Everything old is new again

Welcome to the FIRST Edition of our newsletter - “Its Not An Either/Or”

Everything Old is New Again

Zita Cobb is the CEO of Shorefast - one of the largest social enterprises in Canada. The organization seeks to “unleash the power of place for local communities to thrive in the global economy.” How do they do so? They don’t get stuck in the past. Instead, they repurpose the wisdom and insight of the past to apply to the needs of the present.

Drawing on the Newfoundland culture of hospitality, they built the Fogo Island Inn to welcome people from around the world to learn about and contribute to their local economy. They filled the Inn with and now sell beautiful quilts and wood furniture that values well-honed subsistence skills handed down over generations. As Cobb says, they find “New Ways with Old Things” living into the paradoxical relationship between tradition and modernity. (If you want to learn more about how Zita Cobb and Shorefast live into paradoxes… check out Chapter 1 of our book Both/And Thinking).

Welcome to the FIRST Edition of our newsletter -  “It’s Not An Either/Or”

The paradox of old and new is fitting as we launch the first edition of our new newsletter, “It's Not An Either/Or.” Paradox and both/and thinking is an old idea… more than 2500 years old! In our work more broadly - and this newsletter specifically - we apply this old wisdom to our modern-day challenges and opportunities. To do so, we will bring you monthly snippets of quick hits, ah-has, and deeper dives, offering wisdom and advice about how we can all value paradoxes, embrace both/and thinking, and avoid either/or traps. 

We are grateful you are on this journey with us to make the world a better place by enhancing our collective ability to live into the both/and. We can’t wait to hear your reactions, suggestions, and ideas!

To extend the conversation, we have shared what’s below as a post on social media (LinkedIN, Instagram, Facebook). 

Feel free to like it, repost it, or post your own if you think this can inspire others in your community. 

• What traditions are valuable to you, your family, your organization? 

• How will you bring them into the modern world in new ways? 

• What can you draw on in the past to advance and enable the present?

Paradox: Modernizing an Age Old Concept

The fact that our organizational and social world is paradoxical is an OLD idea, that has only recently become NEW. 

Paradoxes refer to ‘persistent interdependent contradictions’ - opposing tug-of-wars that are intertwined and synergistic. In the 5th Century BC Lao Tzu based his philosophy in the Tao Te Ching on paradoxes of stability and change when saying  “True steadfastness seems changeable”. In the same century, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus played with a similar paradox. He claimed, “No person ever steps into the same river twice”;  the river is always changing as is the person. (For more insight, check out pages 24-25 of Both/And Thinking). 

Scholars continue to bring the old concept of paradox to our world in new ways. In the 18th century, people like Michael Faraday, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, and others offered quantum physics as a quantum leap over Newtonian physics - moving from a linear, rational conception of space and time to a paradoxical one. (Want to learn more … one of our favorite books is The Tao of Physics by Frijof Capra). Soon after, psychoanalysts like Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Viktor Frankle started to make a case for the paradoxical nature of our psyche (For more here, we treasure Kirk Schneider’s The Paradoxical Self, where he taps into Kierkegaard’s insights.)

We often say that those of us who think about organizations, strategy, leadership, interpersonal relationships, and decision-making are LATE to the paradox party! We are late to realize that we need to lean into interdependent opposites to understand and navigate our world. 

That’s what we said in our acceptance speech at Thinkers 50. Thinkers50 is the “Academy Awards of Management Thinkers.” This past November, we were honored to be chosen for the Thinkers50 2023 Breakthrough Idea Award for both/and thinking. Honored… though a bit confused. Breakthrough idea? Paradox?  But this idea is over 2500 years old. Yet herein lies the breakthrough…. that we can bring this old idea to our social world in new ways to help us all better understand and navigate the complexities of the world. 

Everything Old Is New Again. We are grateful to all of you for being on this path with us to surface underlying paradoxes and bring both/and thinking to improve our relationships and our world.  

Have you drawn on old wisdom to address new problems? Email us and let us know where this tension has emerged for you.

Great thinkers have been embedding both/and thinking into their work. Here are some examples of how paradox implicitly informs their key messages. 

• Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly - How do you find the courage to do something impactfully? By being vulnerable? Brene reminds us of the paradoxical relationship between courage and vulnerability; to be courageous, strong, powerful, and impactful we have to be vulnerable and address our deepest concerns. 

• Adam Grant’s Give and Take - How do you advance your own success? By contributing to others. In this beautifully written book, Adam Grant reminds us of the paradoxical relationships between giving and taking, self and others,

• Amy Edmondson’s [The Right Kind of Wrong]- How do you perform well? By trying, failing, performing poorly, and then learning. Amy’s work on psychological safety embeds within it the paradoxical relationship between learning and performance, success and failure, today and tomorrow. …. The positives of negative outcomes; 

Thanks for joining us in this conversation. We welcome your reactions and feedback.

Keep an eye out next month for “It’s Not an Either/Or” (second Sunday of the month) when we reveal our #1 tool for moving from either/or thinking to both/and thinking.

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