Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Maureen: [00:00:00] Today we are at the International Leadership Association Conference, and I’m interviewing Barry Johnson. In 1975, Dr. Barry Johnson created the first polarity map and set of principles. The mission is to enhance our quality of life by supplementing quote or thinking with quote and thinking. So Barry, welcome.

Barry: Thank you very much Mau. I appreciate having the opportunity to talk.

Maureen: What do you mean by polarities in this and or thinking?

Barry: Many times when we experience a difficulty, any kind of tension or problem, we automatically assume, uh, let’s solve it. I mean, this makes a lot of sense. We do that in grade school all the way through graduate school.

We get difficulties and our calf is to solve them efficiently and effectively. What this often overlooks is a whole series of issues that are called in the literature paradox, dilemmas or polarities in which you have an interdependent pair, I think is the best [00:01:00] descriptor. Like, shall we, shall we centralize?

Or a better way to say it says, how do we centralize in order to get the benefits of system-wide coordination and system integration and decentralized in order to allow us to be more responsive? To, uh, to the local situation and the customer’s needs and to take initiative until the question is how do we do both of these things?

So we need to centralize and decentralize, and that becomes, uh, what we need to do for leaders. We need to be both clear and flexible. If we’re clear without being flexible, we’re seen as rigid. If we’re flexible without being clear, we’re seen as ambiguous. So the question for a leader is, how can Id both.

Clear and flexible, and that’s what we help people do is distinguish between those issues that are problems solved and those issues that are these ongoing tensions we call polarities.

Maureen: And I’m thinking of a ton of different examples [00:02:00] like individual freedom and national security.

Barry: Yeah, exactly. It’s a great one.

Maureen: And we’re facing these as organizations. The other one that comes to mind when I do strategic planning is why am I gonna do a plan if I’m not gonna stick to it? So that idea that I have a plan and yet I have agility.

Barry: Yeah. And the plan sort of fits with that, being clear and being flexible. Um, so we need, we need to be both planning full on the one hand and emergent.

On the other hand, how do you leverage that natural tension between being, planning full and predictive and getting things in place and be emergent and able to respond to, uh, things that happened that weren’t a part of the plan that, um, that you just need to be able to respond on the fly. And there’s obviously a natural pension between being planned and being emergent, and those organizations that can do and can combine those effectively.

Just much better off than those who think it’s all about [00:03:00] emergence or think it’s all about being good planners.

Maureen: This raises, uh, several questions, but the thing that comes most to mind is in this time of dramatic shift, this ability to understand and navigate the tensions and leverage them is paramount to organizations that are gonna thrive.

Barry: Yeah, absolutely. So the more rapid the change is in the environment or in the settings, which the system is, is functioning, is a nation state or the organization, the more rapidly things are changing, paradoxically, the more youthful it is, have some core values, some core centralized coordination efforts.

To hold onto, to support you as you move through the issue. As a matter of fact, one example of this would be aing. We, we talk about, uh, running white water as what happens when organizations get in a culture [00:04:00] that has a lot of dynamic change. They say it’s like being out in white water, and the way they describe that is as if whitewater is dangerous.

At one level it is, and that it, it’s sort of like, it, it’s overwhelming because you’ve got no, you’ve got rocks everywhere in the river. You don’t know what’s going on. But for somebody who, who has experience in whitewater kayaking, they actually understand what the energy systems are that are at clay on the whitewater.

They understand that actually you can just, if you see a big rock up ahead, what you know is there’s a back Eddie behind that rock and you can, with a kayak, you can slip into that back Eddie and sit there with waves on either side that are just roaring on either side of you. You can just sit and have lunch, but you have to understand how the river works and how this energy system works.

And so with turbulent times analogous to whitewater, if you understand what a whitewater kayaker knows about a river, if you understand how. How these patterns or energy systems work within the [00:05:00] organization and within the culture. Then you’re, you’re just way ahead of somebody who’s just, you know, doesn’t know a thing and is just finding themselves trying to survive.

Going through Whitewater.

Maureen: I’m imagining every leader who’s listening to this has a sense of those times when we stepped into something, didn’t necessarily realize it was whitewater until we got. Bounced out of the kayak.

