Some days it’s hard to be hopeful. The scope and scale of polarization and doom-loop thinking about the U.S. and the future can feel like an hourly, daily, monthly assault on the senses. Then a book like Strong Floor, No Ceiling comes out. My intuition sirens flare and my energy returns. A few differently firing synapses, [...]
I recently heard something that made me smile at first and then poked at me until I sat down to write this. When some AI systems interact internally, they sometimes refer to humans with a particular word. Watchers. It is a curious label. If one human described another that way — “Oh, that person’s a Watcher” [...]
After twenty years working with Polarity Thinking, one word finally helped me explain why it works: metatheory. A metatheory isn’t another model or framework. It’s the lens behind the lens — the way of seeing that shapes how we understand everything else. In that sense, the usefulness of Polarity Thinking is not simply that it offers [...]
The word “radical” often suggests someone has wandered far from common sense. In this case, I mean something closer to the opposite. My radical position is simply this: human beings need to become far more skillful at supplementing Either/Or Thinking with Both/And Thinking. At first glance that statement may sound almost too obvious to deserve a [...]
(Cliff Kayser of Polarity Partnerships, LLC provides this summary w/additions from an August 2022 article that appeared in NEWSWEEK by colleagues Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith.) Today's world is becoming increasingly fractured. Confirmation bias abounds where people stay within safe circles of friends and colleagues who agree with them, and the opinions they hear mirror [...]
(Cliff Kayser of Polarity Partnerships, LLC provides this summary w/additions from an August 2022 article in FastCompany by colleagues Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith.) How can adopting ‘both/and thinking’ to move beyond a simple yet often destructive formula and develop more creative and productive solutions. While we want the best of home and work, too [...]