A famous Zen koan presents the case of two monks rolling up a blind—imagine it: someone on each side, rolling, rolling. The Zen teacher in the case, Hogen, comments, “One gain, one loss.1” In our ordinary way of looking at things, this is an apt description of paradox: most decisions present more than one right possibility, and to decide for one thing is to decide against others. For example, do we focus on short term or long term in running our business? An extraordinary push to make this quarter’s numbers may bring us short term gain, but we’re almost certainly sacrificing long term sustainability. Do we decide in favor of work or family when a crucial business meeting collides with the school play? One gains, one loses. The student of Zen further penetrates this koan to realize, beyond the dualistic challenges of everyday life, the boundless emptiness out of which this ceaseless change plays out.
But let’s start with the dualistic paradoxes of everyday life, for there are better and worse ways to manage them. And managing them well not only makes our life easier and our work more effective, but it also develops our agility and insight into this ceaseless change. Managing paradox well is itself an important “flip” in consciousness from “Or” thinking (“My way or the highway.”) to “And” thinking (“I’m right about my facts, and what other right perspectives do we need to take into account?”). It’s a flip from seeing things from only one perspective to knowing there always 2 or more sides worth considering.
Simply admitting to more than one perspective can be a challenge, for our nervous system tends to land and stop on the first answer. For example, what do you see in Figure 1? If you say “frog,” that is correct and not complete. What else do you see? If you lock onto “frog” it’s impossible to see anything else. But if you change your perspective, tip your head to the side, you see it instantly: horse. Carl Jung once said, “Only paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life.” Certainly leaders today are finding that only paradox begins to encompass the complexity of the decisions they are faced with day by day.
Do we focus on cost or quality? Do we push for performance now or develop people for the future? Do we tend to what’s good for the individual or focus on the harmony of the group? Yes, yes, yes. The flip to “And” thinking embraces both sides. But how do we do this? Let‘s start with a simple example of a paradox you’re probably managing well right now: inhale vs. exhale. Which is right? OK, stupid question, because we know both are right and, indeed, the functional tension and oscillation between them is what achieves a higher level goal (i.e., breathing). This is true of all paradox, however, we may be so partial to one side, that we have a hard time seeing (much less admitting the rightness of) the other side.
So play along for a moment and imagine you’re partial to inhale. You suck in a deep breath—ah the oxygen!—of course this is the best side of breathing, it brings energy and fullness to the body and if you keep inhaling, inhaling, inhaling long enough—uh, oh—physiological signals are starting to say, “Enough already.” And naturally, all you want do is exhale—ah-h-h-h-h—this is the best part of breathing, the relaxing side of the cycle that lets you settle down, get rid of all that carbon dioxide. And if you keep exhaling, exhaling, exhaling, subtle signals are now getting louder, declaring depletion, and all you want to do is breathe in. Drawing on the work of Barry Johnson2, we can depict this process as in Figure 2. Trying to maximize only one side, we also maximally fall into the concerns of overdoing it. Now we don’t normally drive breathing to such extremes. However, we often do go too far in driving the paradoxes of life and work, whipsawing organizations, confusing employees and customers alike, and destroying more value than we create in the process. “Guardrail to guardrail management,” is how one of my clients describes it at her company.
We can do better. The Zen Leader3 lays out the following 3 steps for making the flip from “Or” to “And,” plus managing “And” more artfully. To support you in this process, you can also download a free paradox mapping guide.
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See 2 — For any ongoing challenge, identify 2 opposing forces that keep it in play (e.g., work vs. family time). For an opportunity you want to pursue, identify opposing forces or constituencies for how you might go about it (e.g., drive my agenda vs. listen to others). There may be more than two forces at play, but as not to overwhelm your thinking and drawing abilities, take 2 at a time. Draw a 2 x 2 matrix as in Figure 2, and label your two forces on the left and right ends.
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Map 4 — Standing on the side of force 1, consider the upside of attending to this force: what value can be created? Write 2-3 items in the upper left-hand quadrant. Then, as in the exaggerated breathing exercise, imagine the downside if you go too far. In the lower left-hand box, write 2-3 converns you’d start to see if you overdid Force 1. Moving to the side of force 2 and into upper right quadrant, jot down 2-3 things that are right about force 2, or that you’d hope to achieve. Finally, drop down into the lower right hand box and write 2-3 concerns that would result from too much of force 2.
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Manage the Figure-8 — Consider what overarching goal could be achieved through the optimal mix of both forces, and write that down. For here is the real art of managing “And:” knowing when to shift. For a paradox you manage both sides of—such as breathing, or even work-life balance—using subtle signs or internal measures may be good enough. But for most paradoxes, especially those where the different forces are represented by different people or parts of the organization (e.g., headquarters vs. the field), it’s important to have measures on BOTH sides and thresholds for when it’s time to shift. Johnson calls these measures “green flags” for signaling what’s good enough, and “red flags” for what downside thresholds we don’t want to sink below. They represent metaphorical “altitudes” within which we can safely fly this paradox.
