A moment of clarity I suspect it’s playing a game I reach out, and it’s gone My unreality By a different name Is what yet to be drawn.
What needs to be done Always feels right And when the story had spun Shying from light, It always begs to forget Filling the stores of regret.
Do caterpillars dream of flying? Do they know they will have wings? Do they realize that being land-bound Is just a temporary thing?
Imperceptible? Immense? I can’t tell, barely there myself Unable to keep the facade of pretense swallowed by the intense losing all sense of space, time, and self.
Losing all sense Changing, yet staying the same, Thrashing my wits and will, Am I still me? In my defense, This question is unanswered still, While being reframed. What will I be?
I facilitated a workshop on systems thinking recently (or “lensical thinking” as I’ve come to call it). The purpose of the lensical thinking workshop is to provide a coherent set of tools for approaching problems of particularly unsolvable kind, using the concept of lenses as the key organizing concept.
One of the participants became quite fond of the polarity lens, realizing how broadly applicable it is, from the larger organizational challenges (like “centralized vs. decentralized”), to something as in-the-moment as hidden tension in a conversation.
The participant even pointed out that the use of lenses, at its core, has a polarity-like quality: a wide diversity of lenses brings more nuance to the picture and as such, makes the picture less simple and crisp. The tension between the desire for clarity and the desire to see the fuller picture are in tension, causing us – if we’re not careful – to swing wildly between the two extremes.
That one resonated with me, because it’s a very common problem that every leader faces: in a vastly complex space of mostly unsolvable problems, how do they speak with clarity and intention while still leaving room for nuance and convey who fuzzy everything actually is?
The deeper insight here is that we are surrounded by polarities. Behind every bad decision, there is undoubtedly a pair of what seems like two equally bad conflicting options and the agony of having to commit to one – often knowing full well that some time from now, we’ll have to swing all the way to the other side. In that moment, the polarities rule us, both individually and collectively.
In a separate conversation with a dear friend of mine, we arrived at a point of clarity when we both saw how a problem we’ve been looking at was a gnarly polarity. We saw how, over time, the only seemingly available options had this quality of “either do <clearly unsatisfying thing> or do <another clearly unsatisfying thing>”, repeating over and over.
When that happened, we both felt a bit of a despondence setting it. This has been going on for a long time. What is the way out of this swing of a pendulum? Is there even one?
This question was surprisingly helpful: “What’s the third option?” When caught in the grip of the polarity, it feels counterintuitive to slow down and look around for something other than the usual. However, given that the other choices leave us animated by the pendulum, the least we can do is to invest into observing what is happening to us.
The third option is definitely that of deciding to do better this time, now that we’ve seen how we are subject to polarity. We may claim to have a more active role, to elevate the polarity into something productive, and many consulting hours are spent heaving that weight. Unfortunately, the pendulum cares very little about that. And inevitably, we find ourselves back in its grip.
The third option is rarely that of nihilism, of deciding that the world around us is inherently bad and we are better off uncontaminated by it. The WarGames ending was beautiful, but in a polarity, it’s an option that is chosen when guided by naivete – for nihilism and naivete are close cousins.
The third option is rarely that of avoidance – even if it’s the avoidance through drastic action, like proclaiming that we’re moving to an island/starting a new business/adventure, or joining a group of like-minded, clear-sighted individuals that suspiciously smells like a cult. When we choose this path, we mustn’t be surprised how the same old chorus cuts into our apparently new song.
The presence of a polarity is a sign that our thinking is too constrained, flattened either by the burden of the allostatic load or simply the absence of experience with higher dimensional spaces. The search for the “third option” is an attempt to break out of a two-dimensional picture – into the third dimension, to see the limits of the movements along the X and Y axis and look for ways to fold our two-dimensional space into the axis Z.
Put differently, polarities are a sign that our mental modals are due for reexamination. Polarities, especially particularly vicious ones, are a blinking light on our dashboard of vertical development. This means that the third option will not be obvious and immediately seen. “Sitting with it” is a very common refrain of third-option seekers. The axis Z is hard to comprehend with a two-dimensional brain, and some serious stretching of the mind will be necessary to even catch the first glimpses of it.
Most significantly, that first glimpse or even a full realization doesn’t not necessarily bring instant victory. Orthogonality is a weird trick. Opening up a new dimension does not obsolete the previous ones – it just creates more space. Those hoping for a neat solution will be disappointed.
Instead of “solving” a polarity, we might find a whole different perspective, which may not change the situation in a dramatic way – at least not at first. We might find that we are less attached to the effects of a pendulum. We might find that we no longer suffer at the extremes, and have a tiny bit more room to move, rather than feeling helpless. We might find that the pendulum swings no longer seem as existential. And little by little, its impact on us will feel less and less intense.
