Mary Ann. That's what introduced me to thinking about paradox and paradox brought me back to now I can go back and look at these issues of sustainability. And so the idea that I had to pick one or the other and then get really stuck in that and choose and identify myself by one of these topics

is the heart of this either or thinking, which is, yeah, I still have to make a choice. I had to figure out what my dissertation was going to be about. It was about IBM, and if I was a little bit more helpful in my thinking, or what I would have liked to have done in my thinking, was know that I can study IBM and innovation, and it could open up possibilities for myself to study these other topics that I'm interested in new ways. What's interesting that you brought up, Enron, and I'm just gonna touch on this because I think this will be a great example

for the audience. Enron, unfortunately, is something I know extremely well. I was a senior manager at Arthur Anderson in Houston when this went down. And the thing that made Arthur Anderson different from all the other big five accounting firms at the time was that you have this duality that exists where you have the engagement partner who's responsible for the account and you have a quality control partner who looks at what they're

doing and then opines. And in every other one of the big five, the quality control partner overruled the engagement partner at Arthur Anderson, it happened that they gave that decision making to the engagement partner. So when I ended up playing out if people don't understand is this quality control partner and I knew both partners, well, kept going to the engagement partner saying,

we can't do what we're doing. We can't allow this to continue, and the engagement partner was sitting there saying, well, we have 2,200 employees here in Houston where the largest office now, two thirds of them are working on Enron. If I start doing what you say, we're going to start losing this work. And instead of using but and he made a very either or decision and the consequences

of it were shutting down ultimately in 80,000 person global firm. I just am I thinking about this in the right way? Yeah, oh, that's a, we both studied N-RON in a variety of ways. You've lived at much closer, and that was an excellent example of both end or the lack thereof, right?

Because in some ways, they set up a duality that could help work through that tension, but they didn't use it that way. It sounds like the leaning was so firm on the engagement partner that really was a one-sided approach. More than they probably thought they had set up structurally. I would add to that, I want to be sensitive because I think that people who experienced and went through the enrown collapse, it was incredibly emotionally challenging and devastating for many people. And in some ways, it is a real example of what happens

when you overemphasize one dimension, one side of the needs at the expense of the other. That, and so for enrown, the overemphasis of profit at the expense of ethics for Arthur Andersen, the over emphasis on engagement at the expense, not listening to, not being open to the quality folks saying, hey, we got to think about this along the way. So not knowing the details from the paradox perspective, it's often a perfect storm of going so far down one track that you end up in this vicious cycle.

That's the ruts that we talk about. This intensification, the more that you're engaged, the less that you're going to actually pull back and ask, are we doing this right? So I think it's a great example. Yeah, the only thing I wanted to add, just so the listener can understand this is the engagement partner is not this quality control separate group. The engagement partner is someone who just like the engagement partner is an engagement partner on other accounts. And so they do the same role. They're just assigned to certain accounts so that they're, as you're saying, is this kind of overwatch or ensuring that

what we're doing is the proper way that we should be doing it. Which I think this leads into a great follow on question, which is we often exist today in echo chambers. And I think that's exactly what was happening with this engagement partner, where the only opinion we want to hear is something that's similar to our own. Why is it so important that we should broaden our perspective? Well, one way to think about it, John, we use the analogy, the Hindu parable of the blind men and the elephant. Right? That most issues that are really challenging are complicated. They're messy, they're dynamic,

and there's just no way for one person or even one kind of type of perspective to get the whole picture. And so by narrowing ourselves, by staying in an echo chamber, listening to others with the same perspective, we're missing all other parts of that elephant, and we're likely to make a really poor decision,

because we don't see the complexity. And this is in part a group think issue, but I'd add another concept to be thinking here, which is cognitive. And there was some brilliant work by James March, who actually won a Nobel Prize for it around bounded rationality, which just means, cognitively, we can't see the whole elephant. It's just not possible. It's too complicated of a system. It's too messy. And it goes back to then you have to triangulate. How are you going to bring different perspectives

to the table into the discussion and listen so that you're playing through with a more intricate understanding of what's going on. And it's not easy to do because I think the other piece goes to the emotions that Wendy's talked about. It feels much more comfortable talking to people who say, oh yeah, exactly, right? And you feel this kind of reinforcement for your view, but that's just going to fuel that intensification. If you don't get the other debates in the room, you are going to miss really important elements.

