The Paradox Problem

Today I want to talk about an article in the latest edition of the Mercer Management Journal, now posted on the Mercer Management Consulting website. It's titled "Learning to Live with Paradox." The author is Stephen Rhinesmith. I like the aritcle's topic and what the author says about the topic; but I am particularly interested in how it illustrates well a couple of key points about articles written to showcase thought leadership.

First -- what the article is about. Basically, the article says that many of the problems global organizations face actually express themselves as paradoxes. Paradoxes consist of opposing needs that don't go away. If you organize to fully satisfy one of these needs exclusively, then eventually you will be forced to confront its opposing need -- like family versus work.

"The test for identifying a paradox is that it has no final solution."

--Mercer Management Consulting

The author frames the discussion in terms of intellectual and emotional maturity -- for example, that managers should learn to be comfortable holding two opposing ideas in their heads at the same time and that they should also seek out those with opposing views. Doing so develops a manager's emotional intelligence and cultural empathy -- especially important qualities in global operations where one size seldom fits all.

The article also offers more practical hands-on advice such as to create what the author calls paradox alarm metrics:

"For example, moving products close to the customer in order to achieve fast delivery times may result in excess local inventory. if both sides can agree on an acceptable level of inventory they can manage the tension. On a global level, an agreement might call for 70% of new products to have global branding and applicability, with 30% of new products customized for local consumption."

As a writing approach, the article illustrates what I call "the big hairy concept" article. It's very effective as a way to think creatively about topics or generate new topic ideas. The approach is to take an intellectual abstraction and say what it means and how to deal with it in a specifically management oriented context. Here the concept is "paradox". Another good one is "complexity." (You can see my previous blog posts on how Boston Consulting Group and Mercer Management Consulting did this.)

An offshoot of this is the "style" article -- where you create the big hairy concept by linking the noun form of a verb to the word style -- as in marketing style, interaction style, and so on. (The links are to blog posts on examples from Booze Allen Hamilton and McKinsey & Company, respectively.) What's interesting is that you can usually use the style technique to extend or develop any big hairy concept. In the paradox article, the author sort of does this by invoking an "anatomy of a paradox" grid adapted from Barry Johnson's 1996 book, Polarity Management. Each quadrant in the gird represents a different set of priorities (and consequences) that must be appropriately balanced in managing any paradox.

What would also be interesting is to take Rhinesmith's paradox balancing idea and apply it to various style articles. For example, in the BAH article on marketing styles, you could use paradox modeling to further develop that author's thesis that no one marketing style fits every organization equally well -- but a mix of style attributes must be somehow balanced.