Transcript

Episode: Diverse Opinions for Effective Decisions | Wendy Smith

Wendy Smith:

And the core idea in this book is that tensions aren’t the problem. It’s not if we experience tensions, it’s how.

Joel Miller:

That’s Wendy Smith. She’s a professor of management at the University of Delaware’s Lerner College of Business and Economics. She’s also the co-author of a book entitled Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems.

Wendy Smith:

Tensions aren’t the problem. In fact, tensions can enable not just these detrimental, challenging conflicts, they can also enable us to be creative and generative and enabling. And so, the active side of that is what we see great leaders do is actually go out and ask for, explore, surface these tensions, even if they’re not passively bubbling up on their own.

Joel Miller:

If we’re honest, most business leaders don’t have that much trouble finding challenges and tensions in their organizations. Why? Because they work with other people. If there’s one thing other people have in common, it’s that they have different opinions about pretty much everything under the sun, and those differing opinions, it’s worth saying are an asset.

I want to quote you something from Astro Teller, and I don’t think his mom actually gave him that name when he was born, but this is worth saying, “If you want to explore things you haven’t explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.” Scholar Scott Page would call that the diversity bonus, the idea being that people have different cognitive styles, different approaches to problems, different life backgrounds that might allow them to have different assumptions than you, and those different assumptions might unlock the answers that you need. Still, those tensions are real and they can be difficult to manage. So, what’s a business leader supposed to do?

Hi, I’m Joel Miller, chief product officer at Full Focus. Today, on the Business Accelerator Podcast, we’re going to answer that very question First, we’re going to have a conversation with our founder and chairman, Michael Hyatt, along with our CEO, Megan Hyatt Miller, about a powerful tool for incorporating different opinions in your organization to get optimal outcomes. This is something that we teach our clients in the Business Accelerator program. It’s something we do ourselves at Full Focus. It’s a tool with the power to take all those voices and all the tensions that they create to come up with productive solutions. Then we’ll jump to a conversation with Wendy Smith, and we’ll talk about her book Both/And Thinking.

In most settings, when we’re presented with a paradox or a contradiction or some other kind of dilemma, we try to resolve it through either/or thinking. We try to say, “Well, this must be right, therefore that must be wrong.” But if we want to validate the opinions of our teammates, and selfishly speaking, we hire them so it behooves us to listen, we need to take seriously the ideas that they have, even when those ideas directly contradict our own. If that’s the case, we need a framework that allows us to incorporate not just one or two views, but even three, four or more, and then use those inputs to create productive answers that can move us forward. Michael and Megan are going to share just such a framework. They’re going to walk you through each step so you can actually put it into practice starting today. Let’s jump in.

Michael Hyatt:

Have you ever been at a meeting and you’re trying to solicit input and it quickly becomes a free for all? The most charismatic, dominant people do, in fact, dominate the meeting and the people that oftentimes have the wisest, best input sit quietly. We want to share with you a technique for structured brainstorming that allows you to get the feedback you need so that you can create the outcome you want. This is great for creating products. It’s great for planning promotions. It’s great for relocation projects. Whatever it may be, this is a way to get everybody on the same page and get the best feedback in a way that’s non-confrontational. It really helps you get the best input possible so you come up with the best solution.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Well, Dad, when you told me about this tool, I was really intrigued because I think we have all had experiences, where we knew that we needed to get feedback from various groups of stakeholders, but maybe we’ve tried to get everybody in a room and thought, “Okay. We’ll just brainstorm this.” And then all of a sudden, it’s either groupthink, you get a couple of the really charismatic people that start the conversation, then everybody just agrees with them. Or the most senior, or it literally is a free for all of people arguing or talking over the top of each other, or you don’t get the best feedback from the people who may be the wisest in the room, but also not extroverted, not dominant.

Consequently, you don’t have the ability to aggregate the best input possible to ultimately come up with a great answer, whether you’re trying to improve a product or a service or some part of your operations or come up with something new or whatever. You just don’t get the benefit of people’s thinking because that format of just an open brainstorming session often becomes uncontrollable, and it’s really stressful for the leader and it’s really stressful for his or her participants who are not maybe the most charismatic or dominant in the room.

Michael Hyatt:

Okay. So I learned this technique from my dear friend, John Milosevich. The two of us serve on a nonprofit board at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. The seminary is considering or contemplating a relocation, and everybody had an opinion about it. Some wanted it to move here, some wanted it to move there, some didn’t want to move at all. And so, we needed a structured way to brainstorm that and get the feedback of everyone so that we could create alignment and really be thorough in the planning process so that we didn’t get to the end of it with everybody disappointed because that we didn’t arrive at the outcome that they had hoped.

