The Innovation Show

EP531 Wendy Smith - Both/And Thinking Part 3

Understanding Emotional Dynamics for Creative Problem Solving with Wendy Smith In this episode, Aidan is joined by Wendy Smith, co-author of 'Both/And Thinking,' to discuss the crucial role of emotions in addressing creative tensions and solving tough problems. Wendy emphasises moving beyond cognitive approaches to engage the heart, recognising and honouring emotions as vital to navigating uncertainty and innovation. The episode dives deep into actionable tools such as pausing to reflect, broadening perspectives, and dynamically adapting to changing environments. The episode concludes with practical insights from Unilever's approach to managing tensions under Paul Polman's leadership and tips for leaders to embrace paradoxical thinking in their organisations. 00:00 Introduction to Embracing Tensions 02:07 The Importance of Emotions in Innovation 03:45 Tools for Comfort with Discomfort 06:27 The Power of Pausing and Breathing 15:08 Broadening Perspectives for Creative Solutions 18:08 Navigating Organisational Change and Conflict 19:46 The Role of Dynamism in Innovation 22:56 Case Study: Honda's Emergent Strategy 26:09 Case Study: Paul Polman and Unilever 36:59 Leadership and Paradox Management 48:17 Conclusion and Resources Find Wendy here: And Substack here: Contact Aidan McCullen for Keynote Speaking, Corporate Workshops and Education Tourism to Dublin and California: Find the Innovation Show on Substack and Website:

Duration:: 49m
Broadcast on:: 28 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

To open ourselves to tensions we must move beyond focusing on our mindsets and thinking to be able to engage our heart. We need to use our emotions as an enabling resource rather than a crippling obstacle, a small excerpt from part three of both and thinking, embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems. It is a pleasure to be joined once again by the co-author of the brilliant book Wendy Smith, welcome back. And it's so great to be back here with you. It's been an absolute pleasure spending this time with you and thanks for giving me three bites at the cherry as well to learn even deeper and follow the three parts of the book as well. So the last part is turning towards emotions and this is a huge part. Most resistance as you rightly know from studying innovation comes from fear and that triggers emotions. And I thought I'd tee you up perhaps for this with a beautiful quote from the book. You said, "The uncertainty created by products is inevitable. The detrimental outcomes from that uncertainty are optional. Our underlying paradoxical dilemmas can surface deep fear, anxiety and defensiveness. All those are real and important emotions to accept. However, it is these emotions that can lead us to narrow our focus and resort to either or thinking. If we ruminate on fear for too long we end up pushing ourselves farther and farther down the rabbit hole. We need to honor our fear but then find a different approach to respond to the competing demands. That is by recognizing our emotional discomfort we can then use tools to find comfort with the discomfort. I love that and I thought I'd just throw that at you to open up today's show. I love that you read that. I want to just offer two two thoughts to open up back to expand this conversation. The first is emotions matter. Emotions matter. We know that in our gut and yet every time I sit down with my academic colleagues when I sit down with my with leaders and workshops the first thing is how do we change mindsets? And so we know that our emotions are important to inform our behaviors and yet we still somehow have this idea that we are walking brains that were brains with a body attached to move it around and that our emotions we should just leave them out of the work site. But that's not the way we operate as human being and so emotions matter and they particularly matter when it comes to navigating tensions because tensions raise uncertainty. Uncertainty there's open questions about how to navigate them how to deal with them. They raise anxiety they raise defensiveness if I pick one way and there's an opposite way I start to defend that as if my my ego and honor is at stake and that's emotional and if we pretend our emotions don't exist we're going to get ourselves into a bad place. So the question is how do we deal in a different way? Let's show our audience how to do that because one of the things we try to do on this show Wendy is explore all elements the holistic approach to innovation or change including personal level so this could be health or fitness or breathing all these kind of things have a huge impact on how we embrace change or how we step up in times where we need to be resilient and you introduced three tools here and I'm going to share on the screen once again for those people who are following us on YouTube three of the tools that Wendy shares in the paradox system and this is particularly to deal with comfort with discomfort so I'd love you to take us through these main tools and so I just want to highlight the comfort in discomfort there's something important the important idea here is that the discomfort exerts the fear the anxiety the defensiveness those are all real and importantly these tools are in service of noticing that recognizing and embracing that and then dealing with it and what and what we mean by and I wanted to say so so what we mean by recognizing and embracing is that if we try and say look this fear this discomfort I'm not I don't want to deal with it it's it's not worth it and we try and metaphorically sweep it under the rug pretend it doesn't exist what we know from research is that those emotions will rebound they will come back even more powerfully