Polarity Partnerships has never been a one-person endeavor. Over the past two decades, I’ve had the privilege of building this work alongside a wide circle of gifted partners and colleagues, each shaping how we teach, consult, and think about interdependent tensions in their own way.
One of those partnerships reaches back to the very beginning of Polarity Thinking itself: my work with Barry Johnson.
Barry didn’t set out to build a framework. In the mid-1970s, while finishing two years of training in Gestalt therapy, the first polarity map emerged out of a single one-on-one session with a client.
The client was caught between two things that seemed to contradict each other. Barry’s training assumed one had to give way to the other. What he noticed instead was that neither one was going anywhere, and neither one needed to. They belonged together, whether anyone had a name for that yet or not.
He drew a circle to hold both. Over the years that followed, that circle became the infinity-loop map I still draw on whiteboards today.
I’ve come to believe that single session makes the case for this whole series better than any argument I could build on my own. Before Polarity Thinking was a consulting practice, a certification program, or a framework we now teach to leaders and practitioners around the world, it was one person paying close attention to one other person, and refusing to force a choice that didn’t need to be made.
I’ve been asking some version of the question buried inside that session ever since — in boardrooms, classrooms, living rooms, and more than a few arguments I probably could have handled better. Somewhere along the way, I became convinced we’re asking the wrong first question almost everywhere.
The wrong question is: Which one of us is right?
The more useful question is the one built into that very first map: What if neither side has to lose? What if we’re both pointing at something true, and the real work is learning to hold both?
That question is the reason this series exists.
It’s also where the word “radical” in the title comes from. That word usually suggests someone has wandered far from common sense. Here, 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 series of essays. Most people respond to the phrase “both/and” with polite agreement. It sounds cooperative and balanced. But that quick agreement often hides something important. When people say they support both/and thinking, they frequently mean that it should replace either/or thinking.
That framing recreates the very mistake it hopes to fix.
Either/Or Thinking AND Both/And Thinking are not competing ideas. They are interdependent capacities that serve different purposes. Treating one as superior immediately pushes us back into the pattern we are trying to understand.
Either/Or Thinking is indispensable. Surgeons must decide whether to operate or not. Judges must determine guilt or innocence. Pilots must decide whether to abort a landing or continue it. When safety, responsibility, and accountability are at stake, clarity matters. Boundaries matter. Decisions must be made.
Either/Or Thinking makes those decisions possible.
The difficulty appears when the same type of thinking is applied to tensions that cannot be resolved by choosing one side over the other. Some tensions aren’t problems to solve. They’re polarities to live with over time. When Either/Or Thinking is applied to those tensions, systems drift toward emphasizing one pole to the neglect of its interdependent partner.
That dynamic appears everywhere once you begin looking for it.
Certainty to the neglect of Discovery narrows learning.
Identity to the neglect of Unity fragments communities.
Innovation to the neglect of Wisdom accelerates change faster than judgment can keep pace.
Over time, the pattern becomes familiar. Something valuable gets more attention. Its counterbalance weakens. Eventually the imbalance starts to feel normal — even justified.
That’s exactly what that first session revealed, and what Barry’s work on Polarity Thinking has helped us see more clearly ever since. Some tensions are ongoing energy systems. They don’t disappear when solved, because they were never problems to begin with. They’re interdependent poles that have to be leveraged over time, not settled once.
More recently, I’ve been exploring what happens when several of these tensions operate at once — what we ended up calling Multarities (see And: Volume Two, Chapter 42). A family business isn’t one polarity. It’s a multarity. Immigration isn’t one polarity. It’s a multarity. Different polarities. Different altitudes. Same mountain. The more interdependencies we learn to recognize, the more accurately we can understand the systems we’re trying to strengthen. When several tensions start influencing each other, systems can stabilize in remarkable ways, or destabilize with surprising speed.
The essays in this series live inside that terrain.
One pattern has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
Many of the systems we’ve built reward fast decisions, clear boundaries, and confident conclusions. Those are genuine strengths when we’re solving problems. They become limiting when we’re navigating enduring interdependencies.
We see the same pattern across religion, where certainty can crowd out discovery; across national identity, where a strong sense of who we are can crowd out our sense of shared humanity; across environmental stewardship, where economic development and ecological care keep trading places as the neglected pole; and increasingly in our partnership with artificial intelligence. Much of what looks like an AI problem is really a mirror: it reflects and amplifies whatever patterns of thinking we bring to it, at extraordinary speed and scale. The better we get at recognizing interdependence, the wiser our partnership with AI becomes.
These are old tensions. What’s different now is how closely they interact. Religion, nationalism, environmental pressure, and advancing AI increasingly shape the same informational and political spaces — and when several of them lean toward Either/Or at once, they reinforce each other. Ordinary disagreement hardens into polarization, fragmentation, and distrust across entire systems.
That interaction is what makes this series necessary.
The essays that follow explore where this pattern shows up most clearly: religion, nationalism, environmental stewardship, and artificial intelligence. Each domain holds tensions that won’t resolve once and for all. Each asks for the ongoing work of holding interdependent poles over time.
The goal of this series is not to argue that Both/And Thinking should replace Either/Or Thinking. That would simply recreate the same mistake in reverse.
The goal is to explore how human beings—and the systems we create—can develop the capacity to use Either/Or Thinking AND Both/And Thinking wisely.
Either/Or Thinking gives us clarity. It allows decisions to be made, boundaries to be drawn, and responsibility to be taken.
Both/And Thinking allows us to remain in relationship with tensions that cannot be eliminated—tensions that must be lived with, learned from, and leveraged over time.
Without the first, we drift toward indecision.
Without the second, we drift toward rigidity.
Human flourishing requires both.
The irony is that this idea is hardly new. Variations of this insight have been present in human thought for thousands of years. What is new is how often modern systems forget it.
So the position I’m taking here may sound radical. It’s really just common sense — the uncommon kind, practiced deliberately in a world that keeps rewarding us for choosing sides.
This series is an invitation to practice something we’ve mostly forgotten how to do: recognize the enduring patterns already built into reality, and stay faithful to both sides of them long enough for wisdom to grow.
Recognition comes first. Wisdom grows through faithful participation. Wiser decisions follow.
Common sense. Uncommon practice.
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