So John learned this, in fairness to the original source, from the Wharton Business School, where they came up with this technique. John used this in the construction and facilities management industry for years, where he worked with a lot of government organizations and it was very typical in that industry for people to be disappointed with the results. They’d spend millions of dollars building a building. They would get into it and they would discover that it didn’t meet their requirements because they didn’t do what we’re about to share with you. Now, this has a less than sexy name. It’s called Nominal Group Technique. I mean, doesn’t that just roll off the tongue and get you excited? No, it does not.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

It sort of sounds like a medical procedure that you don’t want to have.

Michael Hyatt:

Yeah, exactly. So it’s called Nominal Group Technique. We’re going to call it NGT for short because that’s less painful. This is just begging to be reinvented and repackaged, but the process, I promise, is solid, rock solid and it’s going to help you. So we’re going to give you the seven steps of the NGT process so that you could use it next time you need to do structured brainstorming. Okay. Megan, you ready to get started?

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Yep.

Michael Hyatt:

Step number one, frame the prompt. Here’s the great thing about this, as a leader, you don’t have to have all the great input. All you have to do is come up with a prompt for your team to do their best thinking and this is usually in the form of a question that you want answered. So for example, the seminary, the prompt was what information would you need to see in order to make the best decision possible as a fiduciary of the seminary? The question we did recently inside of our company is… And we did this with some outside groups. We did it with several inside groups, a lot of structured brainstorming, but we said, “What would need to be true in order for Business Accelerator, our coaching program to be the best business coaching program on the planet?”

So you could think of your product, your service, some problem you’re trying to solve. As the leader, the first thing you’ve got to do is come up with the right question and you’re going to be able to toss that out. We’ll get more into that moment. And then just sit back and watch the participation. It’s amazing. But the important work, the first work is coming up with that question that focuses everybody around a single conversation. I mean, we’ve been in those brainstorming sessions, where it just goes adrift or it gets off-topic. This keeps that from happening.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Part of the magic of this technique is the structure. You’re putting very firm structure in place from the very beginning, and this is going to be a question that you are going to send out to the participants well in advance, ideally a week early, maybe even more, I don’t know. But in our case, internally, we’ve sent this out about that long. This is also great for the people who are really thoughtful that may not think at their best under a lot of pressure. Some people are intimidated by sharing their thoughts in a meeting, or they just need more time to process and really contemplate the implications of something. And so, if you want to get everybody’s best thinking, not just the people that think really quickly on their feet, you want to share this early so people can noodle on it and they can prepare their answers in advance. It also avoids that groupthink that I was talking about earlier, and you really get the best thinking when people are doing it on their own and then they’re bringing that to the conversation.

Michael Hyatt:

Okay. So that’s step one, frame the prompt. Step two, assign groups.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Yeah. So when we did this recently, we’ve done this on a very large scale, and we’ve done this on a much smaller scale. We recently asked our directors, because we’re changing some ways that they’re being developed, we asked them to talk about what would have to be true for them to have an ideal partnership with the executives that they report to. And so, that was a much smaller group of people. But when we did this for our coaching program, we had seven different groups. We had every functional area. We had our coaches. We had other outside people that were involved with that. And so, we, in that case, grouped them according to team and that made a lot of sense. There’s all kinds of rationale for how you put people together in groups, but based on the constraints of time and how long we were going to have for people to share their answers, I think we probably had a maximum of maybe eight participants in the room at any one time and I think that made sense.

Michael Hyatt:

Yeah, that’s right. You want to keep it big enough to be interesting, but small enough to not be overwhelming and so that everybody has a chance to give input into the group. You don’t just want to simply involve the people that are closest to the problem. Sometimes you want to involve people that are completely unrelated to the problem, who might be seeing the problem for the first time because they might have a breakthrough idea just because they’re not so caught up in the details of it that they can’t see the forest for the trees. So don’t just bring in the experts, do bring in the experts, but don’t just bring in the experts, bring in a variety of people to represent a variety of perspectives. That’s what usually gives the right result.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Well, for example, one of the groups that we hosted related to our coaching program was our finance team. You might think to yourself, “Well, the finance team doesn’t really have a lot to do with coaching, right? I mean, they’re not actually coaching anybody.” No, but they certainly are processing all the payments. They’re handling all that backend stuff. What we learned from them is that certain ways we were doing things were making it more difficult to get the reporting that we wanted to help us have some insight that would be important for developing the program over time. And so, that’s not something that we could have ever known.

