When I first started, people were like, “Don’t say the word paradox… don’t say it because they won’t get it.” And now people are like, “Oh my goodness, I need this.”
When it’s a case of scarce resources – as it always seems to be, right? – our default thinking is Either/Or. Either I spend time on this project, or I prioritise my family. Either I work on delivering today’s priorities, or I focus on planning for tomorrow.
But Professor Wendy Smith would like you to consider a different way of thinking: Both/And. Life is essentially paradoxical, and she argues that the best way to navigate all the competing demands on our time successfully is to understand their interdependence. In an increasingly complex world, navigating tensions creatively can lead to better, more inclusive solutions – and this applies to personal life just as much as professional life.
She also shares the challenges of writing for a natural speaker and extrovert, the hacks she’s developed for herself, and why books are ‘rocky splashy’. (If you were worried that all this research-based, insightful stuff was going to be terribly academic, I hope you’re now reassured.)
Both/And Thinking site: https://bothandthinking.net/
Wendy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendykimsmith/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: www.proposalchallenge.com
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Wendy K. Smith, who is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and Academic Director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the University of Delaware’s Lerner College of Business and Economics.
And she’s the author, with Marianne W. Lewis, of Both /And Thinking: Embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems.
So first of all, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here, Wendy.
Wendy Smith: It’s great to be here, Alison.
Alison Jones: It’s so cool to have you here. Now, Wendy and I met at the Association for Manufacturing Excellence conference last month in Atlanta, such a terrific conference. And I was just, I loved your talk so much there about the idea of embracing paradox and why it’s so important for us: I have to have that woman on the show, now! Thank you for being up for that.
Wendy Smith: My pleasure, you know, Alison, anybody who writes a business book, to be on the Extraordinary Business Book Podcast is a real privilege.
Alison Jones: I mean, there’s no higher honour. You’re quite right. Yes.
Well, it’s brilliant to have you here and I want to hear a little bit about the genesis of this book. I’m always fascinated, you know, what was the first sort of twinkle in the eye that brought you to this point?
Wendy Smith: Yes, really, it’s a story that goes pretty far back. Both my co-author, Marianne Lewis, and I have been working together studying this idea of paradox of living in the both and for about 20, 25 years. For me, it goes back to my own career decisions, life decisions, academic decisions that all felt like these tug of war of either ors and led to this place of feeling like I was getting nowhere.
And so when I found paradox as an idea that informed my doctoral work, my PhD dissertation when I was at Harvard, it not only spoke to what I was studying for my dissertation, which was at that time how business leaders innovation, and navigate the tension between today and tomorrow, it also was really helpful in how I was thinking about my own tug of wars.
Alison Jones: And tug of wars domestically as well as professionally, I’m guessing.
Wendy Smith: Absolutely.
One of my favorite talks was when I was giving a talk at a large tech company and someone came up to me and said, Oh…. and I was talking about how they could innovate and think about the tension between today and tomorrow, and they came up to me and said, Oh, Wendy. You might have just helped me with my ex-wife, so, you know, there it is.
There’s tons of examples in the book of how I have navigated tensions with my husband, with my children, parenting, partnering, it’s all there.
Alison Jones: And so talk us through the idea of paradox, because I so recognize that sort of either or.
Oh, well, if I have to do this, I can’t do that. And we get into this sort of reductionist mindset and it’s not helpful. How does paradox help us?
Wendy Smith: It is not helpful. I think the first thing is exactly to note what you are saying, which is that we all experience tensions. And by tensions, it is indeed that tug of war of, I’ve got these alternative options and I feel like I’m being pulled an alternative places around them.
And, you know, I like to say they show up in our daily lives, right? So do I spend the next hour running, for example, or finishing and working on my book? Like, I have an hour. Where do I spend my time? How do I think about that?
But they also show up in our strategic thinking. How am I going to focus on my career? Or how as a leader am I going to focus my organization?
They’re showing up now in our politics.
So it starts with these tensions. Noticing them, feeling them, recognizing that they’re all over the place. We like to say it’s not if we experience tensions, but how. And that our primary go to is to pull them apart as an either or.
Indeed, a reductionist experience. We argue that that is limited at best and detrimental at worst. And we can unpack that a little bit. And paradox is an alternative paradigm for thinking about our tensions.
Alison Jones: Well, you’re going to have to tell us more. What do you mean by that?
Wendy Smith: Yes. So I just want to unpack the word paradox for a minute.
