Black and white thinking is easy, there is right and wrong, you decide which side of the fence you are on, and stick to it.
Luckily, life is not like that. Life is a mass collision of colours, ambiguity built on ambiguity, built on uncertainty. That is what makes it interesting, and worth living.
Following the previous post that offered 9 strategies for more impactful decisions, it seemed appropriate to observe that the great advice in that post is useless in the absence of being able to see a problem from a number of perspectives.
In other words, see all the colours.
Most problems we face in strategy development are wicked ones, where there is no obvious right and wrong answer, where there are nuances on top of nuances, second order impacts, and where definitive data is hard, if not impossible to find.
Thinking in a binary manner means that you dismiss all these opportunities for creativity because it is somehow inconsistent with your existing views.
This also means you lose sight of most of the stuff from the alternative choices, which is where the richness usually hides.
Differences of opinion cause tension, discomfort, and room for conversation which become challenging for a binary thinker.
Thinking and then communicating in a nuanced way is an enormously valuable skill.
Relationships that last can accommodate the differences caused by the grey areas. It requires that you can hold seemingly inconsistent ideas in your mind at the same time.
Binary thinking means you cannot hold those conflicting ideas.
The question every time in a disagreement, is the extent to which the tension created by differences in opinion are healthy.
We are used to seeing things in a binary manner, it is the automatic response, but we need to find a way to manage the inconsistency and ambiguity. We need to be flexible, as well as being driven by the rules.
The biggest challenges we face have the need to be able to dance with the facts, what works today, may not work tomorrow.
Overdoing structure removes the flexibility, and the opportunity to see things that may become important.
We think most problems can be solved, that is the base assumption we always have, but the conventional wisdom does not always work.
As a kid I lived on the beach, surfed a lot. The water pushed into the beach by the waves needs to get back out somehow, so you have ‘rips’. The area that allows the water to return from the beach. When surfing, you go with the rip, it will take you out, try and swim against it, you will just get tired and make little or no progress. You need to be able to swim at an angle, use the rip to take you out, then move across towards where the waves are.
This skill works in problem solving, finding bits of a problem that are resolvable, like getting a single wave in a session in the surf, you get the thrill of that great wave, use the rip to take you back to catch the next one. It is a process
Tension between people who hold differing views is healthy when managed well. This is when there is a recognition that there is no right or wrong answer to a wicked problem, just the better choice at this point. Then the differences in opinion can better hold the outcomes of the decision to account, it will increase the opportunity to pick up the problem molehills before they become mountains.
Ambiguity and bias can be used constructively.
Embrace your opposites. It indicates you recognise there are differences, give permission to voice the unfamiliar perspective. This is the opposite to just having people with you that agree, then there is no tension, no opportunity to see the differing perspectives.
One side of any question is rarely completely right, and the other completely wrong, we must be curious to see the reasons that the others see it differently.
This is how we produce creative new options that reflect life.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld in ‘New Scientist’ magazine.