It was invisible to everybody but that team in particular. I’ll just tell you, candid moment, I almost didn’t include them because I didn’t think that they would have anything particular to contribute, because I just thought this is not an area that they’re very involved with, and boy, was I wrong because I learned so much out of that conversation and I’m sure glad that I took the advice of our CFO and went ahead and hosted that conversation because I learned a lot that is going to shape the program in the future in ways that are good for the business, but also great for our clients.

Michael Hyatt:

Okay. So that was step two, assign groups. Step three, generate ideas individually. Now, Megan, you already addressed this in a sense and you just pointed out that some people are great on their feet, they’re great in a meeting. Just the first thing that comes to their mind, they blurt out. But there are other people that are more thoughtful that have to process it. This gives an opportunity for everybody to think through their ideas. And so, I like giving people or asking people in advance of the meeting, “Come to the meeting with five to 10 ideas. Just jot them down. Nobody is going to see this except you.” But this is priming the pump so that when we begin the conversation, people don’t just stare blankly, they’ve got something to share.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

I try to start with people who are the least senior in the room or maybe the most quiet or introverted. You just want to make sure that those people, we’re going to talk about this in a second, but really feel like they have the opportunity to contribute and speak. You don’t want to start with the CEO or with an executive in the room if there’s a power differential because that can shut everybody down and make people feel nervous that their ideas aren’t good.

Michael Hyatt:

Well, that’s good and that leads us to step four, which is to share ideas without comments. So the way you’re going to do this is you’re going to go round robin. You’re going to start with one person, then you’re going to go to person number two. Let’s say you have eight people in the room. You’re going to go from one to eight. Each person shares one idea, and this is the key thing, they don’t get a chance to explain. They don’t get a chance to clarify. They don’t get a chance to comment. Nobody gets a chance to ask them a question. All this is going to come later. But in this particular process, in step four, they’re going to share the idea without comment. So once you go from one all the way around the circle to eight, then you start over. And so, people keep sharing ideas as long as they have ideas.

At any point, somebody can opt out. They can just say, “Look, I’m out of ideas.” And so, no big deal, you just go to the next person, but you keep hitting that person every time you do the round robin. So maybe they said in the last round that they were out of ideas, but something somebody else said stimulated ideas, so now they do have a fresh idea. So you basically just keep going, sharing ideas without comment till the whole thing fizzled out and you finally say, “Okay. Any other ideas?” and everybody says, “No, I’m out of ideas.” But the key thing I’ve noticed, Megan, is it’s usually when people get out of ideas that you get the obvious ideas on the table and now all of a sudden you have the opportunity to hear breakthrough ideas that you wouldn’t have heard if you just stopped with the obvious.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Yeah, I think that’s really true. Fair warning though, this is hard and here’s why it’s hard, not commenting. I mean, this is a very unconventional brainstorming style because normally, especially if we’re really energized by brainstorming, it’s like ping, ping, ping, ping. People are having ideas and jumping off the ideas. This is very structured and so you’re kind of like putting your two hands over your mouth so that you don’t comment because it takes so much self-control. You want to chase the rabbits and ask questions and dig in and share something you just thought of. That is not allowed in this and that’s part of the reason that it works, but it becomes kind of funny. I mean, we had a lot of laughs as we were trying to exercise self-control because it was so unnatural to not just jump in, but you have to trust the process. It’s part of why it works.

Michael Hyatt:

I should say too, that you’re recording the answers.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Yes.

Michael Hyatt:

So designate somebody as the recorder. You can either use a whiteboard or you could use the giant Post-it, notepad, whatever, but you want to capture all the ideas and I promise you, there’s going to be a heck of a lot more ideas than you think. You’re going to come up with a gazillion ideas. If this is a Zoom call, and by the way, I’ve done this both ways, then what we do typically is just take a Word document, share the screen, the person who’s recording it, create columns, make the print small and just record every idea as it happens. Fill up one column, go to the next column, go to the next column, go to the next column, and you end up with all of them. You’re going to need to record them because you’re going to refer to them in the next step.

