See Patterns And Hold Mystery.
Just Tao It is my attempt to put words to a thread that’s been running through my life for almost forty years. I stumbled into the Tao Te Ching in 1987, at a time when certainty felt thin and my inherited faith tradition felt…let’s say “under renovation.” I didn’t have language for any of it. I just knew the Tao Te Ching was a refuge—not because it gave me answers, but because it helped me live inside questions without going rigid, cynical, or performative about it. It was like finding a hidden spring underground—not with flash or hype, just enough to begin to understand how things stay green on the surface.
Then in 2006, I met Barry Johnson.
Barry’s life work gave me something I didn’t know I was missing: a way to see the patterns in the mystery. In my world of applied behavioral science, Organization Development, and executive coaching, he’d been doing the hard, steady, real-world work since the mid-1970s—showing how interdependent tensions (values, needs, energies, truths) behave over time. He didn’t treat them like problems to solve. He treated them like tensions to leverage. And he built a way to map them—the Polarity Map—so people could stop arguing in abstractions and start working with what’s actually happening.
That was a “wait…are you kidding me?” moment for me. It felt like the universe had handed me a modern-day companion to Lao Tzu: not replacing the Tao, but giving me a disciplined way to practice what the Tao points toward when we’re under pressure.
Fast-forward: I’ve been in partnership with Barry and the team at Polarity Partnerships for more than two decades. The academic research is abundant. Our tools have matured. The practice community continues to mature. We now have a resource portal, training, credentialing, and an assessment platform that can measure how well leaders, teams, and organizations are leveraging interdependent tensions over time. And underneath all of it is the same foundational reality the Tao points toward with a grin: Yin AND Yang. Not as concepts to debate, but as interdependence to live and work with…as best we can.
So, here’s what’s at the heart of what I’m doing in this series.
The Tao Te Ching has always held the Mystery. Polarity Thinking has helped me see the Patterns.
Over time, I’ve come to experience these not as competing ways of understanding the world, but as a tension to live inside.
Patterns AND Mystery.
Polarities often feel like opposites. They’re connected and depend on each other to work.
In this polarity, if you lean too far into Patterns, everything becomes mechanical—over-explained, over-managed, stripped of life. Lean too far into Mystery, and everything becomes vague—unanchored, hard to act on, difficult to sustain. Together, they offer something different: the ability to work with what we can see while staying open to what we cannot fully explain.
That tension shows up everywhere—in leadership, in organizations, in systems, and in our own lives. Especially when things get complex and the usual answers stop working.
Just Tao It isn’t an effort to convince you of anything. No indoctrination. No guru cape. It’s simply me sharing what has been useful—especially when I’m tempted to tighten up, speed up, argue harder, or reach for certainty when what’s actually needed is steady fluidity for wiser decisions.
It’s also no accident that the Tao Te Ching shows up across leadership and business writing. Not because it gives a framework—it’s allergic to that—but because it’s durable. It speaks to what it feels like to be human inside complexity, especially when institutions fray and everybody’s selling a fix.
Lao Tzu was writing into a world under strain. The Zhou dynasty was cracking, factions were consolidating power, and thinkers everywhere were offering rules for how society “should” work. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Which makes this a good time to return to an old text that begins with a simple warning: be careful with your certainty.
My rendering of Chapter 1 begins with four words: “Names fail describing Tao.” In other words, the moment we get overly confident that we can capture Tao cleanly in language, we’ve already started to miss it. That doesn’t make language useless. It makes it a tool, not a trophy. In this series, I’ll use “It” often—not to be cute, but to resist the human tendency toward name games, righteousness, and premature closure. In the Polarity Thinking community, we’ve said for as long as I can remember in the 5-Step SMALL Process—Seeing, Mapping, Assessing, Learning, and Leveraging—that every step is a values and language clarification process.
Which brings up a practical question for this series: where and how does Polarity Thinking fit?
Here’s my take. It gives us a disciplined way to work with what the Tao keeps pointing toward—especially when life, leadership, and systems get complex.
When either/or thinking isn’t sufficient and both/and thinking becomes necessary, we’re dealing with ongoing tensions that need to be lived well over time. Not problems to solve, but polarities to leverage. Polarity Thinking helps make those patterns visible. It helps us see the predictable upsides, the predictable downsides, the early warning signs, and the leverage actions that keep us in motion—so we can stay grounded without becoming rigid, and stay open without losing direction.
In Organization Development, this matters. Because most of the challenges leaders, teams, and systems face are not technical problems with clean answers. They are ongoing tensions that show up in relationships, decisions, culture, and performance—over time. When we treat them like problems to solve, we get stuck in cycles. When we learn to leverage them, something different becomes possible: Steadiness AND Fluidity, Competence AND Character, Love Yourself AND Love Your Neighbor.
The series will begin with what I think of as a “starter arc” of chapters—not because they’re better, but because they’ve been especially useful to me for learning how to be done without checking out, how to use technique without becoming a technician, how to live in the AND between things, how to let go AND hold on, how to live exemplarily without turning into a performative saint, how to be skillful, and how to serve without losing myself. (If you’re thinking, “Wow, Cliff, sounds like you’ve nailed all that,” please enjoy a good laugh on my behalf. Most days I feel like the worst Taoist ever to walk this planet.)
One more thing: I’m not doing this alone. I have a practical “Board of Directors” I use to sanity-check my thinking and keep me honest as this work meets the real world—especially where Tao × Polarity intersects with AI, translation, and scale. You’ll see references to Barry, Gemma Jiang, Jake Pinnock, my colleagues and partners connected with IOC/IOCC in China (Innovative OD Center and the IOC Consulting Ecosystem team), and others as the work unfolds.
Next up, we’ll go deeper into Chapter 1. We’ll stay close to the text AND grounded in lived experience, because the point here isn’t to sound smart. It’s to get a little steadier, stay a little more fluid, and make wiser decisions over time in how we live and lead.
Want to explore your Patterns And Mystery? Try the Chat w/AI Cliff for support for Step 1, Seeing Polarities
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Check out our online self-directed Basics, Credentialing, or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge! Certifications and Courses
If you’re new to the Tao Te Ching, here’s an on-ramp to “Meet “It” — Introduction, Part II.
Go to Chapter 1 of Just Tao It
