take it! I've heard about decision making, but what is choice making? Well, to me, choice making is just a way of using a phrase that's a bit more open. So when we use decision making, we've come to a conclusion. When we're talking about choices, we still have options. So it's sort of catching it a bit earlier in the process where we still have a number of opportunities. As a leader, why should I care about choice making? Because the most important thing you do as a leader is to make choices, small or big choices. And therefore, it's super important to have a strategy for how to make great choices. That's why I have to listen. It's so important. I have a second question for you. Yeah. If we're saying this is an era, what defines it? And when did it start? It's an era. It's an epoch. And I think it started with COVID, really. And as of then, it has just been ongoing crisis. And that has just changed the context in which we make choices. How is a paradox different than a regular business challenge? So a paradox is different in the sense that even though you make a choice, it doesn't go away. So it'll come back and present you with new types of dilemmas again and again and again. And what it really calls for is that you have an ongoing conversation with that paradox. So instead of thinking that you can make a decision and make it go away, you need to sort of invite it in and just accept that this is going to be part of your everyday life indefinitely. So we got 75 minutes. Why don't we talk about choice making in an era of paradoxes? Let's do that. How is choice making different today? There's a crisis load. Poly crisis. We spend more and more time and energy navigating crises and emerging tensions coming left, right and centre. COVID. Economic downturn. Inflation. Supply chain bottlenecks. Ukraine-Russia war. Almost like the crises mutate. Who are to solve the worthwhile problems of humans? Societal problems have become business problems. Societies are looking to ask. What big problems are we trying to solve? The public expect us to take a lead, to speak up, to propel society forward while running our business. ESG is part of every business choice we make. Business problems hold more complexity and ambiguity. They hold paradoxical tension. The problems are persistent. They do not go away. They look us in the eye again and again and call for rethinking. No dopamine rush from fixing a problem that then goes away. We need to find comfort in discomfort. Turn discomfort into ambition. Tension into creativity. We need to be integrated things. Hold opposing views and options without collapsing into one or the other. Surface the tensions that we need to address. Shape courageous conversations even when we do not know what to do. The conversation will do the work for us. Leaders cannot default into mine or yours. This or that. Either or. We must embrace the both and. And every leader has to navigate contradicting tensions, competing demands. These problems cannot be extinguished top down. Choices are made by everyone, every day. We must build the capabilities and the mindset for making great choices when faced with competing demands. Profit and planning. Diversity and inclusion. Net zero and double digit growth. Autonomy and best practice. Shareholders and stakeholders. Quarterly budgets and long term ambitions. Top down and rolled up movements. Low cost and resilience. There's been a shift. We are at a frontier and the shift holds an invitation. To embrace hybrid thinking and diversity of thought. To navigate competing demands. To build the mindset and the capabilities to make great choices in an era of paradoxes. So we went and spoke to these 30 leaders, top executives from listed companies. And we kept the conversation anonymous. Because that's the only way you can get into something that they're challenged with. What was the main point you took out of our conversation? Well, I think the first point I'll highlight is, and in every interview, this was the first 15 minutes. And that was talking about crisis load. So for the past three and a half years, ever since COVID came, one crisis has been taking over the next one. So geopolitical tensions, inflation, supply chain challenges and so forth. And that really puts leaders in a special position where they all the time are on the spot. And need to make decisions collectively together with their leadership teams. So that's definitely one part of the shift and something that's changed. They all say we spend significantly more time in the board and in the executive committee. Both time and energy. But interestingly enough, about the same time as COVID broke out, something else happened. And I think the most evident point of departure for that was at the World Economic Forum, where Edelman Trust Survey was published. And that's a survey where they go out and they ask the people on the planet, who do you expect to solve the worthwhile problems of humanity? And for the first time ever, they didn't point to policymakers or NGOs. They pointed to leaders and organizations as the entity that has the capabilities, but also the agency to fix these societal problems. And specifically, they expect CEOs to both speak up and take a lead in propelling society forward. And I think it's an interesting point because the implications of that is that suddenly societal problems have become business problems. And that just makes choice making different as of now. Yeah. And one thing I think really stood out in the interviews around that was also that the way people or the leaders experience that is that the stakeholder landscape is completely changed. So you're no longer answering just to shareholders. You're answering to a much larger community of stakeholders, the public policymakers and so forth. And you don't really choose those stakeholders yourself. They choose you. And if you don't have an opinion and if you don't cater for that, then it can really backfire on you. Up until now, it has been more or less okay to say, I'm just running a business. I'm trying to outgrow competition and I'm trying to make more profit, so profitable growth. And suddenly, the tectonic shift has meant that that's not good enough. We are expected also to propel society forward. And these issues are often a lot more value-based. They're a lot more, have much more components of ethics and moral and so forth, which is also a bit of a new dimension that businesses need to navigate. The implications is that the problems we're looking into are more complex. They hold more ambiguity. They even have paradoxical tensions, which means they're persistent. Even if we make a commitment and actions, the problem doesn't go away. It takes a few months. Then the problem will look us in the eye again and say, have you done enough? Could you do more? So it's kind of annoying. It's persistent. And there is some permanent kind of discomfort in holding problems that has that feel. That they don't go away. And I think an example that also came up several times was around navigating a DEI agenda, so diversity, equity and inclusion. So lots of companies start in one place. Maybe they start with gender. But then after they've been working