I was speaking to HR leader Kim Chaumillon and we both expressed our admiration for the work of Barry Johnson, author of Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems and And: Making a Difference by Leveraging Polarity, Paradox or Dilemma. The core of his idea is that we often lurch back and forth between two poles such as centralization and decentralization, when we need to recognize how to find a dynamic balance between the two.
Johnson does a good job of explaining the idea and has a solution for dealing with it, basically a simple way of mapping out the poles of an issue on a piece of paper with a place to list warning signs that you are getting out of balance and so on (see, for example, this article).
He wrote the book way back in 1992, and it’s quite well-known, so presumably, companies have got this all sorted out, much the same way double-entry accounting has sorted out many issues in that field. Alas, no such luck! The problems of polarities still loom large in organizations.
The limited success of what appears to be an excellent tool is a great case for us to work with in investigating how to use AI coaches to make a leap forward in management practice. We need to start by figuring out why the tool hasn’t had the success it feels like it should have, and then figure out how an AI coach might be able to help.
As to why the tool has had limited success; I’d suggest that experience has shown that polarity thinking is too difficult for most managers most of the time. Sure, just about anyone can do it with a little coaching in a one-off situation. And yes, a few people can do it any time they need to. But as a general solution it fails because, even though it’s not obvious why it’s so difficult, in fact, it is hard—at least for humans.
My suspicion is that polarity thinking essentially asks us to keep in mind two opposing ideas at once and the human brain is just not wired that way. We can use a tool like the template Johnson provides to help us think it through but it’s still too hard for polarity thinking to become a regular feature of management. As a result, companies swing between centralization and decentralization, tight control and loose control, too much communication and too little.
We can keep writing articles, giving workshops, and providing coaching on polarity thinking but we are fighting against the fundamental way humans are wired.
This leads us to consider non-human solutions; perhaps some kind of AI coach that has been designed for the purpose of thinking two things at once. If we can create such a coach, then polarity thinking might finally achieve its full potential.
What might that AI coach be like? Well, I’ve begun to sketch out four levels of AI coaches. That’s what I’ll discuss in my next article.