Okay. So that leads us to step number five, discuss the ideas. Okay. So each idea you’re going to go through and you’re going to say, “Okay. Does anybody want to comment on this?” Okay. This is the time-consuming part of it. The other part, may be time-consuming, but you just want to encourage people that if they don’t have a comment, they don’t have to make a comment. Some people feel obligated to comment on every single one, but the original person may say, “In the light of the whole thing, I just want to cross that out. I don’t really think that’s a great idea.” Or somebody that may say, “Okay. I just need to understand the rationale behind your point. Why are you suggesting this or how would that work in practice?”

This is the place where you can get questions, more detailed explanations, agreement or disagreement, clarification, but ideas can be eliminated by unanimous consent. They can also be categorized or combined. So if you’re leading it, you might say, “Well, that idea that Sally shared is very similar to the idea that Bill shared. Could we just make those one?” So this is the process of calling, combining and all the rest.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

The thing that’s really cool is you do start to see themes. Themes emerge, and all of a sudden things start collapsing under each other and you realize, “Okay. We have a track to run on here.” One of the things that was really cool when we did this with a very, very large group and seven different groups within that group is that as we got to probably maybe finish the third one and we started with the fourth one, what you realize is you see these themes repeated and it really validates some of the conclusions that you’re starting to draw, which is so helpful as you’re ultimately working toward a solution. So, obviously, this is time-consuming, particularly this last step that’s about discussion because in our sessions we had sometimes a hundred different ideas that were shared in a session. So how long should people set aside for going through this process?

Michael Hyatt:

Well, whatever time you have, believe me, you can fill it. So you could do the first part of this down through step four in, say, an hour. You could come back for a second part of the meeting on another day and maybe do that in another hour. You could spend an entire day on this. It really depends on the scope of the project, how important it is to your organization and what the risks and the stakes are. So I think you just have to allow as much time as necessary in order to get the outcome and where people feel heard and where you have some consensus and you’re able to create the alignment that you need.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

What’s amazing about this in my experience of doing this with our team, when you get to the part where as the business owner or your executive team or some smaller group of stakeholders who are tasked with making the decision, coming up with a solution, when you go to present that to your team, the kind of alignment that you can get because people have had the opportunity to speak into the process, even if you’ve come to a conclusion that they don’t agree with is so much greater when they’ve been heard, when they’ve had the opportunity to use their voice than if you were just to make a decision without getting their input at all. So you don’t want to use this for everything, but when you’re doing big change management, this can be a great tool for that.

Michael Hyatt:

One of the things I learned from John Milosevich in addition to the NGT technique is he said, and I think this is so true and it so resonates with my own experience, people own what they help create, and that’s why the alignment goes so much faster because there’s ownership. They’ve participated. They’ve helped create this thing, and it’s easier for them to step in and begin implemented because they help create it, which leads us to step number six, which is vote to prioritize ideas. So not every idea is of the same level or weighs the same as every other idea, but there’s a prioritization within them. Again, this is where you want to establish ownership by giving people an opportunity to vote. So how did you do that, Megan, in the groups you led?

Megan Hyatt Miller:

So, basically, we let each of the stakeholder groups vote on what they thought were the biggest priorities on those lists. Remember, there’s a hundred things sometimes and probably never less than 50 in our smallest groups. Then the executive team was able to take those list of cold items and vote on what we would take action on. You know what, it was pretty easy. It was pretty clear at that point because we had been through such a thorough process up until the point of decision making that the decision was the easiest part, which sometimes is not the case. I think that is the value of just giving yourself enough time and enough diversity in the input that you’re getting that you really have the context you need to make a great decision.

Michael Hyatt:

Yeah. In a sense, the consensus sort of bubbles up.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Right.

Michael Hyatt:

It became very clear in that process and I was part of that process, what the top priorities should be. Obviously, if it’s a business with limited resources, you can’t just take every suggestion or every bit of feedback and address it and not anybody would expect you to because you’re just brainstorming. Again, not every idea has the same value and that’s where it’s good to get the consensus on what are the issues that need to be addressed or need to be included in the proposal so that we get the best outcome that we want.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Dad, I don’t think we said this at the beginning, but one of the things that’s important to do when you’re opening up a session like this, because most people will have never participated in a process like this, is to let them know that the ideas that are shared on the board, there’s no commitment on the part of whoever the leadership team is to follow through on every one of those, because some people could come in and think maybe, “Gosh, I shared my ideas with you. I shared what I thought should be priorities and then you didn’t do anything with them.” In reality, that’s not the commitment. The commitment is that we are giving you a place to share your best thinking and we’ll see what the consensus emerges as over time, but there should not be an expectation on the part of the participants that every idea that shared is acted on. I mean, in our case, you’re talking about 700 ideas and we probably boiled it down to five or six primary areas of focus that we took action on.