on that for a while, new questions will arise. Well, what about neurodiversity? What about LGBT plus? What about age? What about international employees and so forth? So it's something that will keep returning to you. So a shift that has three components. One is crisis load. One is societal problems have become business problems. And then lastly, there are paradoxical problems and loads of tension and complexity and ambiguity. Yeah. It's a new reality. And there is that one man that has a really cool perspective on this new reality. Why don't you share with all of us who is Roger Martin? Because he's up next. Roger Martin is the leading thinker within choice making. He has a series of books on the subject. He has creating great choices, opposable mind, playing to win, a new way to think. And where he literally lays out a language for how to make great choices. So we love to play with him. And recently he had an article out in HBR around strategy in a hyperpolitical world where there is political, ethical, moral tensions involved in your choice making. And the case he's going to share with us is interesting in many ways. And one of them is that a seemingly tactical little choice somewhere down the organization suddenly had a dramatic impact. It was catastrophic for this company. And I think it's an invitation for us to think about how do we build an organization that is collectively able to make consistently great choices. So let's hear what Roger has to say on that. My name is Roger Martin and I spend much of my life thinking about thinking. Thinking about how people think and can they do that in a way that's more productive for them. And one of the things I did in the fall of 2022 is with a smart friend named Martin Reeves, wrote an article in HBR called Strategy in a Hyperpolitical World. It came out in the November, December 2022 HBR. On April 1st, 2023, four months later, Dylan Mulvaney, who's the transgender TikTok influencer, did a paid commercial for Bud Light. And in the wake of that, within a month, Bud Light sales, remember, the number one selling beer in America, 35% market share, had fallen by 25% and it's stayed low ever since. The greatest kind of destruction of a, greatest and fastest destruction of a number one brand that the world has ever seen. And so it sort of begs the question, kind of, what was going on there and how can a company think in a way that would help it avoid that? And my way of thinking comes from a metaphor, right, which is that of fault lines, right? So across the Earth's surface in various places, there are fault lines underneath the Earth. They're not a problem until sometimes they shift and become fissures. And when that happens, as with in 1989, the San Francisco to Oakland Bay Bridge, one of the longest and most heavily traveled bridges in America, was actually torn apart by an earthquake. So that a fault line underneath it that nobody knew existed, it wasn't the San Andreas Fault, which everybody knows about. That one is famous. This was the one that, the Loma Prieta fault that nobody had ever heard of. That fault essentially opened up and created 63 deaths, untold damage, and one of the, one of the San Francisco's important computer routes to be out of action for a long period of time. That's in some sense what happened to Bud Light, right? The Dylan Mulvaney commercial Instagram post, that's all it was. One Instagram post caused a fault line between the Bud Light drinkers who may sort of say, I don't, you know, I don't care about whether Bud Light is supporting a transgender, to some who said, no, I am for one reason or another offended by that. So that fault line that was hidden, right, became a fissure. And I think it's a warning to companies that they have to make sure they don't think about their market as homogenous. Well, if they're drinking Bud Light, they're kind of all similar enough. No, there are differences in those various consumers. And you've got to ask, what might open up a fissure? Now, am I saying, well, you shouldn't, you know, support transgender influencers? No, no, no, no, no. What I'm saying is you need to understand your marketplace and what you're trying to serve more broadly. And if you want to serve a broad marketplace, and this would be my message to any company in the modern hyperpolitical world, the broader your marketplace, right, the more fault lines you're going to get. If you're trying to serve, if you're trying to serve 35% of beer drinkers, you're going to have a variety of folks with a variety of attitudes and sentiments. And so if you think that in the modern world where everybody sees everything, right, you can't speak to one segment and say, oh, the other segment isn't going to hear this. You have to think as if you're speaking to everyone and asking the question, are you opening a fault line or not? And if you don't ask that question, you will do it accidentally. Was Bud Light trying to do this? I mean, after the fact, they sort of said, well, this was inevitable. It's going to happen. No, no. Losing 25% of your market share in one month is not inevitable. It was something caused by not thinking about its entire market, what were the fault lines, and how to make sure that you respect everybody in that marketplace so as to not create that kind of disaster. And that is what you have to think about for strategy in a hyper-political world. So Roger's point here is that we need to build our sensitivity as leaders to fault lines in order to actually be able to navigate this complex stakeholder landscape. Now, we wanted to get a real-life perspective on this, and therefore we invited the chief delivery officer of MASK, Henriette Halbert-Thusen, to a short conversation to explore what lands with her when listening to Roger's talk. Welcome, Henriette. You've been a leader for more than 20 years, and I know that you also just saw the Roger Martin video on creating strategy and making choices in a hyper-political world. And I'm super curious to hear what lands with you watching that. Yeah, I absolutely think that Roger is hitting on a number of key points. Let me start by saying it was amazing timing of his article in terms of all that is happening in the world and happened just after it was published in the HBR. So two thoughts I had looking at the video. I think first of all, the whole notion of strategy and strategy being more static versus more dynamic. And in my view, we need to realize that strategy today is not how we used to learn it in business schools or by consultants in the sense that I do firmly believe in the point of having a strategy and planting a flag, but I also think we need to have more flexibility in how to get there and also be comfortable that we will not know all the answers now in terms of how are we going to get there. So there is just something about the world today and how things evolve that we need to allow ourselves to be comfortable with more ambiguity and that there may be different roads to travel and we may also have to course correct as we are progressing. Yeah. And how do you experience an organization reacts to when you sort of cascade that type of ambiguity down? Because we've also taught, in a