We’re in the business of choosing sides.

Profit OR Planet. Progress OR Tradition. Human Wisdom OR Artificial Intelligence. My team/family OR Your team/family.

And we’re exhausted. Not because we’re choosing wrong, but because we’re treating tensions that require both as problems that can be solved by  one or the other.

Just Tao It is my attempt to put words to something different—a thread that’s been running through my life for almost forty years, and might be useful now.

I stumbled into the Tao Te Ching in 1987. I was 27, sitting in a bookstore I can still picture—wood floors, narrow aisles, the kind of place that smelled like old paper and quiet. My inherited faith tradition felt…let’s say “under renovation.” Certainty felt thin. I didn’t have language for any of it.

The Tao Te Ching didn’t give me answers. It gave me company. A way to 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.

For almost twenty years, the Tao stayed in one corner of my life. Useful, private, mostly unspoken. During that time, I worked steadily on my own interpretations of each chapter—not as scholarship, but as spiritual practice. Those interpretations appear throughout this series.

Then in 2006, I met Barry Johnson.

And something I’d kept quietly personal suddenly became practically applicable.

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 as 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.

The Tao had taught me to hold paradox. Barry showed me how to work with it—in real organizations, with real leaders, under real pressure. Not as philosophy. As practice.

I could suddenly see why teams kept oscillating between micromanagement and chaos. Why strategic plans worked briefly then failed. Why the same conflicts kept recurring with different faces.

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.

This tension—Patterns AND Mystery—is showing up with new urgency as we navigate artificial intelligence.

AI dramatically expands our capacity for Pattern (data analysis, prediction, optimization at scale). What it cannot do is hold Mystery—the ethical discernment that resists quantification, the relational wisdom that emerges in presence, the capacity to remain responsive to what cannot be fully modeled.

And here’s what keeps me up at night: we’re generating Pattern at AI speed while developing Mystery at human speed. That gap is widening. And if we don’t learn to hold both, we’ll build systems that are extraordinarily capable and profoundly untrustworthy.

The leaders, teams, and systems that will thrive in an AI-amplified world won’t be those who choose Pattern OR Mystery. They’ll be those who learn to leverage both—grounded enough to use the tools, open enough to override them when something that can’t be measured matters more.

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 when I’m stuck in the Either/Or trap:

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. 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. And, the original title for this series had been, “World’s Worst Taoist” — but a friend/colleague talked me out of it.)

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—because this work doesn’t stay theoretical. It’s meeting AI translation tools, crossing cultural boundaries, and scaling in ways I couldn’t have imagined in 1987.

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. Not as endorsements, but as the community that helps me stay grounded while the work grows.

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.

If you’re someone who:

  • Feels the exhaustion of choosing sides in tensions that need both
  • Suspects there’s wisdom in ancient texts but needs practical application
  • Works with complexity and wants tools that honor it instead of oversimplify it
  • Is navigating AI’s acceleration and wondering how to stay human inside it

…then this might be for you.

Or maybe not. Either way, welcome.

Invitations:

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