and the 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 face tensions. 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, 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 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 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-to-weighbor. We call that either-to-weighbor. 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-or thinking. 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, 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, 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 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. 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 be, 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, 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.