Well, and this is exactly where I want to take the discussion is to examining a couple different scenarios. So, earlier today, I released a podcast episode with Seth Godin. And in it, we discussed his latest project, which he considers the most important project of his career, which is the Carbon Almanac. And it's a document that he coordinated. It has 300 plus scientists, researchers, collaborators who put this together. It just lists out facts as a thousand different footnotes in it. But what he is arguing

for is that we need to have systems change to solve this issue. Individuals themselves are going to be able to do it. And it was a very difficult interview for me to do because climate change can be so polarizing because you've got people, it seems on two camps, aside that believes it's happening and a side that argues, well, if it is happening, then why didn't we have a hurricane this year? Yet we have these huge floods in Pakistan and the way that Seth handled the discussion, because I had to ask him very difficult questions, is he never said either or, he said both. And ultimately, he said, what I am trying to do is give people the information so that

they can make their own mind up. But to him, it was, the information is so black and white that it's hard to argue against it, but in a bigger sense, because this is something that we have to solve for in the next decade, how would you encourage leaders or even people at home just listening to this, if they're on one of these camps to think about climate change in a different way. Yeah. Should I start?

Yeah, this is a big one, and we think a lot about this one. And it's a great example, because what it points to is the ways in which we have picked a particular perspective, lined up with other people who confirm our perspective, and then we get into these polarizing debates. And while there may be solutions going forward, the problem is that we can't get to those solutions because of the process and the way that we interact with each other. Climate change is a great example. I think what's happening in many of the global issues that we're facing is that we want to define ourselves on one side or the other side of the issue, but when you go and talk to people, there's actually a lot more overlap than they actually propose to say when they just identify with a particular perspective. And that's true

with climate change too. If you ask people what the polls are showing these days is that when it comes to climate change, there are still climate deniers in which there is no issue around climate change. But for the most part, most people actually believe that there is some, that there's an impact on the climate on some level. And yet, they might have different ways of solving the problem, different kinds of competing interests, different strategies, different approaches, different considerations that they're considering along the way. So the question then becomes, well, it's not, do you believe that there's climate change or do you not? Because even though there are climates and iris, for sure, I think that the bulk of the

people, it's, how do we get us into a conversation with one another so that we can come up with strategies that enable that honor these different perspectives and considerations that we have to do in order to go forward. So I think that, and I think that's a question on a lot of our political debates, which is that we have so polarized ourselves into different camps and then reinforce those camps that we haven't listened to, engaged with, understood what the other side has to say, and tried to figure out, no, we don't have to agree with everything about it, but tried to figure out how we can accommodate or bring some of that in, how it can inform and expand

our own thinking. Yes, well, it's right into the next question I wanted to ask. I was really happy to see in the book that you had Senator John McCain. He happened to do my commencement speech when I graduated from the Naval Academy. And I was hoping you guys could say, why you singled him out and how,

especially in his final hours as he was dealing with his brain cancer, how was he trying to honor the complexity in our world by understanding, appreciating, and embracing the vital opposing forces that fuel our political systems? Well, we pulled him out for a number of reasons, but maybe one that I would just call out in terms of the book is we juxtapose his approach to President Obama's as they were even against each other as political opponents, they actually

thought quite similarly in terms of process. They were both very much both the unthinkers. And we use a quote from John McCain because he really was pushing to, how do we work across the odds? How do we have these discussions in a way that these are incredibly complex systems problems that require lots of perspectives and are going to require collaboration as well as intense debates to work through. And he was a wonderful example of someone who treasured those opportunities with different

sides of the aisles and didn't see them as two sets of extremes. Found, I think to Wendy's point, the actual individuals, the discussions are all ranges in the middle. And how do you pull those out? And one of the key ways he would pull them out, and I think President Obama was given a good example