When I give talks, I will often ask, like, is this a good word for people? Is it a bad word for people? What do people think?
And it’s a bit of a Rorschach test. So what we mean, we are drawing on a concept that’s like 2,500 years old. I mean, we’re talking, we’re going back to Greek philosophy, Heraclitus. We’re going back to, like, Confucianism, Taoism, something is being and not being.
The idea is that we live in a world where there are these opposing pressures and tensions. We see them as oppositional and competing. So, today and tomorrow, self and other, love and hate, you know, you name the, collaborate and compete.
But they’re not only in competition with one another. Here’s the ah ha, is that if we look at their relationship, they also inform, define, are synergistic, interdependent is the word we use. So if we think about the relationship between today and tomorrow, the more energized we are for today, the more resources we have for tomorrow, the more that we think about and enable what’s possible for tomorrow, the more it energizes today, they reinforce each other.
I mean, self and others, so too, you know, particularly for people that, the more that we feel like our self is, that we have given to ourselves and we’ve taken care of ourselves, the more resources we have to take care of the other. The more that we give to others and enable others, the more that it feels good to ourselves.
But in the moment, so they are interdependent, but in the moment, it really feels like a tension of how to spend your time and your energy.
Alison Jones: It comes down those scarce resources, doesn’t it?
Wendy Smith: It kind of, well, limited resources, limited time, limited space, that is certainly one of the reasons that we feel like these are, you know, like we have to make a choice between them. That’s one of the things that leads to that choice.
I think the invitation is if we can reframe it and see that interdependence, we can apply and think about a different way of making that decision or being more creative and expansive in our approaches.
Alison Jones: The both and, rather than the either or, which is a beautiful formulation of it. And you say in the book, and I actually snorted tea over my keyboard when I was reading this, you said that the research is the ‘me search’, or in your case, the ‘we search’, and it’s that sense that this comes out of something that you need to learn as human beings too.
Wendy Smith: Yes, I mean, Alison, I’ll tell you, I was an undergrad at Yale University. When I was there, I wanted very much to make a difference in the world. I wanted to do something that was profound and purposeful. I wanted something that was clear and certain. So, I glommed on to this idea that I should be a doctor, and in fact I had a friend whose dad was a doctor, he brought me into the ER, he showed me what it was like, you know, so I was going to go ahead and be a doctor, but at the same time I also had all these background and competency with leadership and activism, but those things were uncertain. And there was no clear path to those things and I had no idea what came next with them. And I could not understand directly how they were just as directly purposeful.
And I remember, like, on a cold, wintry day in New Haven, biking up to the top, if anyone’s been to New Haven, to this East Rock, and sitting there and thinking, Oh my God, should I be a doctor, or should I do this thing that I don’t really know what it is, called a leader of some sort? Like, please, God, give me a sign! What should I do?
And, you know, I got no sign. There was no sign coming down from the heavens to help me with my career decision. But that feeling of a tug of war, indeed, was what I was trying to adjudicate, and truly, I will say that I feel like the work that I have been able to do in academia has been less certain, but created a more certain path over time, but it feels purposefully energizing in a way that also allows me to engage with leadership, like I’m allowed to bring those things together over time, but in the moment, it certainly didn’t feel that way.
And that was what I was trying to figure out, was how to live with that discomfort, but also be more open to possibilities.
Alison Jones: And that’s, it’s so interesting that, I mean, we’ve touched on the fact that this is ancient, that idea about dichotomy, about tension is ancient. Years, you know, a lifetime ago, you were grappling with exactly this stuff. Do you think there’s something modern about it as well? And the VUCA world that we’re living in has really, you can’t not deal with this stuff now.
I mean, maybe you never could, but it just seems more and more timely.
Wendy Smith: I mean Alison, if I can be a little bit grandiose, I think we’re in a paradox revolution. Maybe a paradox paradigm shift, and I think, so what I like to say is that these are ancient ideas, in fact you know, I say 2,500 years, I spent a semester in Australia on sabbatical, and my aboriginal indigenous colleagues were like, this interdependent, holistic approach, this isn’t just 2,500 years old, this is like 60,000 years old, we get this ecological interdependence in this ancient wisdom tradition. So like, ancient traditions, and at the same time, what I think has happened, what I think we are seeing is that this idea of bringing together and seeing competing demands in relationship with one another and needing to lean into them, this has bubbled up in other disciplines.