For example, if we’re managing the paradox of doing what’s right for customers versus what’s right for employees, we might measure customer satisfaction on one side and employee engagement on the other. We may decide (or have data that shows us) that on a 5-point scale, 4.5 is good enough, and 4.0 is a threshold we don’t want to sink below. So we might direct employees to increase service to customers to bring up our customer satisfaction ratings, and at the same time watch that employee engagement isn’t falling below 4. Once customer satisfaction reaches 4.5, we know that’s good enough, and can tend more to our employees’ needs.
What even this admittedly mechanistic example starts to show is the constant flux of paradox. There is no point solution, no checking it off our list, once and for all. It is like surfing a wave and continuously adjusting our balance to match the conditions, using measures to communicate or converge our thought processes with others who are managing this with us. When the shifts happen frequently—as in surfing or breathing—it’s easy to sense the ceaseless motion. However when shifts happen over periods of months or years, it’s easy to forget that we’re dealing with ceaseless change.
In that sense, managing the dualistic paradoxes of everyday life is a good warm-up for seeing a much deeper sense in which, to paraphrase Jung, paradox comes closest to comprehending the fullness and emptiness of our human existence. When we think about who we are, even though we are constantly changing, we still give ourselves (and one another) a fixed name, a relatively fixed identity. It is like looking at figure 1 and seeing only “frog.” Our ego is the usual suspect in any answer about who we are and, as with any one-sided view, we are correct and not complete. But seeing past the ego is far more difficult than tipping our head to the side, because the ego regards anything that it’s not as “other” and any process that threatens it as death. So we lock onto the finite aspect of our being and miss the infinite, we see the self-in-the skin and miss the boundlessness.
But here’s the good news: the agility we build in managing “And” raises our suspicion of one-sided views and opens us to broader possibility. Add Zen training (or equivalent extraordinary conditions that let us see around the edges of ego) and the condition of oneness becomes our own genuine experience, even as we live a human life. Who We Are is revealed in its paradoxical entirety: the power of the universe manifest through our own hands and feet. The Zen leader in us is revealed in the ever-changing emptiness, in the all-embracing “And.”
1 Katsuki Sekida (transl.), A.V. Grimstone (ed.), Two Zen Classics, Mumonkan and Hekiganroku (New York: Weatherhill, 1977, Mumonkan, Case 89.
2 Barry Johnson, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems (Amherst, MA: HRD Press, 1992)
3 Ginny Whitelaw, The Zen Leader: 10 Ways to Go from Barely Managing to Leading Fearlessly (Pompton Plains, NJ: Career Press, 2012)
About the author: Dr. Ginny Whitelaw is a leadership expert and a Zen master in the Chozen-ji line of Rinzai Zen. Author of The Zen Leader, she is the President of Focus Leadership and founder of the Institute for Zen Leadership. Formerly, Deputy Manager for integrating NASA’s Space Station Program, she has a Ph.D. in biophysics, as well as a 5th degree black belt in Aikido.
Ginny Whitelaw and Ken Wilber
Ginny Whitelaw talks to Ken Wilber about her new book, The Zen Leader, which offers an exceptionally simple guide to help maximize your health, happiness, and productivity. What's remarkable about The Zen Leader is that it doesn't just present useful concepts to help you think about leadership in a new way, but offers practical ways to continuously check in with your own body—right here and right now—to gauge whatever resistance and self-contraction you may be experiencing, and follows with simple practices to help you sustain a more open and creative state of mind.
Leaders today face impossibly big jobs, asked to do more with less, expand globally, innovate quickly, inspire broadly and - oh yes - balance work and family. How does one manage all this pressure?
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Comments
Tue, 07/10/2012 - 22:47
Now, I have always heard this Koan translated as "one has it, one does not". I am fascinated by its use as the reality-parallax of "one gain, one loss". Since up and down are the same, going up means not going down. Thank you for this. It does make an excellent practical awareness of the choice between the complementary domains of reality which form the scaffolding of Integral Theory.
I have tended, contrariwise (sic) to experience this koan as the assertion of a difference between two things which are identical. Both of them do exactly the same task -- but one succeeds and one fails. The immediate bait is to think that one of them did the "zen way" and the other guy was just a shmuck. But for me the encounter provoked by the assertion that sameness is not the same just kills me.
The beauty of the way you've handled it, however, is precisely in its ability to sprawl out into a schematic of worldly wisdom.
Good cheers.