lot of organizations at least, our middle managers and employees that, you know, this is the direction, here is the five-year plan, this is exactly what's expected of you. So what happens? What's your experience? Yes. So I do think it's a challenge. Overall, I firmly believe in a lot of strategic successes in execution. So it's extremely important also that you can get an organization together around what is the direction, how do we move, how do we execute. But I do feel at times that what I have been struggling with a bit is that there is this organizational ask or desire to be super clear on what is it we're supposed to do and just, you know, this is the plan. And when you then say, I may not know the full plan, but I know these are the next things, this is what we need to do the next year, I sense that there is some discomfort. So clearly a task there, one of the things I'm working on and with, is this how to be comfortable in this about moving forward and getting the organization to be comfortable in how to move forward, even when there are a number of unknowns or things could change and so on. The last thing I want to comment on Roger's video is primarily triggered by the Bud Light example he put in there. It at least reminded me of the importance of both personal values and company values and how you need to be quite clear on what are those values. As I do think in this hyper-political world, we are asked as companies to go over and beyond. It's not enough to just follow legislation. I'm not sure whether I fully agree with Roger because you need to be also authentic. Who are you as a company? So you also really need to be careful that you are not running too much after what may different groups think. So I think, is it perhaps more about being very clear on what you think? What are your values? How do you believe in acting? And then being authentic around that. But do you see that there is a way for making values a both-and question? At least I think that where you really need the values is when there's no easy answer. Yes. Because if it's the easy ones, then we can all handle that pretty quickly. So I do think the values, if you really have this value-based leadership in a company with strong values, I think they need to guide you when decisions become really difficult and tough. And there may be more angles to look at it. And that's where you have to go through and say, okay, you can look at it this way or the other way. Maybe and hopefully there can be solutions where it's not the either-or, but indeed the both-and. And how to stand by your values also in difficult times is going to be even more important in the future. So making choices and creating strategy in a hyper -political world really calls for authentic leadership. Yeah. Cool. So I appreciated Henrietta calling out these three cornerstones around values and leadership principles and authentic leadership as key factors in navigating this hyper-political world. And I think with her talk, that sort of concludes our exploration of the shift. And now moving into, if we are to make great choices in an era of paradoxes, then what is actually the big invitation? What is it then that we need to consider, need to do? What's your point of view on that? I think Henrik Poulsen, the chairman of Carlsberg in a recent article, actually exemplified that beautifully. He went out and he said, Carlsberg needs to grow in China, but China cannot be too big for us. So he's going out publicly communicating competing demands that he is asking the organization to hold that tension and figure out what to do. And in my view, it points to the big invitation in this, that in essence is about how do we build a both-end mindset at scale in our organization so that we equip every leader to make these choices and not fall into the trap of going either or, because they are not either or. They can only be solved through a both-end mindset where we embrace opposing ideas to get to better choices. And in that way, he is pointing to the ability to turn discomfort of these competing demands and turn that discomfort into ambition. Or put differently, to leverage the tension and turn the tension into creativity. So you use this tension to come up with better choices and enable the organization to not go either or, but always both-end and hold these ideas at the same time. I think that's the big invitation to all of us. Lars, I've invited you in here because I can't think of anyone but you who speaks with more CXOs about the world and what's happening out there. And I have a question for you. All this both-end or paradox mindset, is it real? Do you hear it? I hear it all the time. I hear it in different formats. Why? Because it becomes such a complex world. How many solutions are black and white? How many situations are black and white? Basically, it's very few things that you can say you can only do it this way or that way. That is right, that is wrong. So each time you find a dilemma or an opportunity, challenge, you need to find your way through it. And those situations change all the time. And therefore, you need to find, in many circumstances, you need to consider many aspects to find the right solutions. And therefore, often you end up with thinking, at least, both ways. And practically, what are some of those competing demands that you hear about? Well, the competing demands is that if the majority of your key employees wants a really good purpose and don't really care about your bottom line, and all your owners predominantly care about your bottom line, you kind of need to go both ways. And therefore, you need to be able to combine it. And I'm amazed of how many people, individuals and companies, who actually succeed in doing that. And find ways that we would just a few years ago never would have thought possible. What are some of the most pressing competing dilemmas that the people you talk to are challenged with? The key dilemmas right now is, one, you know, what do you bring to the world? And how do you make a business out of it? How do you attract the right people and retain the right people with a purpose and with a willingness to give? If you go to Silicon Valley now, the first question you'll get, what problem in the world are you solving? Just a few years ago, you know, what's your business case? And of course, you need to consider that all the time. And you have massive constraints in terms of climate, in terms of geopolitical tensions, in terms of unknowing financial markets, how to attract employees. So you have these huge challenges that cannot be solved by yourself alone. So you need to work with others. And when you need to work with others, you need to find the right solutions and consider both ends of the equation. And in your own leadership, does this sit in you? Like, is it actually a mindset that you go into conversations with? Often it is. And it's often a situation where you want to try to understand what's going on on the other side. Yes. And what's the reverse, what could be the reverse argument of this? And look at the tensions in the world now. Look at how we geopolitically, you know, go into the same room with totally different approaches. If you only