imagine in a leadership space where something is bothering you you don't deal with it or in a personal space something is bothering you you don't deal with it you try and pretend it not there you bury it you tell yourself it shouldn't be a problem the next thing you know it really it doesn't go away it's not like you can really bury it but actually psychologically it just brews inside of you until it experts out probably in a way that you don't want it to at all that's what happens with these competing demands is that we experience these tensions we've talked about the tension between navigating between today and tomorrow or pressures between the which which shows up as pressures between the innovative business and the existing business or the pressures between the sustainability folks and the finance folks and they create these conflicts and if we don't talk about them if we don't deal with them they burst out and create these problems in these relationships or they burst out in ways that don't allow us to come up with a more creative productive solution so the invitation here is to start by pausing the pause and allows us to notice the tension notice the discomfort that comes from the tension notice the negative emotions taking a breath literally pausing and taking a breath and creating some space between the triggering emotion and our response some of your listeners might know the famous idea by Victor Frenkel that notes that our power our agency as individuals happens in that micro moment between some kind of trigger and our response and then we get to in that moment decide how we want to respond to something and what's going to happen rather than the trigger causing us to decide how to respond in its own way if we can just expand that micro moment a little bit we give ourselves that moment of space to really lean into the kind of response or the kind of action that we that we want to engage with so so noticing that there's tension noticing that there is a difficult emotion pausing and taking a deep breath to reframe the response i used to in this in this in this and i i think i write about this in the book i used to in meetings put a big black x on my hand as i would walk into meeting so i would walk into meetings i knew that i would sit in a meeting people would say something and i would get defensive or i would get reactive and i would just blurt out my thought so i would put this kind of x on hand as a reminder to stay quiet listen take a deep breath and pause so that i can offer a more informed reflective curious engaged reaction rather than a responsive immediate triggered reaction and so that's the first piece the pause which looks like taking a deep breath looks like sitting back for a second looks like being curious for a moment before letting your emotions drive your ear and that's number one i love that Wendy because it's something that we don't really talk about much because it might be considered a bit woo woo but actually we're learning more and more as you know from neuroscience that it has a dramatic effect on how we even think and even if i do breathing exercises throughout my day i can get more out of my brain my brain recovers quickly it takes on the information better i show up better in relationships i communicate better there's so much in it that i hope now people will start to bring that in more and more i'm always encouraged to see you'll see now top sports teams taking time as a team to come together and breathing together in moments of stress in the game i think that's such an important thing i always point today to my kids and go see that he's not crazy but it's such an important piece i want to say just two quick things first the number of senior leaders that i speak to now ceo's c-suite that will talk about the importance of this pause of taking a breath before they step into a meeting to come to compose themselves of pausing in a meeting before they respond so even as it sounds like it is more new age and sitting on the mat and meditating it shows up in these micro ways for leaders as a very profound and provocative practice and breathing is not breathing is what we do on a daily basis and so it can feel like we're entering into this new age world or your listeners can just take it as an like what we do we breathe and can we just pause and notice that to calm our emotions before we go forward and indeed at the second piece the accepting the discomfort Buddhist thinking has had some profound impact which has now come up in research as well to see how we need to value and accept our emotions in order to move past them and i'll just say this second arrow because i think it's profound if other people have not heard it the Buddhist notion is that we get hit by a first arrow it causes pain but then we create this story about the pain where we feel guilty or angry about being hit or frustrated and that is all what the Buddhist will call the the additional suffering and that we as human beings experience pain but we cause onto ourselves the additional suffering that's what they note as the second arrow the additional emotional intensity that goes along with or that we create around that pain so what does it look like to notice that there are difficult things and there are difficult moments and we experience these challenges and that's all real but not to add on the additional suffering and in fact i to your point i am a big fan of the work of psychologist and Buddhist Tara Brock who has a great book called radical acceptance and she indeed makes this case about how the practices of starting with accepting all of what we feel as a starting point to enable us to broaden to enable us to respond differently and for her the purchase of acceptance is just starting to say yes yes i feel