Healing the Half-World: How My Worldview Changed from Helping Leaders with Complexity

by Dr. Lance Newey

’m a business school researcher, and the game has changed throughout the years. I’ve come to sympathize more with the demands and expectations placed on leaders. What’s more, I think that the education system needs new answers to help them lead through this greater complexity. Our old specialization model helps, but it leads us to perceive half-worlds. Half-worlds avoid complexity. I’ll explain as we go.

Push and Pull

Business and civic leaders get hit from all sides and are pulled in opposing directions. They are expected to grow economically by producing more, selling more and earning more, yet also be responsible for the health of their workers and customers, as well as the sustainability of the natural environment. They must create wealth for investors yet also distribute wealth for all. They are to create cohesive organizations yet also promote diversity. They are to work hard and long yet also preserve mental health. They must perform but do so safely, legally and ethically.

Quantum physicists have discovered that a contradiction lies at the foundation of matter: waves AND particles. That is, when you look at this smallest thing from one perspective it appears as a particle but from another it’s a wave. It is static but also dynamic.

I’ve come to realize that succeeding in this environment requires a whole new way of thinking. That is, there has to be a fundamental personal shift in the way we look at the world if we are going to manage opposing tensions. Sounds good, but in working with this new way of thinking I’ve noticed that habitual tendencies and unconscious biases interrupt the process. This is about personal development, and with that comes a bit of conscious effort to work through defenses.

With that in mind, let me share how I think the education system needs an upgrade to prepare leaders for the push and pull of complexity. To do this, we have to look at waves and particles.

Waves and Particles

Quantum physicists have discovered that a contradiction lies at the foundation of matter: waves AND particles. That is, when you look at this smallest thing from one perspective it appears to be a particle, but from another it appears to be a wave. It is static but also dynamic. It can be awkward for us to hold such a contradiction without trying to change it in some way to make it fit our prevailing paradigms. We often try to resolve it by breaking it into its parts, either as a wave or a particle. But in doing so we miss what nature intended: The wave and the particle are interdependent opposites which make a whole. When we treat a polarity as an either/or choice, we create a half-world. We only see a wave or a particle rather than both and the value inherent in the tension between them.

This waves-and-particles question is related to a bigger paradigm shift in science between atomistic and systems views of life. We are trained in the atomistic paradigm, which says that if you really want to understand something you have to break it down into its parts. By understanding the parts deeply, you will understand how it works. Those of us who have been to University have been exposed to this atomistic approach to the world. We chose a discipline like economics, psychology, engineering, law, business, politics or medicine and drilled down into the parts to become a specialist. But each discipline is also part of a larger whole.

Complexity is about this larger whole. It’s about understanding how problems like climate change, economic growth, mental health, social cohesion, immigration and food security are all related. The systems view of life is that you can’t understand the whole just by studying the parts and looking at these issues as though they are independent of each other. Systems thinking asks: what is the pattern that connects everything together?

We miss something in the interdependence and necessary counter-balancing tension between the parts. So, while we have been growing economies we’ve missed how this affects the environment. Caring about the environment counter-balances us from being too excessive about economic growth. It’s the tension between them that is the value. In our push for materialism we have missed how this overtakes more internal sources of fulfillment. Spirituality was once a powerful source of deeper meaning that counter-balanced addiction to perishable material things. In allowing rapid globalization we’ve missed how we still need to integrate our differences. Social integration is meant to counter-balance being too open with diversity. But how can we understand systems and wholes if we are trained in silos? We aren’t trained to hold the contradictions — the wave AND the particle.

The Price We Pay

Let me share an example of the large price we pay for our unconscious bias towards the atomistic view of life rather than the systems approach. We’ve been researching how leaders can create better community wellbeing by consciously leveraging five polarities: economic growth and environmental sustainability, physical and mental health, social cohesion and cultural diversity, economic benefit and social good, and materialism and spirituality.

Our method for doing so is to ask leaders to think of these as polarities rather than either/or choices. This sounds straightforward, but we underestimated the consciousness shift this is asking. What’s more, leaders don’t realize how entrenched either/or thinking is — they routinely choose a wave or a particle but not both.

Table 1 illustrates a sample collection of polarities that become activated when trying to create a place to live. The left column represents how we usually frame issues — our habitual either/or thinking. We choose a side and stick to it. This results in community gridlock because of the amplifier effect. That is, all the polarities in Table 1 are interconnected such that if I favor being out for myself then there is a high chance I am also choosing competition over collaboration, personal gain over community development and control over empowerment. It becomes a system-wide bias.

A personal example: I was recently engaged in an argument and held onto my position, only seeing the downside in the other view. I felt hypocritical banging on about polarities when I myself had failed to see it in this situation. You get caught up with a one-pole (half-world) bias without even realizing it. Then one morning I realized something: A lot of the arguments we have are in fact unconscious polarities at play. We remain gridlocked in our respective positions because we don’t recognize polarities. Gridlock happens when you hold onto your position and I hold onto mine. When we let go partially and consciously look for the value in the tension between both views, then we allow space for a new synthesis to emerge. This new synthesis activates a greater good and we grow beyond polarization. It’s not that you are wrong in your view and I’m right; it’s that we are not allowing a higher synthesis beyond any one view at all. When the dust of battle clears, aim for the synthesis.

The Limits of Problem-Solving

Problem-solving skills are lauded in our education systems, but they are not enough for leaders to handle complexity. For complexity we need both problem-solving skills and polarity-leveraging skills. This became really evident to me when working with leaders on how they frame issues. They might face a problem like needing to grow an economy and “solve” the problem by granting licenses to new business operations. The latter then can employ people and the problem is “solved.” But complexity doesn’t allow us to get off that easily. There are many more moving parts. So, have we solved one problem only to create others? What if these business operations aren’t environmentally friendly? Now there’s a choice: do we grow the economy or do we protect the environment? A polarity perspective says doing both gets you a better return in terms of community wellbeing. It takes both — economic growth AND environmental sustainability — to create a complex outcome like community wellbeing. Economic growth AND environmental sustainability is not just a problem to be solved but an unresolvable paradox. You are not meant to solve it but instead leverage the tension between the two because each counterbalances the worst of the other.

Problem-solving logic doesn’t get you to think in terms of pairs of opposites. It tends to keep you focused on solving the problem at hand, leaving you blind to effects elsewhere. Polarity thinking is a way to expand our line of sight into the other moving parts and look for actions which satisfy both. For complexity, we need both problem-solving logic AND polarity thinking in our toolkit.

We All Stand to Gain

By making the effort to develop our polarity consciousness, we can create broader system-wide effects. I recently worked with an organization that was struggling with a common problem: spending too much time in the business instead of on the business. At a strategy retreat, they resolved to do better on both in the next 12 months. Twelve months later, nothing had changed! I remembered a saying: polarities live outside us and polarities live within us. So, we shifted focus from the organization to the individual level. What this uncovered was that the leadership team collectively had a bias to a controlling style. The job was not going to get done right unless they did it. At the same time staff were crying out for more empowerment.

So, here are two interlinked polarities at play across individual and organizational levels. By controlling everything, I don’t have time to work on the business. But if I see the polarities at play and treat them as such, I just might open up new possibilities. Leveraging both control and empowerment might enable us to score better as leaders but also open up space to work in the business and on the business.