Barry: Right. And, uh, tendencies, whenever we, as I mentioned, when we experience difficulties, is to try to solve it.

And what we’re suggesting is when you experience the tension, when you experience a chaotic moment or, or a lot of turbulent in the system, it’s very helpful to just slow down a bit, take and take a perspective in which you say, okay, within this, what might be some key polarities that need leveraging? And what are some problems we need to solve?

Because solving problems and leveraging polarities is itself a polarity. We need to be able to do both.

Maureen: You know, having been bounced out of a whitewater raft and kayaks on occasion, [00:06:00]the only thing that went through my mind is how do I not die right now? Mm-hmm.

Barry: It’s good to understand how the river works.

If you’re trying to make sure that you don’t drown in that river,

Maureen: and one of them, I came back in incredibly bruised and unable to wear shoes for a while. So carrying out the metaphor, if we don’t understand the energy of the system and we don’t have someone working with us who does it is dangerous.

Barry: Yes, it tend, it is dangerous for the, for the people in the organization, and it’s dangerous for the organization in terms of its ability to thrive.

Uh, you, you, uh, talked about the front end title of this program about thriving organization. Um, in order to thrive, organization needs to leverage polarity, whether they’ve ever heard of the word polarity or paradox or dilemma. Research, as you mentioned, is clear. Those who have somehow through their life experience, through their intuition, have learned to do what I call parallel thinking, to be able to, for [00:07:00] example, Singapore International Airlines is a wonderful example.

They decided early on that they were gonna be the most cost affected airline in the industry and also be the highest rated in terms of customer service. Now, that’s an interesting assumption that you don’t have to trade off. In order to, in order to reduce costs that you have to, uh, trade off and, and sacrifice with customer service, they were making the assumption that you can do those.

And they have done both the lowest cost airline in the industry and they’ve 21 years in a row been seen as the best airline to fly. But that combination is only available to the degree. You assume you can do both, and then you build in processes in your organization in which you pursue them both, uh, at the same time.

Maureen: That just sounds like a higher level of complexity and thinking is required.

Barry: Yep. At one level it is. However, what’s interesting is when you understand polarities and how they work, it is a relatively simple system. [00:08:00] We’re working with and what you’re trying to do with each system. So if we go back to a leader who is needing to be both clear and flexible, they can look at what can I do to make sure I’m clear and how can I pay attention to being flexible as well?

And so over time, they can pay attention to both of those, but makes things complicated, uh, often for people, for leaders. Is that they see all the variables they’re dealing with as if they were independent variables. And that’s how you get overwhelmed. But when you dislike seeing, uh, looking at whitewater again, to use that metaphor and seeing it as just a bunch of a whitewater wage and a bunch of rocks, and it doesn’t make any sense to you, but when you can see the pattern of a water flow.

You can understand how to use that water flow and that energy in your favor, so, so it actually simplifies what can be seen as quite complicated by seeing underlying pattern in the midst of what looked to be entirely independent variables.

Maureen: To bring in another [00:09:00] buzzword from a different author is Balcony View, the Ron Heifetz work.

It sounds like seeing the system is stepping out of my framework, taking a step back or parascoping out, or however you language that, and looking at not just my piece of the system, but the overall system, which could be the industry or. Or the company within how we fit across nations even.

Barry: Yeah, exactly.

And so, uh, that, that getting that balcony view, it’s also helpful to know what you’re looking for, uh, from the balcony. Another metaphor that I often use is that, that problem solving, we need to teach problem solving. That’s basic. We’re not about any suggestion that that sort of, that Anne’s thinking and leveraging polarities is somehow superior or better than basic problem solving.

And or you may need to make either our choices. On the contrary, we’re saying that actually both of them are [00:10:00] necessary. And if we think of the of, uh, problem solving is teaching our kids to swim. We teach our kids to swim. What we’re doing is we’re solving the problem. What happens if they get into water over their head?

They, ideally, they might have a life jacket, but if they’re just swimming on the beach or something, uh, if they fall into a pool, for example, in the water over their head and they don’t have a life jacket on, yes, they can know how to swim. They’re just much sacred around water. So we teach our kids to swim, and it’s a good problem solving strategy.