understand your own approach on this, if you only accept your own approach and your own way of doing things, you will end up losing. The other dimension to this, I think, which is important is that nobody can succeed alone. Everybody needs partnerships. All types of partnerships. You know, going to market, R&D, or private-public partnerships with different interests. If you have an ability to think in this manner, then you have a real, true opportunity of succeeding in your partnerships. Also unusual partnerships. If you cannot do that, basically you end up working with yourself. And that's, one, pretty boring. Two, for sure, unsuccessful. So if you take the square root of the three most surfaced dilemmas or issues from your conversations with leaders, what are those three? Right now, it's one, attracting and keeping the right human capital, the right talent, no matter where in the world, actually, and making sure that that's sustainable. Two is how to utilize technology of today and tomorrow in the best possible way. And three, I would say, is how to lead and navigate in a world of true constant change, where the only constant is constant change. And how do you embed that into your organization and still keep a direction? When you speak to CEOs, what are the most pressing dilemmas or paradoxes that they sit with? I think in terms of paradoxes, how do you continue to be a successful company in an owner's perspective? And how, at the same time, do you actually show and do you actually create value to the world on a continuous basis? I think that is probably the key dilemma. And then, of course, it's a dilemma when you have public opinion changing so much all the time. So you end up with a very few countries in the world where you can actually deal with, because there are all these public issues that you need to consider. And I think that is true dilemmas. You've seen it in many different ways. And your competitors might still be operating in country X, and you shouldn't, because your interests are outside of that country, because you're forced to be outside of that country. So there are constantly big dilemmas like that. Is this the end of the epoch where leaders were kind of heroic decision makers? No, I think you need to be pretty heroic these days. But you need to be heroic in the way that you accept that what was a clear-cut decision just a few months ago cannot be a clear-cut decision tomorrow. Thank you. So, Sini, you've been cooperating with Wendy Smith. She's an author of the best-selling book, Both and Thinking. She's a professor. You've been cooperating on leadership in navigating paradoxes. So why don't you tell us all what's her great gift in this space? Well, Wendy Smith is the leading thinker within paradox and leadership. And what I found so powerful about her work is that it provides us a really great language that allows us to embrace paradoxes, but also to figure out what's the mindset that can help us get to great choices when faced with paradox instead of getting paralyzed by them. I'm Wendy Smith. I am professor of management and leadership at the University of Delaware, and author of the book, Both and Thinking. Here's the big idea. We all face tensions, competing demands, opposing pressures. It's not if we face tensions, but how. In the work that I have done with my colleague and collaborator, Marianne Lewis, we've pointed to a number of different types of tensions that surface for us in our strategies, in our leadership, that surface in our personal lives. We talk about the first type of tensions as the tensions of innovation, or the challenge and tensions between today and tomorrow, the ways that we are and the ways that we become. We talk about this as a tension of time. We also talk about an obligation tension, the tensions between whether I'm focused on what I need or what is needed in a broader community or outside of myself, the tensions between in a company focusing on our bottom line, our profits, or focusing on a broader set of social missions, social challenges, as well as being able to focus on profits and planets. We talk about that kind of sustainability tension as an obligation tension or the tension of why we're doing something. We experience tensions in how we get things done, between collaborating and competing, between centralizing and decentralizing. We talk about that as a coordination tension, and we experience tensions in our identities, a tension of who am I, who am I in relation to the whole, the group or the part, the individual, the global or the local, and we talk about that as a globalization tension. And the important thing here is not which bucket do my competing demands fit into, but rather in noticing just how pervasive how these tensions are, how much these tensions emerge across our entire lives, our strategies, our personal lives, our professional lives. The problem, the challenge, is how we navigate these tensions because when these issues come to us, they come to us as a dilemma that we want to pull apart the opposing ideas, analyze them, and make a choice. We call that either or thinking because we pull apart and are choosing either one option or the other, and that kind of thinking is natural. It's actually reinforced. We business school professors tend to reinforce that thinking for leaders. Come into a class, do a case, what are the opposing options, pick which one is right, and that kind of thinking is limited at best and detrimental at worst. And in the research we've done, we've identified three vicious cycles that happen when we get into either or thinking. The first is that we pick an option and then we reinforce that option. We want to be consistent in our thinking. We surround ourselves with the kinds of competencies and skills and people that reinforce that option. And it becomes hard to see any other alternative. In our personal lives, that might look like we pick a career and we get stuck within that career in a more narrow way without seeing more broadly. Or professionally in our organizations, you know, one of the things they say is the biggest reason for organizational failure is organizational success. Because the more successful organizations are, the less that they're able to change when the environment around them shifts and changes. And so we talk about that as falling down a rabbit hole. And then when the environment shifts, we make the shift to the complete opposite of the way that we've been. We overcorrect. For organizations, this might look like shifting completely into an innovation and leaving behind all of these successful competencies and existing customers that we have had. Individually, it might mean shifting so far to the opposite side that we lose sight of what other possibilities there are. Some of us might feel this in our organizations when we feel that kind of yo-yoing between different kinds of culture or perspectives. The most pernicious, however, is the third cycle. And that's what we call trench warfare or the experience of polarization that when we pick a side, we often are in conflict with another individual group that picks an alternative side. And even though we like to suggest that we live into the