More on Polarity Management

Since I am new to Polarity Management, I asked someone who is a pro to say more about it. Her name is Margaret Seidler, and she just published a book called Power Surge: A Conduit for Enlightened Leadership. Check it out at www.mypowersurge.com. Here is what she has to say:

Polarities are those dilemmas we face in many areas of lives, which if unrecognized and unmanaged as such, produce conflict. It could be conflict at home between parents and their teenagers as well as conflicts between nations.

My interest in polarities has really focused on intra-personal awareness. My theory is that the better we understand ourselves, and how our own motivational values drive us to think and act, the more effectively we can relate to others in our work and home lives. It's because Barry Johnson's Polarity Map(TM) makes the whole picture more accesible and visible.

Before I knew the polarity principles and map, I often came to situations with an "either/or" mindset, strong in my convictions and beliefs. It wasn't until 8 years ago that I learned about "both/and" thinking being a strong match for certain complex situations in life.

For decades, I was a "can do" manager, I valued getting the work done (Task focus), so whenever I came into a new job, productivity would shoot up and my boss would be thrilled...Only to find within several months that employees were now getting burned out and feeling under-appreciated for the hard work. Since hard work (Task) was my sole focus, I continued to emphasize for all to work harder and smarter! Next, employees started complaining that I didn't care about them, there was much talk around the water-cooler. Now productivity dropped due to those chats, long lunches and rising absenteeism.

What I learned was that I had to continue my strong focus on Task AND supplement that motivational value with something very different, yet complementary, Relationship focus. What a blind spot I had for so long! Once I incorporated both into my management approach, productivity was up and so was employee satisfaction.

Polarity Mapping can be done for yourself intra-personally, for teams, for organizations and nation-states.

President-elect Obama has framed all of his plans for hope under the rubric of this polarity.

Indvidual Responsibility AND Mutual Responsiblity

He recognizes that we need to focus on both simultaneously. Without either, we as country, are doomed to try and solve problems only to create new problems. We need a country that can see these very different views as a polarity vs. allowing them to polarize people.

www.mypowersurge.com

New Video: The Language Revolution

Check out this video about language, identity, and paradox.

Polarity Management

The universe (a dear friend, actually) pointed me in the direction of Polarity Management (www.polaritymanagement.com), which was developed by Barry Johnson, and is described in a book of the same name. Polarity Management is a way of looking at issues that we all face in life, at work, and at home in terms of balancing the polarities involved. For example, we all face the challenge of balancing work and pleasure, care for self and care for others, the need for privacy and the need for social time. Life works better when they can be balanced and managed than when you swing from one extreme to another. Simple concept, right? Now try applying it to your unruly teenager who wants total freedom from parental constraint. How do you help him/her find that balance between having freedom to do what s/he wants while maintaining responsibility to school, the family, and his/her extracurricular commitments? It doesn't have to boil down to "because I said so." You can actually determine what happens when you swing too far one way and then overcompensate by swinging too far the other way. And by actually discussing it with your teen, both your concerns and his/her concerns can be put on the table in a reasonable manner.

How does it work? Each pole of a polarity has an upside and a downside. You identify both for each pole and notice how you react when you get too much of a downside of a particular pole--you swing to the upside of the opposite pole. When you get too much of that upside, it flips to its downside starting the cycle to the upside of the opposite pole again. Notice how this happens in the political arena: when one party has been in power for a long time and has pushed its agenda too far, the tide turns and we elect them out of office and put the other party in. It just happened :) Fortunately, we just elected someone who indeed sees the necessity to balance the polarities.

This is about all I know so far, and it just scratches the surface. I hope to have a guest blogger share some more about this amazing methodology. Stay tuned!

Now on Hubpages Too

Although not specifically about paradox, I have started writing about language on Hubpages.com as well. To see my first hub, Creating Language for Peace, click here.

Paradox and the Transformation of Language

I will be presenting a paper this spring at the Conference for Global Transformation, and although it is only tangentially about paradox, a tangent can be a useful place to visit. Here is a little tease, to whet your appetite. A link to the whole paper is at the end.

TRANSFORMING LANGUAGE TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD

Lisa Maroski

To the extent that language shapes our world and our thought, a new type of reality cannot rely on a language grounded in the old type of reality, the one that we are transforming. What would a new type of language be like? What types of underlying presuppositions would it have?

Would a transformed world look much like the one we have now? Would we refer to things the same way, use the same words, reason using the same principles developed thousands of years ago by Aristotle? Or would a transformed world look, sound, and feel different? Would we interact with it differently? To the extent that the world our senses perceive will always be “just what’s so,” but the world in which we be is shaped by our language, then perhaps to transform the world concomitantly requires us to transform the language we use to describe and create it. Otherwise, are we simply pouring transformed wine into old conceptual bottles?

To read the whole paper, click here.