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I study how people manage ongoing persistent competing demands–tensions between work and life, being collaborative or being competitive, acting authentically or trying on new identities, getting big projects done or dealing with daily administrative tasks. In organizations, leaders need to address competing demands between performing effectively today while experimenting with new opportunities for tomorrow, or between being financially successful while addressing broader social, ethical and environmental concerns.

What we find in our research is that these competing demands are paradoxi- cal–while they are contradictory and oppositional, they are also interdependent and synergistic. For example, our success at work impacts our lives and vice versa.

Traditional approaches suggest that effective decision-making involves thinking through a difficult decision, weighing the pros and cons of alternative options, making a clear choice. As professors, we teach our students how to collect and analyze data to make better choices. And then we like when people are consistent and stick with their choices. We believe that leaders who change their positions are “flip-floppers” or “wishy-washy.”

However, in our research we find that this kind of either/or thinking to try to choose between competing demands can actually be a detriment. Instead, a both/and approach to these tensions can lead to novel, creative and more sustainable outcomes. Yet, we also know that adopting this kind of an approach is really difficult for individuals as well as leaders of organizations.

I probably began exploring this notion of paradox because it spoke to me personally as I confronted my own competing demands in my career (be an academic or be a practitioner), my research (study organizations or study individuals) and my life (focus on my career or focus on my family), and how I often felt stuck and unsatisfied with the either/or choices as I experienced them.

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Lines … what lines? As a kid, I was always much happier drawing on a plain white sheet of paper than in a coloring book.

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Ben and Jerry’s!

Before starting my Ph.D., I briefly worked as a management consultant. I was intrigued by the concept of social responsibility. I remember sitting in a Portuguese restaurant in Newark, New Jersey, while my team leaders patronizingly told me the concept of social responsibility was idealistic, but limited. But the collapse of Enron as well as several other large corporations in the late 1990s demonstrated what happens if organizations focus ONLY on profit.

Ben and Jerry’s and the organizations that followed that comprise Businesses for Social Responsibility, or all the organizations like B-Corporations that are changing legal structures to allow organizations to pay attention to a double and triple bottom line, demonstrate sustainable pathways to integrate profits and purpose. If we can bring together profits and purpose in a single organization, we can integrate all kinds of paradoxical tensions in our lives.

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LOTS of naysayers! As a Ph.D. student, I wanted to study paradox, especially in the context of social responsibility. Academics told me “paradox” belonged in a yoga study or a meditation session, not in academic journals. Others told me I would never get a job as a business school academic if I focused on social responsibility. I guess I was too naïve to listen.

There is a point where their feedback was right. While I did get a job, it took me a long time to be able to publish these ideas and share them broadly in the way I wanted to. That said, I was also able to navigate some of the naysayers by listening carefully to their arguments and thinking about how to better articulate mine. I spent a lot of time with forward-thinking individuals and executives to learn what they thought. I also surrounded myself with people who shared my ideas and could continue to help me think through and advance them—many became long-term collaborators and academic mentors. Finally, I worked to build a community of like-minded individuals about paradox to help support one another.

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My Ph.D. adviser once told me, “I know I have a good idea when lots of people resist it.” That statement helped me see the resistance to my own ideas as a source of strength and something I could learn from, rather than as something to stop me from what I was doing.

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I am currently most satisfied when someone tells me how the ideas of paradox and both/and thinking enable them to reframe a challenge and help them to become unstuck, more creative or more satisfied. I find it rewarding to share ideas of paradox and both/and thinking with senior leaders and see the impact on their organizations. I find it rewarding to share these ideas in one-on-one conversations with friends and colleagues to help them think differently about situations they face. Perhaps I find it most rewarding — and most terrifying — when someone calls me out on my either/or thinking and challenges me to adopt a more both/and perspective to my own competing demands.

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Our economic system is one of the most important challenges we face at the moment. Capitalism advances growth, novelty and innovation, but has done so toward the goal of individual achievement, rather than collective growth and improved universal welfare. As a result, we have consolidated economic, political and social power in the hands of a very small number of people, who do not and cannot address the diverse needs of a broader society. If we are to improve our global welfare, we have to rethink our economic systems so that they can motivate growth, novelty and innovation toward the advancement of, rather than to the detriment of, collective success and improved social conditions. I’m intrigued about what that kind of system looks like and how we can get there.

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I have 12-year-old twins. Both/and thinking can be really helpful at home.

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The potential to make a positive impact on our global welfare.