defensive might not be what i want to feel but i feel defensive yes i wish that they just said yes to my idea without coming up with an alternative plan because that would feel more respectful yes i'm feeling jealous yes i'm feeling angry yes i'm feeling a lot of anxiety and fear about the uncertainty of how the world is playing out right now yes and and just honoring that it's like a jiu jitsu movie if we say no stop feeling those things all of those things will come back and say and push back against us but if we say yes those things are okay then all of those emotions can stop defending themselves in us and we can move forward more effectively i love that i try to teach my kids the idea that words are the language of the mind and emotions or feelings of the language of the heart and they don't speak the same language so they they don't communicate very well through a jiu jitsu so you have to actually lean in understand what's the emotion trying to convey to you and firstly like what you started off with it takes the moment of pause because you have to be in quietude in order to be able to let that in and understand what it's trying to say to you yeah i think about this as a parenting or partnering or just being in relationship as well that we know that once we bring something to a friend that's difficult and the first reaction because our friends don't want to hear the difficulty and so they start telling us why we shouldn't feel that way or how they're going to find the silver lining or all of there is all you want to do then is say no i just feel crappy or i just feel frustrated or i just feel whatever it might be but that the kind of friendship or listening we want in the moment is just an empathetic acknowledgement yeah like where we are it's and so offering that to someone else in listening is it's really quite important somebody's going through something difficult our kids our partners our friends our colleagues they don't want us to just dismiss the difficulty and find the silver lining and get back to some kind of idealized form they want to just acknowledge or be okay with being in that difficult and it's the same thing that we can do to ourselves rather than dismiss or try and reject the difficult emotions the discomfort the fears all these challenges how do we just acknowledge that's okay because that's what's going to give us power to move forward in a more productive way it's this ironic effect if you will it's such an important point for relationships or for organizational change i think one of the key things i learned in my own relationship is i was always trying to fix things or come up with a solution instead of just acknowledging look that that situation absolutely sucks and you see this all the time as do i want to read about innovation that at the end when an organization realizes it has to let go which ultimately means letting go of some of their colleagues perhaps that they built version one of a business or version two with they need to leave the organization because they no longer fit where it's going but that's a just a really terrible situation that has to be acknowledged and there's no point in trying to just kick the can then the road and this is where the next one comes in the idea of broadening our perspectives because that helps us reach for positive emotions yes yes and i i'm so thrilled to talk about this and in fact i might have said this in previous parts we are working on the next book and this broadening our perspective is the heart of what we want to explode out because essentially it's given the problems that we face in the world we need to bring together multiple different approaches to come up with creative solutions and we need to be in conversation with people sometimes that have a very different and and potentially onerous perspective that are hard for us to sit with but that that's what's going to lead us to the ways in which we're going to solve our world's greatest problems and because we feel fear what we do in the moments where we are dealing with these big complex issues is we narrow ourselves we re and and narrowing looks like we reinforce the ways we always think about things we surround ourselves with other people that are similar to us we think about other people as them and we alienate the them rather than being in conversation rather than being curious rather than being engaged and what it does is that it leads us individually to be less creative to be in the short term in service of trying to minimize the discomfort we feel by minimizing the uncertainty and anxiety and reinforcing what we already know in the long term it leads to more narrowness which leads us to be more limited which leads to more detrimental emotional impacts and it also leads us out of connection and collaboration with other people so the question that we are exploring is why do we do that it's such a natural thing for people to do and counterproductive and how could we what does it take to invite people into opening the aperture being starting with being curious to hear things that are different to open up the way we think about things and expand our thinking which in the short term might be difficult to do but in the long term allows us to be in relationship in ways and be in the world in ways and be creative in ways that we never thought were possible that's the invitation beautiful and one of the things that we touched on and probably not as much and i thought we'd lean into this a little bit for the for the rest of the episode is i'm gonna skip past the there's a chapter on should i stay or should i go now it ultimately a point everybody meets where they're like should i stay in this organization or leave so Wendy and Marianne help you navigate that it's brilliantly done there's