win-win, right and right, oftentimes what gets triggered in those conflicts is our defensiveness. And that we reinforce our point of view, defending and rejecting the other side. We call it trench warfare because it's like digging a trench, surrounding ourselves with people that reinforce, that confirm our point of view, and then almost shooting out at the other side without really listening, engaging, respecting, humanizing the other side. And we see that kind of cycle certainly at the national level in our politics. We also see that in our interpersonal relationships when we are fighting over who's right and who's wrong. If either or thinking is problematic, then what's the alternative? And here is where I want to invite us to lean into both and thinking. And I want to start by just noticing the pattern of the challenges or dilemmas that we face, that issues show up to us as a dilemma, as a trade-off that we need to make a choice between. But if we look underlying those presenting dilemmas, what we can see, the patterns underlying those dilemmas are paradoxes, in which by paradox, we mean opposing ideas that are both in opposition to one another, but also reinforcing, synergistic. People will often ask me, what's the difference between a dilemma and a paradox? And what we find is that they aren't different issues, but rather they are different lenses that we place on the same issues. We talk about four different categories or sets of tools to navigate both and. The first is our assumptions, how we think about the problem, our cognition. The second is boundaries, the ways in which we create the scaffolding or structures around us to navigate the problems. The third is comfort or our emotions, noticing that paradoxes trigger discomfort and being able to find comfort amid that discomfort. And finally, dynamics, the practices that allow us to change, to be experimental, to lean into serendipity and possibilities along the way. The idea is that these buckets, these sets of tools, we can't just pick one of them, but that they reinforce one another. They are a system. And so we like to note that navigating paradox is paradoxical. If this idea, if both and thinking is valuable, how do we do it? And I want to just invite us into how we begin. Because what we find is that the first step to leaning into both and thinking is changing the question. is noticing how often we ask an either or question and just changing to a both and question to invite us into thinking about our issues in a whole new way. Our world is becoming more challenging, more chaotic, surfacing these paradoxes. And the invitation is for all of us to lean into, notice the paradoxes, and be able to lean into some both and thinking. Wendy sometimes uses the image of a violin because the tension is actually what makes it possible to play beautiful music. So instead of thinking about forks in the road, but like actually harvesting that creative tension to create something beautiful. But just feel the word choice. It feels, it almost embodies either or. It intuitively, I just see that fork in the road, left or right. So it's actually, you know, I need another inner image for my choices than the fork road. Now we have Roger Martin. And what he has is, he has a, in my view, awesome language methodology or a technology for how to make great choices. It's called integrative thinking. And it's just an easy to understand, intuitive way of collapsing paradoxes, really. One of the things that I work on is something I call integrative thinking. And I like to illustrate it with the Lego movie. Now the Lego movie is of course a cinematic spectacular success. It was a sleeper hit, ended up doing $468 million worldwide box office, more than anybody expected. It was awesome for the Lego brand. It was around that time that Lego became the number one toy company in revenues in the world, surpassing Hasbro and Mattel. But the Lego movie only was the success it was because of the thinking style that went into it from Jernwig Nudstorp, at that point, the CEO of Lego. Because he had two conflicting things to worry about. On one hand, was the Lego brand. If you can have a movie, especially one called The Lego Movie, if it did damage to the brand, if it mocked the brand, if it deprecated the brand in any way, it would be a disaster. Some, you know, it would have been better to have never done a movie than to have that happen. But he knew from previous experience that if you did movies internally, because they had done a full-length feature that nobody's seen that went direct to DVD, it would be, you know, just wouldn't be entertaining and boring and wouldn't reach a wide audience. What you needed was Hollywood talent who knew how to write and direct a movie, could distribute it and get it the wide appeal. However, the only Hollywood talent that would want to work on a corporate movie would be crummy talent because they'd worry about that corporation in the end having final cut and saying, oh, no, you can't see that. You can't see that. You can't see that. And so you either had to risk the brand by giving final editorial control to Hollywood talent in order to get great Hollywood talent or forego Hollywood talent and try to make a Hollywood-type movie internally. That was the either-or choice. And frankly, most CEOs in that position would have said, hey, life's tough. You have to make these hard choices. But he didn't. He said, can I do these two things simultaneously? Protect the Lego brand and get Hollywood talent. And so what he did, which was very controversial internally when he did it, is he went to Warner Brothers and gave them full final editorial control. But rather than just saying, okay, now, Hollywood, you do what you're going to do, he made a requirement of that, of giving them editorial final control, that they spend time with Lego fans. And what he believed is if these Hollywood folks, even if they may have a kind of a subversive streak, anti-corporate, whatever, they couldn't hate Lego if they knew what Lego meant to all of these Lego users, Lego fans. And so what came out of that was a movie that ended up being highly reverential to Lego. In fact, there's a couple of really kind of cool things about it that came out of their interactions. There's a scene between Emmett, right, the lead character, and Batman, who flies in in a black plane. And Emmett says, can I make one in orange? And Batman sort of harshly replies, I only work in black or sometimes very, very dark gray. And that was a joke. They put in that because of the conversations they had with Jern McNistarv, where he talked to them about, or told them the story about when he took over and was turning around Lego. He had chopped the product line. He cut out a color called Old Gray, which is a very, very dark gray color, exactly what Batman said. And he had a firestorm of protest because the Lego fans who were really serious about building used Old Gray, this very, very dark gray, not dark gray, which was not quite as dark a gray. They needed this very, very dark gray to make shadows on their castles and buildings and the like. So he got into a firestorm of protest from them. He told them that story and then