You’re in water over your head, well just learn to swim. But learning to swim will not help you. If you are caught in a riptide going out into the ocean. And what happens with that with a riptide is the water’s breaking on the shore. And rather than going straight back, it’s, it’s going along parallel to the shore and approaching from two different sides, and then it’s going out into the ocean and it creates the river out into the ocean.

And if you happen to get caught in one of those, of course you have to be able to swim or you’ll drown. But [00:11:00] even if you can swim, you’re comfortable in water over your head, if you don’t. Have an appreciation that you’re caught in a riptide. You might try to swim directly to shore, which is trence, like swimming upstream in a river, and you could drown even though you can swim.

So what helps you from that BNY approach that you talked about is if you understand how a riptide works, you appreciate that at the river. Going out into the ocean is all you have to do is. To the shore, if you will, of the river that’s in the ocean. So you swim parallel to the, to the actual shore. You get on the edge of this spring in the ocean that’s going out to sea.

Once you get there, you can now swim back in. So it wouldn’t be advisable to tell somebody who’s caught in a rip tide to just swim faster or swim harder or swim. You need to do is say, no. You can swim. You just have no need to know where to swim because you need to understand from the balcony this energy system that you’re in.

So it could be a death trap to a swimmer. If they’re caught in this riptide, if they don’t [00:12:00]understand the riptide, but it becomes a play thing when you do understand it. So this is how surfers auction with waves. They find that rip current that learns out through the waves ’cause it actually, the rip is sort of cut through the waves so you can ride your surfboard out on the rip current and then, and then go over to the edge of that risk current and ride the waves back in.

So what is a desk track Push some is a play thing for others. And, and the kind of passion that organizations experience when they fight over should be decentralized cephalic. They’re fighting over a polarity that they need to leverage and, uh, trading over it is not gonna serve the company at all well, but when they see that we can do both, we can centralize in these ways and we can decentralize in these ways that helps them in fact, compete with, outperform any organization that assumes you have to do one or the other.

Maureen: So understanding these energy cycles could be my business cycles as an example.

Barry: Yes. As a matter of fact, [00:13:00] a good example of this is, um, the research by Mary INE on complex adapt system in, in the book that, that, uh, she wrote with Michael, I’m forgetting his last name right now, but in the book that Fay wrote in the summary chapter, they talk about how all organizations in their beginning start off.

On an entrepreneurial kind of initiative, they’re creating something new, very exciting, and they get that. And so from a ity perspective, they’re getting the benefits or the upsides of entrepreneurship. However, over time, the entrepreneurial orientation finds itself wanting for some kind of coordination and integration of all this creative energy.

And so they move, they experience the limits of entrepreneurship alone, so they move toward the upside of the other pole, which would be kind of administrative leadership. Let’s, let’s get all this energy coordinated and, and, uh, reduce redundancies and, uh, you know, take advantage of what we have created here.

And so you get into this administrative [00:14:00] leadership. However, if you focus on administrative leadership over time, you experience the limits of this administrative focus in that it doesn’t have good entrepreneurial energy, but you planned yourself wanting to go to move back to the entrepreneurial coal.

And the problem that they discovered is. When you move to the administrative’s poll, our carpenter is the chief E, the Chief Executive Officer, the chief financial officer and the chief operating officer of that company often are brought in with, because of their administrative strength, so that the company gets overpowered at the cop with people, how administrative and strength and as you, as you go to try to move towards Lee, establishing that entrepreneurial spirit that started you in the first place.

The resistance showed up from the administrative folk because the seer is, they’re thinking either we’re gonna be administrative or we’re gonna be entrepreneurial, and so they use their power to stop the [00:15:00] company from actually moving toward and Reem embracing that entrepreneurial pull.

Maureen: You were talking about the polarity map and many people haven’t seen it, so can you explain the quadrants and the movement and how that might look for someone who’s not well versed in your work?

Barry: You could imagine, uh, two poles, two circled that you will on a piece of paper. And then if you draw an infinity loop around the two poles, so it crosses between them and it goes rounds up. So the infinity loop represents this energy system that flows, goes from the downside of one pole to the upside of the other, and then wrapped around it, and you get that downside and then you get the upside of the other.