tools about how to navigate that then there's interpersonal conflict which kind of overlaps with organizational change which is where i'd love to focus the rest of the show but one of the things i wanted to talk about was dynamism even the word dynamism is such a powerful word but you talked about this particularly with the changes that were needed in wl gore and sun we touched on this before but i want to remind our audience that this was the original team of teams organization these parts of the team totally decentralized could make decisions could be entrepreneurial and then along comes a new leader brings the whole organization together it needs to introduce different ways of being because now customers were overlapping it was a very different organization and that was met with massive massive resistance and therefore you need dynamism and i loved what you wrote here you said to avoid falling into rabbit holes in the first place or to help us emerge quickly we need tools that enable dynamism dynamism involves actions that spur learning enable adaptation and encourage ongoing shifts before competing demands not only can such dynamic actions prevent us from getting stuck in roots but they can help us take advantage of creative tensions by constantly reconsidering the nature of alternative sides we can unleash the creativity in paradoxes finding new mules or more effectively walking our tightrope's i love that paragraph because it brings together so many of the elements from the book yeah so i am i just want to frame this that again we started in the first show talking about this paradox system the system is these four sets of tools that bring together the research that our colleagues have been doing over the last 25 years into these buckets these sets of tools and dynamism is a fourth bucket the important part there's two important parts to the system one that it's a system which means not about choosing one or the other it's about how they reinforce each other and the second piece that is that is in baked into this system and it's a paradox system but it's also paradoxical because we argue that managing paradox is paradoxical which means that these sets of tool themselves balance opposing pressures with one another and this tool of dynamism is about being agile and change and enabling shifting and movement and it is balanced against it happens alongside the tool which we call boundaries which is about creating the static structures to scaffold both endings so you've got on one hand these static structures to scaffold both ending the way you set up the rules and the roles and the people and the vision and that are all hold in place boundaries to invite both and and then you create these practices these dynamic practices that allow you to see new possibilities experiment try new things not get stuck and the more that you create the effective boundaries the more that you can engage in these experimental practices things like being open to serendipity what do we mean by that that things come along that you don't even know and expect and oftentimes we just shut them out because we're not looking in the right we're not open to new possibility to luck what we know from research is that actually luck happens all around us it's not that there's lucky people and unlucky people it's there's people that are able to see and be open to lucky possibilities and there's those that are closed and too narrow and focused and can't experience them and so so these boundaries create the conditions that enable us to be more dynamic but these practices invite us into being more dynamic more experimental serendipitous or seeing serendipity along the way as you know we we did an extensive series on Clayton Christensen's work a new new clay and he talked about Honda and you mentioned as well here Honda's a great example of this where you're a you're open to experimentation but then you're open to serendipity you don't have a very tight strategy that you get behind you're more emergent with that strategy i'd love you to share this this is just such a great story we've shared up before in the show but i just think it's one of the best examples of both serendipity and just being open to an emergent mindset it's a great example of that and it's a great example about how we want to rationalize everything so one of the things i love about what they call the Honda effect is in the basic story is Honda comes into the US market with motorcycles ultimately introduces the sort of smaller and more lightweight motorcycle that is not just for long-term drives across the country but enables you to scoot around in cities and becomes a smashing success so the question is why and the interesting part is that boston consulting group came in and did a report on why and how and this report which was taught to business school students all over the place essentially made the case for a very rational strategic planned approach of how Honda came in with a clear strategy and knew and understand that this was an open market opportunity for lightweight motorcycles came in and introduced that and wow look at what it what it's like to develop strategy and several people said i'm not sure that's exactly what happened like thank you bcg for this post hoc rationalization or what our colleague carl wike calls retrospective sense making but that's that's not what actually happened and got back together some of the initial executives of Honda said well what actually did happen well three of us were sent over to the united states and we didn't really speak english that well we had very few funds and we're all shacked up in one apartment together and we brought this heavy weight Honda motorcycle but it turned out that it wasn't as good for the distances that people were driving