they put it in as a joke in the movie. And the other thing they found out is that you must never, ever, ever glue Lego bricks into place because you need to build and rebuild and rebuild and rebuild. And so the evil villain in the picture sprayed people with glue. That was the bad thing and he did. So what ended up happening is that Lorden and Miller, the writer-directors, not only respected the Lego brand, they were absolutely reverential about it. And that's one of the things that made it a great movie. Not just a good movie, a great movie, because the writer-director infused it with so much love and respect and sort of the kind of inside story. So if I generalize from that and say, what did Jernwig Nudstorp do? He did something that I've come to call integrative thinking. So when faced with an either-or tension, a very serious either-or tension, integrative thinkers constructively face that and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other or vice versa, they come up with a creative resolution of the tension that contains elements of each. And that is the art of integrative thinking that anybody can do, but they have to have this view that I can get beyond what everybody is telling me is an either-or choice. And they will be the most successful leaders. How many minutes was that? It's, I think, Roger's methodology for integrative thinking, this methodology for how to make great choices at scale in an organization. For me, it's been one of the most helpful ways to think about a problem that I've ever come across. It's one of the things that I always use in anything I do. If I could only point to one thing, it's the one tool that I'm most thankful for having been given. I remember Roger also calling out in one of his books that of the CEOs he's worked with, the best ones insist on, always to not go with an either-or choice, but to insist on finding that silver lining where there is an integrative perspective. If you really boil it down, it's actually three steps. The first step is framing the issue as a both-and. So you acknowledge the underlying paradox in framing the issue and you invite with a both-and perspective. That's the first step. The second step is to leverage your creativity to come up with different options. So forcing yourself to come up with three or four different ways of solving the problem in a beautiful way that is better than the either-or. And then step three is testing those options using your analytical rigor and then coming up with a choice. And in my view, those three steps are the key kind of steps in making great choices. So now we have a model for how to collapse the paradox. I kind of like that thing. Three steps to happiness and problem solved and a way to both embrace the complexity but also collapse it. Well, it's interesting because I think they can take us a really far way. However, I also think that if it's a complex choice, which a lot of the choices we need to make today are, then there's also a really strong emotional component to that which is often not spoken to or even sort of brought forth when we talk about choice-making because how does it feel like to be caught or faced with a paradox? It's a dilemma that is really begging us to make a choice, right? And immediately we feel like getting out of that tension by making an either-or choice. It's super frustrating and you don't get the dopamine rush that you used to get out of fixing a classic business problem. Done deal. Let's move on. This one comes back at you. It's persistent. It's irritating. It's super irritating. And Wendy actually, she has some really cool perspectives on how can we learn to navigate this more emotional component of choice-making and use both our emotional and intuitive capabilities. So let's have a look and see what she says about that. Kierkegaard once famously said, the thinker without paradox is like a lover without feeling, a paltry mediocrity. But sometimes I wonder what kind of lover Kierkegaard was talking about because when I talk to people about their experience of paradox, what they feel is that the thinker with paradox is like a jealous, angry, frustrated lover. Because indeed, paradoxes trigger some really strong emotions, often negative emotions. And I want to explore how we navigate those emotions in order to value underlying paradoxes. As we do, I want to just start by acknowledging the strategic role of our emotions. You know, it used to be that we thought of our emotions as these problems that got in the way of our clear, rational, strategic thinking. But that, in fact, what we know from research is that our emotions are actually a critical role into and enabling our cognition, our rational thinking, our strategy. That research that has been done on people who have had brain damage, who have problems experiencing emotions, they actually have problems making some of the most basic decisions, like, what am I going to have for breakfast? And that great leaders who we think of as clear, rational, analytical thinkers often are the ones that can actually tap into their gut feeling, their emotion, to inform that rational thinking. And so, there's something really important about how we engage with and navigate our emotions. It turns out that paradoxes often trigger, as we said, negative emotions. In the 1990s, Russ Vince and Michael Broussin did a study where they brought together people in the National Health Service in the UK amid a massive organizational change. They brought together healthcare providers, doctors, nurses, and invited them to draw pictures of how they were experiencing this change, this tension that they were experiencing between what they had been doing and where they were going in the future. Three people drew pictures of the opportunity of that change, the image of moving from the ugly duckling to the beautiful swan. In contrast, 83 people drew pictures of the problems that that change was going to create, pictures of the sick patient in bed or the dark clouds overhead. And as they analyzed this, they noticed that our emotional reactions tend to focus on rejection, repression, denial, anger in response to these kinds of paradoxical tensions. Those are the kind of emotions that tend to be triggered by paradox. And they get triggered for two main reasons. The first is that paradoxes show up when we are confronting a dilemma, a trade-off, a challenge, an open question. And these questions offer up or create uncertainty for us. The paradoxes themselves feel complex, confusing, even absurd. And we want a sense of control. And so instead of enabling us to lean into them, we feel that sense of fear, that sense of anxiety that emerges as we're confronting these competing demands. paradoxes and paradoxes might show up in our interpersonal relationships when we take a side and somebody else takes another side and then we feel defensive. We might feel angry and we might feel frustrated in those conflicts and conversations. At the same time, paradoxes can also trigger a whole lot of positive emotions, of possibility, of opportunity. Famously, Einstein wrote in his diaries that when he was thinking about the theory of relativity, navigating this tension between