in that quote that we use there too, is they go to a higher level. They think more about what is our overarching purpose. Then let's debate the how. But why don't we first agree we all want a better world. We all want a more sustainable world. We all want a more compassionate world, right? Pick depending on what whatever that issue is, but that really high bar, let's build a broad umbrella that a lot of people can get under and then say, now let's roll up our sleeves and let's debate the how, because there are so many different paths to get there, right? But we don't know, again, the different considerations. Some of us are going to be coming from a much

more economic, maybe more social, more right? There are lots of elements that might drive our perspective. But I think his goal was to hold the umbrella high. That would be one way I'd think about it. What about you, Wendy? Yeah, John, I would just also reinforce. I think that the key message there is to the language that you use, which we totally get out of our echo chambers. to the language that you use, which we totally get out of our echo chambers. And for us, part of this idea of paradox is, again, to notice that different people have different perspectives that come from different needs and different, you know, and we can get to better solutions by bringing them together. And in our current political environment, we can't do that because what we do is we line up

under a particular perspective or particular identity in the United States. We line up behind a party Democrat or Republican liberal or conservative around the world. We see people lining up and trying to identify strongly with that particular identity without taking a step back and saying, wait, we do that because it's really anxiety provoking to think that we're in a night, we're in these multiple identities. But the truth is that if you talk to most people, not all their beliefs, fully line up under this particular identity, and they usually have

much more complex beliefs and ideas than what's just under this particular label. And the labels and the reinforcing political institutions get us in trouble by not being able to talk across those lines. What we would argue is that we would come to better solutions. And this is true across politics and across history, the best sort of things that are passed or the best bills that are passed are ones

that are bipartisan, whether's input and insight from both sides. And we're not seeing bipartisanship in politics, but we're also not seeing it like we say in the town halls or the kitchen tables because people aren't listening to and talking to one another. That's a form of either or thinking. And for us, the both and starts with,

can I identify people that are different than me and listen to them, give them the respect that they have a different point of view and respect them by listening to it. Doesn't mean you have to agree with them, but can you just start by listening and hearing what they have to say and living in this kind of ongoing messy space where yeah, we might not agree with each other, but there is benefit. Not there might be. There is benefit in understanding one another

and trying to be curious and figure out if there's possible places of connection. Yeah, I think you both brought up some great advice. And when I think about this, I often come back to my own core values. So when I'm faced with difficult decisions, I let my values guide me. And I think for politicians,

if we would start focusing at that level of what are we really trying to drive for? What are the common things that we both want? You could then get into these issues, whether it's Roe versus Wade, how we're attacking health care, how we're attacking health care, how we're attacking budgets, and come to some common ground that is unified against the ultimate outcome that we want.

But they're not approaching it like this. And I think Roe versus Wade is a great one. I heard you guys do another podcast where this came up, where you could be pro-life or not, but both sides can coexist in this if you change the way that you're looking at it. I wanted to switch to now talking about the corporate world, and I'll just start this out with a personal example. When I was a senior executive at Dell, I came in and I inherited this project

called Quote to Collect, which was we were changing out all the systems across Dell and 160 countries on how we were taking in money, collecting it, how we were interfacing with the sales team, et cetera. And we were spending over $100 million a year on this thing. It was the biggest project. It was put in place by the person who previously had my position who was now one of the five presidents working for Michael in a different capacity. And at the same time, we were trying

to bring in a software capability, and I determined that this system couldn't do the accounting that we needed in the subscription revenue. It wasn't a capability that it had, and fundamentally, it wasn't going to work. And came in with an alternate theory. And I brought this to this group. And I tried to use the both and theory, but I just ran into resistance after resistance because this other person and a few others felt that they would have pie in their face if they reversed this since they'd

gone all the way to the board and we were $200 million in. But I bring that up as an example, but I was hoping that you guys could talk about Terry Kelly who you bring up in chapter 7 because I thought it was a great illustration of a similar situation that she kind of inherited. similar situation that she kind of inherited. Yeah, I can share a little bit about Terry Kelly. Terry was the fourth CEO of WL Gore and associates, a brilliant CEO, fabulous person, and she inherited an amazing organization. Gore are the folks that make Gore-tax and in tons of different kinds of materials, whether it's medical instruments or whether it's guitar strings or dental floss or the jacket that we all love to wear. And Gore started as a company