in the united states and the motor would burn out and we had to send it back well while we were sending it back we're running we're scooting around trying to figure out what to do in the meantime here in la and in doing that some folks from sears were like wow gosh we could think about selling this not in competition to cars but maybe in competition to bicycles and what would it look like to not have this sold by the big motorcycle and automobile dealers but have it sold its sears and and so what would that look like and what's possible and they start and and so it was a series of um urgent moments in which this lightweight motorcycle became a huge success in the united states and so this has been written into business school lore as the emerge the the planned strategy school and the emergent strategy school and the distinction between them in terms of strategy whether it and and and by the way uh and and so there's there's huge outside two things one there's huge value in noticing emergence it doesn't make the leaders look like they are the brilliant strategists who set out with a clear plan and then accomplished it so let's notice the emergence and by the way what we know is that leadership requires both foresight in planning thinking through to create the conditions to allow for experimentation and emergence it shouldn't that shoe is not an either or that shoe is a boat speaking of boat and the brilliant brilliant case study is saved for the end where called Pullman and many of our audience don't remember this but when Pull Pullman was made CEO of Unilever it was equivalent to when Sachin Adela came in as CEO of Microsoft people thought it was a poison chalice it was 2009 the company had gone through lots of cost cutting people being let go from the organization poor m&a strategy poorly executed it was post great recession as it as an 8 2009 and he came to a company that had no morale they were even as you say using competitors soaps and their toilets when they produce soap themselves so this was the decision that Paul Pullman walked into Unilever but i didn't know until you the way you framed it in the book is that he totally leaned into paradoxes and he totally leaned into both and thinking and you interviewed him for the book and it's just a brilliant case to bring everything we've learned so far together i'd love you to share your highlights of this case study yeah and for your readers i am a huge fan of the book that he wrote with Andrew Winston net positive where he captures the case study in so much more depth and i do love he talks about where they talk about him entering into the death spiral of what had become of Unilever i love the the moment where they don't even use their own products and in their corporate headquarters their tea in their cafeteria their soaps in their bathroom it was just a real death spiral and when we spoke to to Paul and we spoke to him a couple of times as we developed the book one thing that he said to us very clearly was there will be tensions my job as a leader is to surface those tensions and use them to enable more creative thinking rather than to bury them and how can i create the conditions to do that in a safe way that sees this as a positive and valuable exercise rather than something that's detrimental and for him he one of the things that he did and that he is known for in those 10 plus years 10 or 11 years that he was at Unilever was to institute or to implement the Unilever sustainable living plan and the Unilever standalone as many people will know or some people might not essentially what he did was he made a very strong commitment that Unilever which is a packaged goods company and has products like soap then hygiene products shampoos etc lots of food products they bought over Ben and Jerry's they sell other kinds of ice cream and iced tea and all kind his commitment in the Unilever sustainable living plan was that they were going to create each of those brands with a commitment to a set of very clear social objectives that we're going to change the way people experience the world people at the bottom of the period pyramid the most financially challenged part of our world most disadvantaged people across the spectrum that change the way people experience the world have a set of environmental objectives that we're going to impact the trajectory of our earth and climate and environment and that they were going to make a commitment to those not adjacent to alongside their financial commitment and not despite their financial commitment but in service of they were going to enable them to double their profits through these commitments to these things now there's lots of companies now trying to figure out how they can courageously address the tensions between social environmental demands alongside financial ones they get it that's important to do but it's really hard because they come up in conflict with one another all the time so for Unilever it would be things like well in the short term it is cost cutting to not deal with the externalities of pollution in my plants but that has an environmental impact or in the short term financially we will make more money if we sell our shampoos and smaller package packaging but that packaging adding more packaging has an environmental outcome to it so so there's all these tensions that arise in trying to address these competing demand and his point is those tensions that can feel difficult and that can feel like this ongoing freshers again between the marketing people and the R&D people or the finance people and like you can just feel those tug of wars how can we create a culture in our organization where we value those tensions we bring them to the surface and we use that as an opportunity for learning growth and moving