Michael Hyatt:

Okay. That leads us to the final step, step seven, decide and execute. So this is where it’s time for a final decision, time for the implementation. Again, after sometimes, there may be more research that’s required. There may be more thorough vetting that’s required. There may be pieces of information that you don’t yet have, but at some point you got to pull the trigger and begin to implement. But if you’ve done this right, then the implementation is going to go a lot faster and a lot easier. This is one of those things where it feels like you have to go slow in order to go fast.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Yeah. In our case, we actually put together a whole presentation for our team and this is the follow-up to all these conversations that have happened. “Hey, here are the decisions that we made. Here is the plan going forward.” They were able to see their fingerprints all over that, even if we didn’t necessarily do exactly what they recommended. They could see how we got to the point of making the decisions that we made, which again, facilitated alignment in a very, very powerful way.

Michael Hyatt:

Well, guys, there you have it. That’s the Nominal Group Technique. It’s deceptively simple, but this is actually easier to do than it is to explain. Once you experience this, I’m confident this will be the method that you use for brainstorming in your organization going forward.

Megan Hyatt Miller:

Well, this is absolutely something that I will come back to over and over again. I think it’s always a challenge as a CEO or a business owner or a leader to try to get all the data and the input you need to make really good decisions. The bigger your team grows, the more challenging that is. So I think this is a great technique. It’s a little time-consuming on the front end, but it makes the alignment so much faster on the backend and it lasts because people remember what it feels like to be heard and respected and honored regardless of their personality or their seniority in the organization or even which department they’re in. And so, I think the kind of alignment that you get when you go through this process is not something that there’s a shortcut to and I think it’s well worth the time.

Joel Miller:

When they were coming up with the name Nominal Group Technique, nobody called me to ask me what I thought, which honestly was a pity. However, while I might change the name to something a little bit more catchy, I wouldn’t change the process. Why? Because I’ve seen it work too well in our own business and also with our clients. Here’s what I know for sure. Nominal Group Technique gives you a track to run on, to take all those various viewpoints, the diverse opinions, the kinds of voices that create real tension in an organization and help turn it into, transform it into a productive outcome. If you’re looking for little help in using the Nominal Group Technique for yourself, we’ve added a helpful link in the show notes. After the break, we’ll step back and explore how either/or thinking hinders your organization’s growth and more importantly what you can do to address it.

So far, we’ve been talking about an operational framework for handling diverse viewpoints. Now it’s time to step back and get the mental framework required to not only help you run a meeting like a Nominal Group Technique meeting, but also more generally throughout your business. The reality is while Nominal Group Technique provides a path to walk, most of the challenges that come to us in business come from all directions. There is no path. There’s only a general approach we might take.

In order to manage that kind of diversity of opinion, we need to have a different mindset entirely. Instead of black and white thinking, we need grayscale thinking to help us get there. I decided to have a chat with Wendy Smith. I introduced her at the top of the show, but I want to remind you that she’s the co-author of a book called Both/And Thinking. When we’re tempted to deal with a conflict by adopting either/or thinking, Wendy is there to remind us that not only is that not very fruitful, there’s also a much better way.

Describe a little bit more about the either/or versus both/and.

Wendy Smith:

The either/or is our typical approach, and so it’ll sound familiar. We’re faced with a dilemma, “What should I have for breakfast?” We go through the pro-con list there. Well, I could go for a really healthy green smoothie or I could have a sugary croissant, chocolate croissant. And so, we go through the pro-con list of which one should I choose and then we make a choice. We do that not just with our breakfast decisions, we do that with how should I navigate my life and my life and career decisions? In my own life, I really grappled with, do I become an academic where I study ideas or do I become a practitioner where I engage with ideas, I do something with these ideas and these leadership concepts?

We do that in our businesses. When we talk to leaders, it’s, “Do I go deep or broad? Do I open into a new category or do I double down on my existing business?” At all these decisions where they are confronted by an or, that’s our traditional way of thinking about something, and the traditional way that we want to decide that is, again, a pro-con list, make a choice. That is comfortable to us. It’s natural to us. What we argue is that it is limited at best and detrimental at worst.

Joel Miller:

Compare that then with the both/and approach.