how an object can be both in motion and at rest at the same time, he almost felt like the ground beneath him was shaking. It was unstable, leading him to feel both uncomfortable but also enabling him to feel energized by what possibilities could emerge. My colleagues call that emotional ambivalence. And my colleague, Naomi Rothman at Lehigh University, has done studies where she shows that that emotional ambivalence, that positivity and negativity together is actually strategically quite beneficial. It leads people in a negotiation to be much more effective in negotiating because the negative emotions make us look for more information while the positive emotions open us up to the possibilities that that information entails. So, if that's the case, how can we lean into these emotions so that the negative emotions don't usurp us and we can engage with both those negative and positive emotions? My colleague, Mary Ann Lewis, and I talk about this as finding comfort in the discomfort, knowing that that discomfort exists and being able to find ways to navigate amid that discomfort. comfort. And we point to several practices that allow us to find comfort in the discomfort. The first is just pausing. Allowing that space between the trigger and the response. Viktor Frankl, who was both a psychoanalyst and a Holocaust survivor, famously noted that it is in that space between trigger and response, between action and reaction that we have growth and learning. And pausing allows us to lean into, create value that space. A pause can look like being in a conversation and saying, hey, this conversation is really important but I feel my emotions rising and I need to step away for a moment. A pause can look like a leader noticing that in a meeting emotions are rising and we just need to stop or maybe even in a difficult decision or a difficult conversation saying, hey, this might be an important decision we have to make but we have to sleep on it overnight. Just pausing. The second practice is that once we've paused, learning to accept the emotions that we feel to say yes particularly to our negative emotions. Yes, I'm feeling anxiety. Yes, I'm feeling fear. Yes, I'm feeling that uncertainty of where this is, what the outcome might look like. Tara Brock is an acclaimed psychologist and Buddhist and she talks about the importance of radical acceptance that we say yes to our negative emotions because if we don't, those emotions will just come back and have a much stronger rebound effect on how we engage. And so as a leader that might look like naming the underlying fears, naming, identifying the vulnerability that we feel as leaders or that we might know that everybody around us feels. And the last is what we think of as expanding, broadening. Barbara Fredrickson has a theory of emotions that she talks about as broaden and build. And what she notices is that there is this virtuous cycle between broadening our perspective, seeing a broader set of ideas that triggers our positive emotions and that our positive emotions trigger us to look for that broader set of ideas. What that means is opening up the aperture to what we are thinking about and learning about so that we can broaden and bring in more of those positive emotions. What that might look like as a leader is articulating the collective hope, the broader set of ideas, making us see the bigger picture so that we can lean into that more expansive space. Navigating paradoxes is not easy. And one of the reasons it's not easy is because paradoxes trigger difficult emotions. But if we can lean into those emotions, if we can notice the discomfort and then find comfort in the discomfort, we can open up to the possibilities that paradoxes provide. How's that? So Wendy land on or lands on three things that we need to master as individual leaders in order to navigate comfort and discomfort, we need to remember to pause, then we need to accept the emotional tension, and then we can move on to actually expanding our perspective. And by doing that, I will develop my ability or my sensitivity to sense emerging tensions earlier, my awareness, and secondly, it will also develop my courage to shape conversations early, even though I don't know exactly where that conversation will take us, but I have the courage to shape that conversation. And I can't help thinking about the interviews we did, that it was one of the things that was mentioned was that when board members are looking at CEOs or leaders in general, they want a CEO operator mindset like safe hand on the steering wheel, but they also want a new kind of musicality, they said. And when we investigated, what is that musicality then? It is actually about the courage to shape conversations. And one of the people we actually think really embodies this combination of having a strong CEO operator mindset and that musicality is Henriette. So we invited her back for a second talk around courageous conversations and the very first thing we do in that conversation with her is actually to show her a short clip with a world-renowned poet and philosopher, David White, who we think has some of the best language around courageous conversations. A real conversation is quite merciful. By definition, you don't have to have the whole conversation at once. All you have to do is begin it and then return to it. You can fail in the conversation to begin with. You can humiliate yourself in the conversation. So there's always a sense of being broken open by a real conversation. There's only one place you can start and that's where you are now, with all your defenses and the ability to make the invitation in the midst of that. What's the conversation you don't want to have? As soon as you ask that question, you're being invited into the courageous conversation because almost by definition, the conversation you don't want to have is the courageous conversation. So what's the invitation I'm not making? What's the conversation I'm not having? Henritte, where do we need to have more courageous conversations? I think we could benefit from having it at many levels, both more in a company setting but you can say also more in a personal development or career development aspect. If we start in a company setting, one area where I'm a little bit puzzled sometimes because I don't even see it as a courageous conversation but it's this how do we have a reflection culture? So we always think about what could we have done better? What I sometimes experience is something happens, big or small, but then we can often be externalised. It's because of what everyone else did. But what is it we could have done better? And I think that reflective muscle of always saying okay, what went well? What could have improved? What did we learn? I think there's so much power in that reflection and learning culture and being open about that and building a culture where people are not afraid of blame but really focus on the learning and the perspectives and have that reflection. I don't see that as necessarily particularly courageous but I'm surprised often how some people seem to be lacking the courage to go into those conversations. But I can see it from the point of view though that if you