forward rather than something that we're going to bury or something that's going to create challenge that was the question and that's the way he culturally led the company and it's culturally and strategically led the company the core element of all this is you talked earlier on about guardrails and that when you introduce say what he did new ways of doing things new practices etc people tend to focus in on the upside for them and the downside creating this kind of either or mindset and he talked about and you talked about in the book about the importance of getting above that to find this higher purpose that people focus on that and then that unveils all these paradoxes below us i thought that would be an important thing to share for those leaders listen to the show who are struggling with this themselves because you can do this you don't have to be the CEO of an organization or an SLT member you can do this with your own department of a team or you can do this for yourself having a higher purpose to drive yourself through those difficult times and help you navigate paradox yeah absolutely i see this by leader women's leadership center was in a big university where a small group work constantly navigate or trying to lean into a set of practices within our own group in order to navigate these ongoing tensions and again in the big picture for those people that are out checked this is creating the scaffolding creating the structures creating the boundaries that enable this kind of dynamic living into these competing demands so very specifically at Unilever if the team was going to be constantly surfacing tensions between their environmental goals and their financial goals or whatever it might be between more packaging or less packaging manufacturing that address pollution they had to know why they're doing it and they had to be in constant conversation to address these tensions and as you're pointing out part of the why is this higher purpose this overarching integrative vision statement so again for Paul Pullman what he said to us when we spoke to him is the very first thing that he did in taking over Unilever was to understand what's the point what's the mission what's the vision what's the overarching vision and for them he leaned back into their historical roots which was making everyday life easier and making more complex to making sustainable living easier on an everyday level essentially the essence of what they were trying to accomplish what we want to do is create a world where sustainable living is easier for people every day it enables two things one it's motivational like why are we here why are we doing this work on a daily basis why are we dealing with these tensions well so it answers the why question that's first of all the motivational why question but the second is that it reminds us how to accomplish that overarching goal we need to accommodate these competing demands these these opposing demand what it essentially does i we like the metaphor it it gives us sort of the vision out into the future that allows us to stand in the chaos of the moment and the metaphor that we use for that is you're standing on a rocky boat you're feeling the sort of rockiness back and forth in that moment and the way that you're told to stabilize yourself is to look out to the horizon because by looking out to that broader perspective you can deal with the the discomfort of the instability in that moment the overarching vision invites you to look out to the broader perspective and say well why am i dealing with this kind of chaotic back and forth tug of war in the moment to like get to that it's both to motivate and to to stabilize that that moment for you so one of the things that leaders can do at any level is to continually name articulate that higher purpose and remind people that that's valuable and important i wanted to say one more thing because in order to get there the second practice that we talk about is the importance of separating and connecting and what we mean by that is then not papering over the tensions but naming them and then giving each side separating valuing honoring recognizing creating time and space to listen and value to the different perspectives in service of finding the points of integration i think sometimes that's overlooked and what that looks like in practice is as a leader i'm going to at my meeting say look we've got these two different ways of thinking about it let's create some time to really explore both so that we can hear it though or as a leader knowing that there's tensions between your finance person your sustainability person or the person dealing with the short term in the long term let me go spend time with both of those people to hear what they have to say so that we can find those points of connection and that too was something that paul pomer was really good at which was creating the space to honor it's not i'm just going to talk about social and environmental and forget that that we have a financial bottom line and i'm not going to just talk about the financial and forget the social environmental i'm going to create space for both of them and as a scholar of innovation you understand that that's constantly comes up with innovation that old and a new and it seems like a battle between the old and the new instead of actually working together because they both ultimately want the same things they might be rewarded differently or measured differently which is a huge part and i highly recommend reading the book and don't forget i have a copy of the book up for grabs for those people who sign up to the sub stack of the innovation show as well you can win a brilliant copy of that book because in there Wendy also talks about the importance of just being able to have those