Wendy Smith:

So both/and starts with changing the question. First, it starts with this realization that either/or can be limiting. Again, it can be limiting because we force ourselves into this oppositional point of view. We pick one side, then what ends up happening is that we usually get stuck on that one side. We talk about it as a rabbit hole. I become an academic. I’m all about studying ideas. I can’t figure out how to implement them, or people, we are focused on one product and then we don’t want to shift to thinking about the other and alternative products. We’re a for-profit, so we have to worry about our bottom line and we don’t think about the social mission and social good and that’s what for the non-profits. We get stuck down. We talk about it’s getting stuck down a rabbit hole where we can’t shift.

This is the classic challenge of innovation. Companies that have a product and they get the whole structures, incentive systems, relationship skills, reinforce that product and then they can’t shift and change to a new product. So, part of the problem of either/or thinking is that we get stuck down a rabbit hole. Then when we shift, we radically shift to the other side. We talk about that as overcorrecting. We throw out the baby with the bath water. The other problem with either/or thinking is that it becomes problematic when you’re in a group, and this happens all the time, where within a group, one side picks one point of view, another side picks another point of view, and then you’re in conflict with each other.

So maybe in your organization, you have the R&D innovative product development people, who are constantly battling against the finance people, who want to focus on short term and costs where the R&D people are thinking about long-term revenues and there’s that conflict about how to navigate or whatever else it might be. And so, we get into these kind of like, “I’m right. You’re wrong,” win-lose situation. So that’s the problem. That’s why either/or is limiting to us. Both/anding starts with changing the question to say, “What’s possible if I can accommodate these competing demands? If we can both, as you said for the organization, be really successful at work and achieve balance and real, our life goals, our broader life goals, what would that look like? How can we accommodate both? How can IBM accommodate both its existing world and existing product and innovate at the same time?” That’s the start of shifting to both/anding.

Joel Miller:

What’s great about that, both/anding, is you can see just in the way you frame the question, it automatically triggers imagination. It automatically triggers creativity because now you have to do some actual work of figuring out how those two things might coexist and that is automatically ideational. It is going to drive thinking.

Wendy Smith:

That’s right. Our colleague, Ella Miron-Spektor, with her colleagues did a study where they brought people into the lab and they said to them, “The challenge of creativity is the tension between creating something that’s really novel, but novel could be really out there and completely not useful, but also really useful.” You want something that actually people can put into it, but novelty and usefulness can be in conflict with each other. So she had these groups in the lab either notice the competing the tensions between novelty and usefulness, or she had a group that changed the question and said, “Look, novelty and usefulness can be in competition, but they can also reinforce one another. How can you do both at the same time and create new products and have them create things as a result?” The group where she invited them to just shift the question and say, “How can you enable both novelty and usefulness?” created so much more creative outcomes as a result.

So the experiment shows just how very basic it is, where changing the question does open up this whole possibility space. It invites us. I love the word ideational. It invites us to brainstorm new possibilities. My co-author, Marianne Lewis, is the dean of her business school. All of the senior administrators at the university started reading the book and they were grappling with attention that I think is coming up more increasingly and something that we’re grappling with, which is the issues of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Sometimes DEI gets pitted as inclusion versus excellence as if access and inclusion is going to be a trade off with excellence. In one of the meetings with the senior leaders, one of the senior leaders looked at it and said, “Access versus excellence, wait, how can we enable a both/and here?” By just asking that question, all of a sudden all of the senior leaders started brainstorming new possibilities into what else, other ways that they could think about that relationship.

Joel Miller:

One of the challenges that you address in dealing with these paradoxes, especially you can imagine these nested and nodded paradoxes that are so complicated is the sense of scarcity with which people approach them. I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about moving into a more abundance mindset. How does that happen? How can that happen?

Wendy Smith:

One of the reasons we go to either/or is because we think that resources are zero-sum, that they’re limited. And so, either you get them or I get them. And so, then the only way to go is to fight over which one of us gets those resources. This is at the heart of any negotiation and it’s the right-wrong, win-lose paradigm. If we’re going to move to both/and thinking we have to stop thinking that either you get resources or I get resources. In fact, the negotiations folks will remind us that better negotiations start off with how can we expand the pie before we split it up? How can we rethink the value of our resources and the way that we use them so that it doesn’t feel like such a zero-sum game, where either you win and I lose or I win and you lose?

