Article (6.08) The Mule and the Tightrope Walker: Lessons in ‘Both/And’ Leadership
Most advice about tension in organisations promises a mule. Take two opposing demands, breed them together, and out comes something stronger and smarter than either parent, which is why the mule (the oldest deliberate hybrid) makes such a tidy picture of what both/and thinking is supposed to deliver. It also makes a very good keynote!
The idea belongs to Wendy K. Smith, a professor of management and co-author, with Marianne Lewis, of Both/And Thinking.¹ In this episode of Leadership Decanted, she describes going into IBM to study how teams handled the move from client-server computing to the cloud, fully expecting to find mules. She found something less photogenic: teams making small either/or choices, over and over, about where the resources went this quarter, and never settling anywhere. She calls it “tightrope walking”. Nobody on a tightrope is ever fully balanced, only correcting, and the teams that fell were the ones that leaned too far in one direction, whether towards the past (Lotus 1-2-3 is her cautionary example) or towards the future, abandoning millions in existing business along the way.
Mules do exist. Paul Polman’s approach at Unilever treated social and environmental commitments as a way of enabling financial performance rather than a cost to be minimised, and she cites Albert Rothenberg’s research on how Einstein, Picasso and their peers held opposing ideas together.² Zita Cobb’s Fogo Island Inn declines to be filed as either an economic venture or a social one.³ The trouble is that some tensions never produce a hybrid, and it seems worth knowing which kind we’re holding. Wendy’s distinction is between a dilemma and a paradox. Her twins, aged twelve, once had a dilemma over the front seat of the car, which had to be settled before anyone went anywhere. Underneath it sat a tension about which of them was loved more, and that one stayed exactly where it was.
Not every contrast qualifies, though, as one objection in the episode makes plain. Human and technology might be a convenient contrast rather than a paradox, in which case much of the discomfort people feel could come from the framing itself. Wendy’s answer, as far as it goes, is what she calls “paradox 2.0”: holding both/and and either/or in relation to one another, with the small either/or choices serving a larger both/and. This has the mildly awkward consequence that a philosophy of both/and needs an either/or to function.
Two further complications sit alongside it. We can’t easily step outside a tension to examine it, and discomfort tends to spread through groups, which may explain why the first thing Wendy does in workshops is tell people the tension is normal and they aren’t alone. Her homework is modest: notice how often we say “or”. We wonder how many of the week’s either/ors survive being asked whether they were either/ors at all.
(Cheeky Half 41, ‘Human dignity in the age of AI’, makes a good companion listen for anyone who wants to follow the human and technology thread further.)
Endnotes
- Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis, Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems (Harvard Business Review Press, 2022). Wendy also writes at It’s Not an Either/Or.
- Albert Rothenberg, research on how highly creative people hold opposing ideas together (his term is “Janusian thinking”).
- Shorefast and Fogo Island Inn, Newfoundland, fogoislandinn.ca.