Check out the full article here

It’s always with a mix of excitement and a bit of apprehension that my attention sharpens when a credible source like Harvard Business Review or MIT Sloan publishes an article on polarities.

The excitement: Finally, broader attention and value recognition.
The apprehension: Was it represented well?

In this HBR article, author Larry Clark gets it about as right as someone in my chair could hope for.

First, I appreciated that Barry Johnson was named explicitly in the discussion of polarity mapping. After more than half a century of work, his contribution sits firmly as backbone—not footnote—in this field. Seeing that lineage acknowledged matters.

Second, the article feels like yet another signal that the business and leadership world may finally be catching up to what practitioners have long known: polarity and paradox are not edge cases. They are central features of how organizations actually function—or don’t.

Clark points to a familiar leadership reflex: our tendency to treat all tensions as problems to solve. The result is predictable pendulum swings—from one pole of a polarity to the other—as leaders “fix” what is simply the natural tension of the system. New initiative. New language. Same underlying pattern.

Drawing on earlier HBR work, Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith describe the shift required: supplementing either/or thinking with both/and thinking. Strong leaders don’t choose between competing demands; they learn to hold and work with them at the same time.

They highlight three practices that support this mindset:

  • Surfacing tensions rather than pretending they aren’t there
  • Embracing tension without rushing to closure
  • Processing tension through ongoing observation, adjustment, and integration

The article closes by positioning both/and thinking as a core leadership capacity in today’s complex environment. Paradox isn’t new. What’s new is the growing recognition that treating it as a problem to solve doesn’t just fail—it leaves real value on the table.

For those interested in deepening your confidence and competence in Polarity Thinking (including online, self-directed credentialing):
www.PolarityResources.com

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