So physics and quantum physics is all about paradoxical relationship between something is there and not there. It’s a wave and a particle at the same time. We see this in psychoanalysis, you know, Jungian psychology, you’re the self and the shadow self at the same time. You’re expansive and restrictive.
And it’s really, I think you are so right, it’s only in the last 20 years that in the world of sociology and relationships and in the world of organizations and leaderships and business, that that word paradox is something that people are like, Oh Yes, I need this. In fact, to your point, when I first started, people were like, don’t say the word paradox to, you know, in academia, to those real people out there. Like, don’t say it because they won’t get it.
And now people are like, oh my goodness, I need this. And in fact, I’m pretty sure we’re on the cusp of a revolution of like, effective leadership going forward. I think we’re going to need the competency of being able to live into the both and to deal with the kinds of complexities that we experience in our world today.
Alison Jones: That’s just a lovely word, when you talk about the ‘competency’ of it, ‘capability’ is the other one that… It’s essential for leaders to be able to avoid that sense of reductionism, isn’t it, and you make such a great point that it’s actually oddly hard to do it for ourselves.
Like we’re not bad at helping other people see different, more integrated possibilities for them. Why do we find it so hard for ourselves? And does that apply in business too?
Wendy Smith: Yes, absolutely. I remember when I first started doing workshops around this and I would ask people, tell me your tension and people would immediately frame it as a both and, and I would invite people to notice, I mean, sorry, frame it as an either or I would invite people to notice how they framed it as an either or, and then invite them to notice the both and, and they could notice the either or, and they saw how they framed it that way, but they couldn’t get to the both and.
And I finally realized that I would have to pair people up and say, help somebody else get to the both and. Because we get so stuck.
One of the things we do psychologically is we want closure. We want clarity. We want consistency. Those are really reinforcing psychological principles. So what we do is when we feel that tug of war, we pick a side, and then we reinforce and have consistency on those sides that we pick and we sort of defend against it. We defend that side.
And it’s hard for us to then pull up and see the other opposite side and to experience that. And so if people, you know, are thinking about this and, Oh, no, not me. I mean, I’m calling in from the US. We just had our election. People have a real point of view about one side or the other on the election.
If people could even imagine assuming that the other side had some points that are right and legitimate, like it’s really hard for people to get there. That’s just one place where we could just see how quickly we get entrenched in a point of view.
Alison Jones: It’s almost like you’re betraying your own beliefs by accommodating, giving headspace to somebody else’s.,
Yes, such a great way of putting it.
So how does, I mean, what does that look like for a leader? What is it? Because leaders are the people who are supposed to have the answers right? And they, more than anybody, have got that leaning perhaps towards certainty because they want to impart certainty. They want to give their people confidence. That’s what leadership’s about, right? So how do you lean into that uncertainty as a leader without losing the confidence of your people?
Wendy Smith: Yes, well, I think I would say two things to that, first is that if people walk away from this podcast, the hope that I have is that they, you know, they do two things first of all, which is one, to notice how often questions are framed to us and we frame, your tensions or issues are framed to us and we frame them as an either or. Just notice that.
Number two, just rephrase the question. How can we accommodate the both and? Because that opens up so much more creativity. And then number three, to your question about leaders, what we find is that the more that leaders can identify an overarching vision, some aspirational vision, and articulate that we’ve got to lean into the both and within that.
Just by way of brief example, in our book, we interview and talk to Paul Polman, who is the CEO of Unilever, famous for the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which was famous for addressing or achieving both social and environmental goals, not, despite, but, or achieving doubling his profit, not despite, but through social and environmental goals, achieving all of those.
And a key piece for him was that there was all these tensions, and he was just going to name them as part of, and invite them as part of the overall goal mission of being able to create making sustainable living every day, every place sustainable living and that those tensions between were just part of that and we were just going to name it and acknowledge that and surface it and talk it through.
Alison Jones: When you talk about the paradigm revolution, that’s sort of what you’re talking about, isn’t it? It’s the paradox revolution, I beg your pardon. It’s that sense that these things that…
…if they matter and the solutions that we can have to be more creative, they have to be more inclusive and the only way we will do that is if we change the way that we think about them.
Wendy Smith: We change the way we think about them, we surface them and talk about them, we name the tensions and acknowledge them, we empathize with the tensions, we listen to and hear the opposing sides. All of that.
I want to just add one…
Alison Jones: all of that really hard stuff.
Wendy Smith: all of that really hard stuff. Yes. That’s it.
Alison Jones: Oh, is that all we have to do? Okay.