by when Bill Gore was working at DuPont and found it to be very hierarchical and said, I wanna create a company where even the engineers at the most entry level feel like they're involved, engaged, and have more autonomy to innovate. So he created GORN Associates based on the culture of the power of small teams get together. If you have an idea that you want to be able to implement, you make a business case for it and then

gather a team around it, you don't have to have a particular title to make these kinds of decisions. And so that ethos has really guided the company and enabled the company's success for years and years. And many of the decisions that they made as an organization reinforced just how important it was to have these personal relationships and to bring decision making down in an empower people. And when Terry Kelly came in, she said that this is really important and she grew up in the company. So she had a very strong commitment to the power of small teams. And yet at this point, the organization was in something like 35 different countries with something like 35,000 people around the world. And they had these small teams running around all over the place without

a lot of integrated enterprise wide strategy. So the tension or the challenge that she felt strategically is this tension that many organizations feel between global and local decision making. Do we do something that is integrated at the global level so that we're all pulling in the same direction? Or do we let local, unique regions and city areas or local teams have more autonomy to be able to make decisions that are more appropriate to their particular location and their particular circumstances.

And indeed, it has to be both. But, and when Terry Kelly started to talk about an enterprise-wide strategy, people would push back because indeed it's one of these things. It's what we tend to feel is this either or yes or no, right or wrong. And so if you talk about an enterprise-wide strategy, it felt like it was killing the ethos of the company of being focused on the power of small teams. It's right there in our either or thinking to start feeling like trying to offer something opposite as an addition was really going to kill what we've always done.

And in fact, Terry's team would actually talk about this in the metaphor of breathing because they wanted to reinforce that they were bringing together an enterprise-wide strategy so that they could pull the company together more effectively without killing the power of small team. So they would talk about breathing. You need to both breathe in and breathe out to live. And that was their way of communicating to people. We're not trying to get rid of what has been so successful in our company for so long.

We're trying to bring it to a new level and create a new approach to doing that. But that was a hard pill for people to swallow, cognitively and emotionally, who had become so emotionally committed to this very empowering ethos that was and is gore. It's a very interesting part of the book, particularly didn't want to go into everything that's in the book because I want the listeners

to buy it and read it. But there's many stories like Terry's that are throughout the book with examples and then how to apply it in your life. So I just wanted you to bring up one and I think that's a great one. And interestingly enough, in my own book, whenever it comes out, I have a chapter on this topic that it's called, eyes on, hands off leadership. And I profile two leaders who did this very well. Keith Crotch, who is the former CEO of DocuSign,

former Undersecretary of State, and then General Stan McRustle. So I know what you're saying extremely well. You've got to balance both. Well, Marian, the last area that I wanted to tackle as far as it goes from examples was how people should approach parenting. Can you share a specific example of where or how this type of thinking can be implemented if you're a parent? Well, I think there's so many elements of parenting that are a paradox going. We certainly live in the tensions, but a classic is tough love.

It's how do you provide the discipline and boundaries for your children to succeed and thrive and be safe and at the same time within those boundaries provide the love and compassion that helps them also succeed and thrive. And I'm going to share a strange, maybe connection to it, but I have a son who went to West Point. So I think about the Academy experience. And something he came back with, and we would talk a lot while he was at the Academy, is those boundaries that you set, the discipline and the rigor, are truly empowering because you know the framework

that you're working within. But nobody does the things that have to be done because of those boundaries. They do it because of their higher purpose, because they have really strong bonds, whether it's between parents and child in the case of parenting, or in this case between leader and follower or between peers. But I think there's some beautiful and powerful connections that we see in a variety of places that go between the discipline, the toughness, the structures, the rigor, and at the same time, the compassion, the heart, the humanity, the relationships. And so I think as parents,