open up that kind of conversation around what can we learn? You're also opening a bit of vulnerability around we might not have done everything perfect. To me it's almost like leaning into that courageous conversation. Also with that comes this willingness for heartbreak. You have to be willing to have your heart broken a little bit. I think David White also says you never survive a real conversation in the sense that you're always transformed after it. I think that has to do with that opening up and being willing to lean in and also have a look at yourself in what kind of role do you play in the situation. And I would say often you can say how little real conversations we are having. And I think the power sometimes it can even be just a few minutes but if there's the courage to really ask the right questions and open up then it can conversation can unfold and you may look at your colleague in a completely different way because suddenly you understand things in a different context and so on. There are clearly other areas where courageous conversations both company setting and whether it's in a career trajectory or feedback element and if I should just build on the feedback I think at least an area I'm sometimes struggling with both in terms of asking for it but also giving it can be how do we really have the courage to give also the difficult feedback. Yes. So everyone wants feedback but do we really get the right feedback and are we also sometimes picking up what feedback can come in many forms so it may also be what was not said or what was the reaction and you then may have to have the courage to actually dig deeper and say okay I sense something was not right here why and how and go into the more personal level. And that when you sometimes to me like the courageous conversation whether it takes place or not is really sort of decided in a moment within right where you decide do I lean in and give this feedback that's a constructive feedback or do I not? But often I would think courageous conversations you need to be more vulnerable and you need also to it's personal it's vulnerability and you need to open yourself up and that's out of that sometimes may come nothing but sometimes may come really good insights and reflection. I believe a lot in authentic leadership and I also believe a lot in very smart employees and I think even if you try to appear like without doubt or without false people will see through it so I think we may as well just be comfortable that they see it so you might as well lean into those conversations and talk about both the good and the bad and having that dialogue. David White says in another context where I've listened to him also that you can just ask the four people closest to you what are the conversations Henriette is not having with herself or with others and they will be able to tell immediately right so that kind of just acknowledgement that people pick up on a lot of stuff. I can say for myself one of the examples have been around the aspects of DEI so diversity and inclusion where I at least also earlier have been cautious of not involving myself because I did not want to be excluded by being one of the few women in the room perhaps. So it became a little bit this academic discussions around DEI and I think that's where in some of those discussions we need to lean in and also be true and honest about our feelings and also everyone around that table then also need to be able to accept and say okay it may not be enough anymore to say I didn't mean it like that or I had good intentions but what are actually the outcomes. Yeah and I can totally relate with that sense of it being almost feeling dangerous to stick your neck out and speak up for that particular agenda. I was driving a DEI initiative in a former position but it took me a long time to figure out whether I really wanted to say yes to that because there was so much at stake but then magic things can happen when we say yes. Yes. Listening to David and Henrietta I can't help but think of a survey that we did some time ago where we asked what are leaders yearning for longing for more of in their conversations and two things were mentioned. One is the courage to talk about what really matters instead of the things right next to it so cut through the corporate theater and talk about what we need to talk about and then the second thing was was curiosity so that conversations were not ping pong where you were just waiting for me to shut up so you can you can say your your point but it was actually there was curiosity in those conversations. And I think if if we really want to start having more courageous conversations there's two really beautiful questions where everyone can start. The first one being what's the conversation I need to stop having either with myself internally or what's the conversation we need to stop having as an organization. conversation and then secondly what's that conversation that I just know that I really need to have but that I'm not having right now and then start there. And we know what they are. We know what they are. It's interesting to think about that when we have to replace a leader one way to look at that is that that leader is not capable of shaping the conversation that the organization needs to move forward. So it's actually I think this thing about being aware of what's my next conversation that I I need to shape is actually an interesting thought. So so one of the areas where we where we tend to bundle choice making is into our strategy process. Yeah. And I think it's interesting that one of the things that also came out of these CEO and board member interviews was that that strategy conversation is broken. So the must win battle epoch is running out. You know the epoch where we do strategy as an event every five years we define five must win battles and then we cascade them down into the organization. That just doesn't work anymore. Oh it's it's it's heartbreak. I've been part of it so many times. We need the north star but we but we we need to not look at strategy as an event. So this actually holds the third and last invitation and that is about reimagining strategy to be something that's always on and thinking about strategy as more like building the capabilities broadly to make better choices. We're coming to an end and we've been exploring how is choice making different in a time of tension and crisis and and so forth and I guess what I sit with is the main conclusion is what got us here won't take us there. We we there's an invitation to upgrade both our capabilities but not least our mindset to to to to to navigate the complexity and the ambiguity we're looking into. Yeah and the three pathways into that is first of all to start embracing a both end mindset both on an individual level but also at scale in our organizations. Yeah and the second thing that every leader needs to build their ability to do is to hold and shape courageous conversations that move us forward. And lastly having the courage to reimagine how we do strategy fix that broken conversation so strategy becomes a continuous conversation always on strategy. I guess that's it. That's it. huh. Thank you. Thank you.