Wendy Smith: Certainly, I have empathy. It’s not, I mean, one of the things we talk about in the book is finding comfort in the discomfort. It’s uncomfortable, and let’s name that. And we’ll be in that discomfort together, but if it’s comfortable and easy, then we’re not hitting the right solution.
Alison Jones: Talking about discomfort,
Wendy Smith: Yes.
Alison Jones: Tell me about the writing. How was, I mean, you’ve done a lot of writing in your time. I know you’ve come from academia, but you know, just tell us, what does the writing look like for you? What do you struggle with? What do you find joy in?
Wendy Smith: Yes. I am not a natural writer. I am a natural speaker, and I want to say I’m not a natural introvert, sitting behind my computer. So, it’s not an easy process for me. I want to just empathize with anybody who is working through the writing process, and it’s not easy.
And for me, what I have learned is that. A, I need to talk through my ideas to be inspired to then write about them, and that has been a superpower, which is finding other people to think through ideas with. And B, I need to make a really disciplined commitment that I am going to sit down and write, my butt in the seat, just sitting down and working through it because it’s hard to do.
It’s hard to do.
Alison Jones: I hope that that has encouraged people. I always think when we say, Oh man, it’s really hard. I never know quite whether we’re, you know, we’re helping or not. But tell us a bit more about how you go through that commitment of, you know, applying the bum to the seat and getting it done, even though actually this is not your natural happy place.
Wendy Smith: I mean, I do hope it’s inspiring because I think that we can do hard things. And I also think that we can do it in our own way. I mean, one of the things as an academic, I always felt like I was the outcast because I was an extrovert, until I learned how to make extroversion work for me.
So, for me to write, I often schedule I mean, I loved writing with a co-author. Marianne and I are great colleagues and co-authors, and we would schedule a weekly meeting, check in, brainstorm, I would take all the ideas that we did and use them to write that up, and then we would check in again. So I use that definitely to my advantage.
I’m about to, I’m working on the next book, it’s going to be a solo book, and I’m trying to figure out how to structure the right relationship with people that might not be a co-author, but a colleague writing a book who I can be in conversation with. But I do schedule conversations to then inform my writing for sure.
I do write early in the morning. It’s my big rock. I commit to it and make sure that I do it before my family gets up so that I make the commitment to at least an hour a day, consistent writing, disciplined, consistent writing. I have a little sticker chart. I actually physically give myself stickers as a reminder because it’s a discipline and getting it done requires me to keep on reminding myself to get it done.
Alison Jones: So the power of streaking, which we were talking about.
Wendy Smith: Alison, you are my inspiration around streaking. I am working on the streak for sure.
Alison Jones: It is so, it’s oddly powerful, isn’t it? And
Wendy Smith: Well, I want to just pull out a quote from your book, which I loved, which has resonated with me, which is when you’re streaking, you are committed to doing this every day, you stop asking, should I do it? And you ask, when will I do it? And that has been a game changer of a question for me. So thank you for that.
Thank you for that gift.
Alison Jones: Oh, you’re so welcome. And I’m so glad it helped. I found that such a profound shift from, you know, the willpower required to decide whether you’re going to do something, to actually just a bit of a planning. Oh, well, you know, I’m going to be doing this or traveling, so I’m going to have to do it here instead.
And the quality of that decision’s so much easier somehow.
Wendy Smith: Yes, yes, I’m going to fit it into my day and it’s going to, and I mean, I’m also a big fan of just, you know, we interviewed this fabulous CEO Zita Cobb from Canada, and one of the greatest quotes that she had was, the most important thing is to keep the most important thing the most important thing, right?
Sort of an essentialist approach, right?
And to me, knowing that this is my most important thing, it’s my not urgent, but it’s my important, it’s my one big rock that I’m going to make a splash with, that has been helpful. That reminder is also helpful.
Alison Jones: And that early, I mean, not everybody can do it, I know, but if you can use the early mornings, there’s something so pure about that energy. Before the whole day and the world has had a piece of you, there’s just the best thinking, isn’t it?
Wendy Smith: Totally, and then it’s like, you’ve done it, the rest of the day is gravy.
Alison Jones: You get to feel smug all day.
Wendy Smith: Yes, yes, You don’t have to worry, am I going to get it done, right? It’s an emotional shift for sure.
Alison Jones: It really, and you know, I feel exactly like that about my running as well. I try and run in the morning if I possibly can. Because if I don’t, I have this kind of thing over me all day. I’m going to run, I’m going to run, mustn’t forget, mustn’t forget. Yes, so you get it done and then you’re back home and you put your…
it’s that image of the jar, isn’t it? You put the big stuff in first and then you see what’s left and you fill it with it.