it's certainly how do we keep these both in mind? Because together, they will empower our children in much stronger ways because they'll also learn themselves for the future. How do I continue to build and shift my boundaries while being compassionate and building relationships? I think it's an important point you bring up because what you're really talking about is intentionality. You have to be intentional and where you're directing yourself. And I know from my own experience at the Naval Academy, you could have all the perseverance and passion,

but if you didn't know how to align it in the right way, it wasn't gonna get you to the end zone, so to speak. Well, I wanted to ask just one more question because I thought this was a really good area that you guys brought up in chapter six. I recently interviewed Juliet Funt, and if you're not familiar with her, she wrote a book called A Minute to Think, and she uses this metaphor throughout it of a fire. And oftentimes when we build a fire, how we're taught is you've got to create space.

And oftentimes that's what's missing when you're trying to light something up is that space in between. And we don't allow ourselves to have this white space in our own lives. It's something that's missing for most of us. You tackle this as well. What is the importance of building a pause?

Yeah, I love that metaphor. We really value how leaders use metaphors to convey complex ideas because we've seen so many do that in this space of both am thinking and paradox. And the reason that we talk about this building a pause is in part to notice that navigating competing demands is not easy. It is emotional, it's challenging, and it's hard, and so we point out, and we argue that it's really uncomfortable. We get defensive quite easily. Our uncertainty leads to lots of fears. We don't say that you got to get rid of that discomfort. Those just are, but you have to accept that if you act from that space, that's where you get into these polarizing either or places. If you pause and reflect, that's where you might be able

to say, okay, I feel emotionally triggered, but how do I find a different way of acting? So we talk about how you need to find comfort in the discomfort, and one way to do that is to take this pause so that you're not acting out of the discomfort, you're acknowledging and accepting this as comfort, and finding a different way in which you can be more open to a different perspective than what you're thinking about, More curious about you're able to listen

even if you have these opposing ideas. Okay, and then lastly, if people wanted to find out more about you, both what's the best way for them to do that? We have a new website. We'd love people to go to it. They can find out more about us. I is both in thinking.net,

but they can also find us on social media channels and we love to get feedback and hear from readers and leaders to have applied these practices and continue to learn ourselves. Great. Well, for the listeners, just a phenomenal book for you all to check out that can influence so of the different aspects of your life. And I will put links to it in the show notes along with their social handles. Well, Wendy, Marianne, thank you so much for being on the show. What a joy and honor it was for us to have you. Thanks, Donna. It's really fun conversation.

Thanks for all the work you've done. Thank you so much, John. And wonderful examples. We are always looking for examples. That's beautiful. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Wendy and Marianne. And I wanted to thank Wendy Marianne and Paul Silker for giving us the honor of having them on the show.

Links to all things Marianne and Wendy will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the authors that we feature on the show. It goes to supporting the podcast and making it free for our listeners. Videos are on YouTube at John Armiles

where we have well over 470 of them for you to check out. Please go and subscribe. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one community place at passionstark.com slash deals. Please support those who support the show. I'm at John Armiles, both on Instagram and Twitter, and you can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I book amazing guests like Marianne and Wendy, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruct podcast interview I did with Dr. Alisa Hellerman, who was once a partner at WME and Talent Agent representing the likes,

a Vince Von, Owen Wilson, and Ben Stiller. And she now runs the world's first recovery agency, devoted to helping addicts. Heal from their addictions by not just getting sober, but by addressing inner trauma and finding true soul-centered wellness. We discuss her brand new book which launches next week, Sobriety. In it, she describes the plan, the heel trauma, overcome addiction, and how to reconnect with your soul. There's a saying that says we don't have complexes, our complexes have us. And so the material, the depth of material that lies in our unconscious, in both our personal unconscious

and in our collective unconscious, is waiting to be sourced so that we're making what's unknown known. Instead of waiting for that to drive us and then we're unfamiliar with why we're doing something all of a sudden or why these symptoms are arising. The fee for this show is that you share it with those that you care about. When you find something that's useful or interesting, if you know someone who wants to understand the power of paradoxes more, definitely share this episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share this show with those that you

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