Again, the win-lose mentality is natural. It’s evolutionary. We want to make sure we have enough resources, but it’s also a trigger to lead us into more either/or thinking and less creativity. It’s a creative question to ask, how can we expand the value of these resources? It’s everything from, look, we only have 24 hours in a day, but not everybody uses those 24 hours as effectively as others. If we thought about where is our energy and where are the ways that we can get stuff done more effectively, that’s how we value those hours for some people more effectively than others. Or we think about a salary negotiation, there’s only so many dollars that we’re going to spend. Well, is salary and the amount of money the only thing that a employee wants when they come into the organization? No, there’s a variety of things. So how can you expand what’s really at stake, what people really value and move beyond just the focus on the win-lose of the resource in order to expand that conversation and get more out of the value that you have?

Joel Miller:

Dealing with these contradictions spark a lot of emotions in people. One of the things that stood out in the book was the conversation around being, for instance, at a funeral. There’s a sweetness to that. There’s a joy possibly in that, but of course, there’s this terrible loss in that. Wedding is the same thing. You use the term bittersweet to describe that and it’s amazing that we actually have a term in our language that’s right there, very handy that recognizes that paradoxes, particularly very heightened emotional paradoxes are real and we have access to them all the time. One paradox like that that also feels very emotional that we don’t have a great word for is that experience of being vulnerable and open in a meeting, where you fear the change that’s being discussed and yet you trust your colleagues and you’re willing to go along with it, but there’s a lot of those kinds of things and we have no language for this.

Wendy Smith:

I think there’s two big ideas in what you’re saying, and so maybe I’ll start with one and see if I get to both of them. The first big idea is that our emotional tapestry is often quite varied and we tend to think that we should either be positive or negative and that things are either positive experiences and positive emotions or negative experience. Most of the time, it’s actually quite varied, where we experience part of it is positive or part and part of it is negative, or those things that are negative actually have a positive implication to them. My colleague, Naomi Rothman, calls this emotional ambivalence. Several colleagues of mine call it emotional ambivalence. Naomi has done some significant research in showing how when we lean into our emotional ambivalence, we notice that the negative emotions are coming alongside the positive ones.

It’s actually a space that allows us to be more productive, more creative, because on one hand, we can notice how our negative emotions, our sadness or our concern or our fears are creating conditions that spark questions for us. And then our positive emotions will come in to enable us to answer those questions more effectively. She finds that it’s a more effective space in negotiations because our negotiating partners trust us more when we are both demonstrating some level of concern and uncertainty because that is more authentic and being more open and trustworthy. And so, it’s both. And so, this experience of emotional ambivalence is actually something that we are benefited from if we notice and if we can value.

One of my colleagues, Kim Cameron, who is at the University of Michigan, wrote a piece for an anthology that we edited on paradox. He studies paradox. He also studies positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship and looked at this notion of positivity, right? We all want to be in this positive space. As he says in the piece, he quotes a proverb that says, “All sunshine makes a desert.” And so, noticing that there is both positive and negative emotions is quite useful. I’ll just maybe say one more thing about that, because I think there’s another piece about that, which is sometimes our negative emotions, our discomfort, our fear, our anxiety can lead us to places where we’re not as open and vulnerable, can lead us to limiting ourselves.

One of the things that we say in the book that we talk about in terms of managing paradox is that they’re really uncomfortable. They can be uncomfortable. There’s a lot of uncertainty that comes with trying to live into these tug of wars or that then trying to be dynamic in our responses. We feel uncomfortable, for example, when we have picked a side and we’re talking to somebody else who has a different point of view than us. And so, just that experience of sitting across the table from someone with a different political point of view, particularly when it’s Thanksgiving and it’s a member of your family and you’re both spouting your points of view very vociferously, we feel that discomfort when we have competing ideas and there’s uncertainty. Just going back to the pandemic, when we started the pandemic and there was so much uncertainty and we wanted clear answers. We wanted to control. Paradox is about leaving things open. It’s about being open to the other possibilities.

So there’s all these uncomfortable emotions that could halt us from living into the both/and. Here, we say it’s really important to find comfort in the discomfort. What we mean by that is that we don’t dismiss the discomfort. We don’t disregard it. We don’t pretend it doesn’t exist and just push forward with mind over matter, we’re really positive, that what we do is we accept, we recognize, we acknowledge, we honor the fear, the anxiety, the discomfort, the jealousy, the whatever else it might be, that whatever else we’re feeling and we accept it and recognize it and yet move forward despite it. We find ways to move forward into the courage of both/and even when it feels uncomfortable and fearful.