Wendy Smith: For sure. I love that image. I once heard this image that really has resonated with me of like, if you throw one big rock into the lake, you get a big splash. If you throw lots of little rocks into a lake, you get lots of little like, you know, lots of little ripples. And so I keep thinking this is my big rock.
It’s not just what I’m going to fill my jar with. It’s what I’m going to make the big splash with. And that has, I love that metaphor.
Alison Jones: That’s a really interesting perspective on…
because writing… you write loads of stuff, right? You know, as an academic, you write research papers as a business person, you write emails, blogs, LinkedIn posts. There’s something about a book that is more ‘Rocky splashy’ than all the rest of them. I mean, I don’t want to get technical with my terminology.
Wendy Smith: I think it’s also longer term, right? So, you know, it’s easy to put it off because it feels like there’s time and plenty of time along the way and you’re not, but I do think it’s big, rocky, splashy. I think it has lots of follow-on impacts, so I see the book not just as an outcome unto itself, but the start of a conversation or the expansion of a conversation.
That conversation happens in so many ways. It happens through my newsletter. It happens through being able to keynote. It happens through workshops. It happens through conversations with other authors and the research that I do that continues to expand on these ideas. But I see it as like a next big splash of what I am thinking about at the moment.
And how to push that forward and how to continue to engage a broader audience, particularly as an academic, you know, I am not assuming anybody’s reading my Academy of Management journal papers. But, you know, the hope is that the book translates those ideas into usable, tangible insights.
Alison Jones: Yes. Executable format. Love that.
Now I always ask my guests for their best tip. So if somebody is just at the start line, I guess I’m saying, what do you wish you’d known? Or what could they, what do they need to know to help them?
Wendy Smith: To help with getting the business book done.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Wendy Smith: Hmm. For me it’s be in a community. Don’t do it alone. And again, that’s just a bit of my own approach because I think collectively I am inspired by other people. I’ve learned from other people. That’s been super helpful. And I would just go back to, I continue to remind myself that this is a discipline. It’s not a whimsical thing. It’s a disciplined activity and holding the discipline is what’s going to get me farther along on the book process.
Alison Jones: Two tips in one there. Thank you. Brilliant.
And also you’re not, I’m just going to hold it up, actually, if you’re on video, you can see this beautiful cover. You’re not allowed to recommend Both and Thinking, but tell us, recommend us a different book, Wendy. What do you think everybody listening should read, if they haven’t already?
Wendy Smith: Alison, I want to go back to the classics in my field on this one. I try, so I am a huge fan of a woman named Mary Parker Follett. She was a management thinker at the turn of the last century, early 1900s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She actually spent some time in Cambridge, UK, so she went between the Cambridges.
She was a brilliant female thinker on, and who I draw huge inspiration on collaboration and conversation. She has inspired negotiations, conversation. She’s inspired democracy conversation. She has a great book called The New State. And I think she got lost as a female in some of the early classics for organizational thinking and business thinking, and I think we need to reclaim her.
So, I would go back to Pauline Graham’s book called Mary Parker Follett, The Prophet of Management, where she pulls together some of her thinking and ideas, some of her talks, and start there.
Alison Jones: I mean, that sounds amazing. And I’m shamed to say that I hadn’t heard of her, so I will rectify that. Yes.
Wendy Smith: You are not alone, and that’s what we’re, that’s the goal of mine.
Alison Jones: We’re trying to put that right. One forgotten thinker at a time. Brilliant. That’s great. What a great recommendation. Thank you.
And Wendy, if people want to find out more about you, more about Both/And Thinking, more about the work that you do, where should they go?
Wendy Smith: Bothandthinking.net
Alison Jones: There you go.
Wendy Smith: Bothandthinking. net, lots of, we have both a little bit more about us and the book and the ideas, but there’s also a whole set of tools. There’s a, I’ve done some research with colleagues on a paradox mindset inventory that is available and free for both researchers and individuals and people who want to use it in their company.
We have a discussion guide, we’ve got, you know, a whole bunch of tools that people can use and they can find me there as well.
Alison Jones: Fantastic. I’ll put that link up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com along with the transcript of this conversation.
And oh my goodness, Wendy, I could just talk to you all day. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been fascinating.
Wendy Smith: Alison, thank you for all the work that you do in this world. Thank you.