conversations and even train your team and putting aside like paul pomer and as company did training bulge for people to be able to retrain and then they decide should i leave i don't think i'd belong in this organization i don't agree where it's going etc there is loads and loads in there but you highlighted a very important thing and throughout the book and throughout the series we've talked about the four types of paradoxes that show up constantly throughout different aspects of our lives performing learning belonging and organizing but in this last part you talked then about well from a leadership perspective they mirror what the challenges are for leadership in times of vuca or times of rapid change and these are challenges of obligation innovation globalization and coordination i'd love you to at a high level share what they are about and how they reflect the four types of paradoxes yeah yeah and so essentially the four that you just mentioned what they do is they mirror as we think of the performing learning organizing belonging as the more generic articulation of these tensions that we experience whether it's in our organizations in our interpersonal relationships or in our inner personal lives by defining them in the end of the book as organizing as organizing organization globalization obligation and innovation we we look at those tensions and we say well what does that look like in strategy at organization for governments for small teams like what does that look like in the context of our genes right or in the context of our organizing and our leadership and so we so for example the innovation tension is what we call attention of learning it's attention of time it's the tension between today and tomorrow between what we do now and what we have to do in the future and that's about how we learn grow change and shift along the way the obligation tension is our label for our sustainability tension the tension between what we need to do for the social versus the financial social environmental versus the financial the mission versus the markets the profit versus the planet and how we can accommodate both of those and we call that that's a form of performing tensions because it's the tension of what are we trying to accomplish what are what's what's the outcome where are we trying to go what's that so essentially what we and what we say and this is a piece of work that we published in her business review before the book with our colleague Mike Tushman who I know you've had on the show and about noting how these tensions these these four tensions show up across organizations they might be more salient one might be more salient in one organization than another it might be that the tensions are more poignant but but they show up in all organizations and by the way and and this is where it becomes really valuable the important piece here I think I said this earlier is not you can name your exact tension but that you see just how often tensions show up in so many different aspects of the organization you can notice that along the way and then notice that they reinforce each other so even in Paul Paulman's case where perhaps the most salient tension because of his his most salient strategic tension is this obligation or social environmental and financial or mission market tension because of the Unilever strategic his Unilever sustainable living plan and still that triggers tensions of innovation because then they have to figure out how they're going to innovate for example if they're going to accommodate people who live on a dollar a day well they can't buy the same products that we're buying in the developed world where we have more disposable income so they have to innovate so that creates tensions between today and tomorrow oh and by the way in order to accommodate these different types of products for the developing world versus the developed world they have to think about what it means to be more strategic about local needs and can't just create global products that they're going to export everywhere so there's this tension between what's their global integrated perspective versus some distinct local you need to there's this globalization tension that it triggers so essentially it reinforces how these it's important to start and notice which tensions we are experiencing and then notice how they actually are knotted which is the language paradox theorists use they're knotted with each other it's not just one tension but they they trigger one another and one of the things you talked about there from an example was performing paradoxes so even metrics and how shareholders would view this because some shareholders actually pulled out their shares and and got out of the business they didn't agree with it so so drastically and there was just so so much in that and we won't have time to cover it i highly recommend read that book also read Paul Pullman's book as well so you mentioned maybe the last thing we'll share are three things that you can do so the first is build guardrails around paradoxical polls i love that language the second is to diversify the stakeholders and this is not tick the box diversity this is diversity at every level of the organization and then the last thing is something that we know well on the show is to encourage experimentation but i love these again through the lenses of your work and both i'm thinking yeah well i will also recommend so in in this question of broadening your stakeholders some of your listeners might know stakeholder theory ed freeman he just came out with a book with his co-authors and i think it's called the power of and there is and in the title it reinforces the idea that if we are going to create more robust organizations we need to think about a more robust set of