Joel Miller:

Vision is a key focus for us at Full Focus. It’s something we coach our clients on. It’s an essential ingredient to success. Why? Because without the ability to chart a course to a better, more attractive future than your current present, you’ll never make any progress at all. More specifically, in a business context, you can’t organize a team to go pursue something together. You can’t even have any direction to your own activity as the leader. So vision is essential in that regard, and that got me thinking as I was talking to Wendy. I wondered how does vision enable us to manage these sorts of paradoxes, these sorts of tensions.

Wendy Smith:

When we talked to Paul Polman at Unilever, he said the first and most important thing that he did when he stepped into the company was to think about what’s their higher purpose, what’s their collective, overarching, long-term vision, higher purpose. And so, higher purpose almost sounds… has some real strong connotations to it. He said that for the reasons that Michael Hyatt says, that it is unifying. It rallies everybody together. It’s motivating and it’s incredibly important for us to be able to navigate these competing demands because it’s in the long term, looking out to the horizon in the long term, in the overarching that we can see the integration of competing demands. It’s in the short term, where they get messy and we get into conflict, right?

And so, oftentimes when you’re thinking about conflict between two people, between a married couple, between two partners in a business or between two groups, one way of navigating that tension is to start and remind yourself what are we collectively trying to accomplish here? Because we’re collectively trying to get to the same place. We might just have different strategies of getting there, different perspectives on how to do it, or we might have different things that are important to us in the moment, but it’s that collective goal that reminds us that we’re on the same page, we just needs to have figure out how to accommodate our competing ideas within that integrative overarching vision, and that vision, that long-term vision helps us to see how we both belong into this space.

Metaphorically, I like to think about it as we’re standing on a boat in choppy waters and the advice to calm ourselves down in that moment is to look to the horizon because it’s at the horizon where we can see that calm. Well, it’s the same thing. It’s looking out to the long-term horizon that helps calm us in the moment and remind us that we’re on the same page and how can we listen to one another, engage in a conversation where we can bring to together these opposing ideas. It’s the same thing in our individual lives, right? We have these competing questions of what do I do with my career, or how do I navigate work-life balance?

It’s in the moment that these dilemmas pop up that we have to make decisions. Am I going to spend tonight spending more time at work or being home for my family’s dinner? It’s in the long term that we can see how both are productive and successful and engaging work enables us to have a more productive family life and life outside of work and how being grounded in our life outside of work allows us to show up more effectively at work. So looking out to that longer term horizon helps us to see the value of why and how to bring together these competing demands in a both/and approach.

Joel Miller:

Wendy Smith, thanks for being with us.

Wendy Smith:

Well, thanks so much. This is really fun.

Joel Miller:

Paradoxes are unavoidable. This idea that there are competing opinions, that there are competing views that we have to somehow manage is just something that we can’t get away from and we shouldn’t want to. The reality is that competing viewpoints enable us to both challenge our own assumptions and push our own thinking to develop new and better ideas, new and better responses to the challenges that we face. Full Focus itself is actually founded on a paradox. We like to say that we help business owners win at work and succeed at life, and those two things are intention. That’s a paradox.

Michael and Megan talk about this in their book, Win at Work and Succeed at Life. Business owners can strive in their professional life to achieve great things, but do it at the expense of their family. In order to not cut their family short, they might pump the ambition break a bit and then not realize their full potential, or you could take a third way, one that incorporates both winning at work and succeeding at life, something that encompasses both ends of the dilemma, because the truth is that real generative creative thinking about solving that problem will only come if we’re committed to both sides of the paradox. When we choose to both win at work and succeed at life, we’ll come up with better, more empowering ideas to do it, and that’s true honestly for pretty much every other problem you face in business.

That’s a wrap for this episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast. These tensions, specifically this fundamental paradox of winning at work and succeeding in life, it’s literally what we coach our Business Accelerator clients on every day. That’s what the program is basically about. We help successful, but overwhelm small business owners like you scale yourself and your business so you can do what? Well, here’s the paradox, win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win. And because we can embrace that paradox, we can make progress in both spheres of our life.

If that sounds good to you, you can find out more at www.businessaccelerator.com. Whenever someone sends me a podcast, I always get a little nervous. If I’m honest, I’m anxious. I look at how long it is and I think, “Do I really want to spend my time on this, this suggestion that someone has given me?” Here’s another paradox for you, you really can suggest the podcast and it really can be valuable to anyone listening. So please, go ahead and share this show with someone you think might benefit, especially someone else in your business. And that’s it. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with another conversation to accelerate your business.