stakeholders not just our shareholders those can create conflicts the same kind of conflicts and tensions that we're talking about here the same kind of conflicts and tensions that unilever experiences because your stakeholder your employees might be might have needs that come in conflict with your customers so how do you bring those together or your employees and customers might have needs to be more expansive that are cost demanding that come in conflict with your shareholders which want you to minimize costs so so the i so shareholders theory and and the book that they just came out with reinforces that you've got to live in the and to do that and one way to do that is to make sure that the voices that you are listening to around the table that are informing your decision-making value or represent these different perspectives so that's the diversity here paul pulman had to essentially change up shift some of the people that were on their board because they're they those people had to what they had to share was a collective commitment being in the and and they each had to bring perspectives that we're going to offer different perspectives i'll say it the other way they each had to offer different perspectives of different groups that they were going to represent at the table but they couldn't just come and represent those different perspectives and be ready to fight for that's what we typically do like i'm coming in and i'm representing whatever it might be and i'm gonna fight for that group at the table no they had to wear two half they had to wear the hat of i'm going to represent the the global south and i have a perspective and i understand what what it means to to engage with development work but i'm also going to come in and i'm going to put on the other hat which is that in order for me to be able to succeed in representing the global south i also have to see this as a going concern that's going to succeed over time i'm going to have to be able to see this all come together collectively and i'll just tell you i'm working on a research project with a fabulous team a colleague in australia and a colleague that just uh finished her PhD in Barcelona and we're looking at this question of how negotiators managed to come to collective agreements particularly in the context of COP where you've got all these different countries that are there negotiating with one another and it becomes clear at some point in time that everybody's coming in to fight for their country's need but at some point they've got to then realize that they work together otherwise they all fail so how do they put on these two different hats and that's what these group of stakeholders have to do a final element and i just thought this would be a really nice way to finish the show and the series in particular is something that is a red thread through all kinds of change and something that we need to lead into we talked earlier on about breathing in this part three but the idea of honoring discomfort and leaning into us and realizing that leaders don't have to have all the answers is such an important thing also on an individual level and one of the paradoxes you mentioned is to be forthright but humble and i loved what you said here you said for a long time business leaders assumed that people could check their emotions at the door of work and focus only on cognitive rationality we now know differently rather than assume that people can deny or repress their emotions great leaders create environments that can recognize and help inform these reactions welcoming people's vulnerability i absolutely love that and i chose that as one of my favorite quotes to finish this series i'd love you to riff on that as a final share for our audience i'm so grateful to wrap up with that because when i do talks i often see people i i'm grateful to see people shake their heads like intellectually they get it there's something really valuable in the both and but when it comes to like sitting at your jaskin living into these tug of wars and into these conflicts and noticing your how how uncomfortable it is and noticing that you've got to honor somebody who you really disagree with it gets messy and hard and so i just want to acknowledge with empathy that this is valuable i i really hope that people will see the value but it's not easy and we're constantly reminding ourselves to acknowledge that it's not easy and keep working at it beautiful and last question is where can people find you because you're encouraged people to take advantage of the paradox mindset inventory this is all at the end of the book as well but you have resources online as well and also for people who want to reach out to you bring you over to this part of the world as well i encourage that for people who are listening from europe and arland and learn more about your work your keynotes etc where's the best place to find it yes the best the easiest place to find us is to follow us on our website it's it's bothandthinking.net i am super active also on linked in we we we can find that through our website we also have a sub stack and i'm going to go sign up for yours although you shouldn't send me a copy of the book i hope other people do as well but we also have a newsletter now it's not an either or if people want to continue on this journey with us we are so welcome to have fellow travelers living into the difficulties or living into the potential of both and it was an absolute pleasure joining you and i'm so grateful for your time this is the book i have a copy of for grabs and don't forget i will share it on the sub stack and also also restack your sub stack as well author of both and thinking embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems wendy smith thank you for joining us thank you