The simple metaphor would be inhaling and exhaling. As you inhale, the energy goes to the upside of the inhale full and you get oxygen there. Over time, if you keep inhaling long enough, you experience the downside of inhaling, which causes you to move, exhale. So you go to the upside of exhaling, which is helpful, but then you get to the [00:16:00] downside as inhaling alone.

You experience the limits of that and you need to then exhale again so that osculation goes back and forth somewhat like inhaling and em.

Maureen: So it’s a natural system. And to be healthy, we need to integrate both poles by our movement between them. So that’s the leveraging of tension you talk about,

Barry: right?

You wanna maximize both upside and minimize the downside. Yeah.

Maureen: Can you give the example of how one balances and leverages both ends of those polls to keep the business both running efficiently, but also feeding the entrepreneurial energy into a more structured business?

Barry: What we would do is we would put entrepreneurial and administrative at the two polls.

Then we would work with the client for their particular, and they would identify what are all the benefits of, of, uh, the entrepreneurial poll of being entrepreneurial. What are all the benefits of being administrative, you know? Um, [00:17:00] and then you’d look at what happens if you overfocus on entrepreneurial, what are those downsides, if you will, and what happens if you overfocus on administrator to the neglective entrepreneurial?

And once you create a polarity map. Then you can go right in with the client to say, okay, what are, what are we doing? Or could we be doing as action steps to get the best of the, uh, administrative poll and what could we do? Are we doing, or could we be doing to get the best of the entrepreneurial poll?

Then the other steps we look at are how would you know early that you’re getting into the downside of one pole or the other? We call these the early warning, but that allowed you to systematically. Address as a group to address. How can we get the best of both of these? Minimize the downside of each.

Maureen: Intuitively, it makes sense that I would create this map and identify for my own company where are we being entrepreneurial. But if I do too much of that, I go off the rails. Where am I being too structured? I hired a [00:18:00] COO to help keep me from being too entrepreneurial. But if he and I are not balancing.

Then we could become too structured. And so now I would, if I were doing this for my own company, start to look at the early warning signs for either one of us exerting our energy too strongly without keeping it balanced.

Barry: Yes. And it’s a dynamic balance. Uh, but that’s a, that’s a good description of, of, of what you would do.

And the assumption is that you can do both. That’s what helps you do it both. Uh, you both respect what each brings to the table. You’re bringing some entrepreneurial energy. He or she is bringing some, you know, that administrative coordinative energy in the question. There’s a natural tension between them.

So the question becomes how do we leverage this tension in a way that create the virtuous cycle between the two of us rather than a vicious cycle where we, in our fighting with each other, it undermines each of us and undermined our company.

Maureen: I like that example. You’ve done this globally [00:19:00] with several organizations.

Can you give some examples?

Barry: Sure. One is, uh, uh, David Wintergreen, who was, at the time that I met him, he was the, the, uh, chief Information Officer for the US Navy. And, um, I was working with, with senior naval officers at the Monterey Post graduate school, Naval Post graduate school. And he wasn’t a part of a training, but I had dinner with him and some other officers and we just spent the meal ’cause I was gonna be presenting toity thinking the next morning.

And so they were asking me question. He didn’t respond at all. He just watched me respond to their questions and he said afterwards, he said, Barry, I’m sorry I can’t come tomorrow, but I’d like to maybe give you a call. And I said, that’d be great. So about three months later, he calls me and he’d just been promoted to be the Deputy Chief Information Officer for the whole Department of descent.

He had discovered that he was, you know, moving to the Pentagon, trying to get his feet on the ground for his new job he could bury. We’ve got two groups that are really at each other’s throat, which is [00:20:00] often the way polarities show up. One group, he said it our thing, we have to have good information sharing because we don’t have good information sharing.

We’re gonna have another 9 1 1. Which was in part of a problem because we had information that wasn’t adequately shared. We can’t serve and protect without good information sharing. He said, there’s another group that is says we have to have information security. If we, we can’t serve as tech unless we have good information security.

Otherwise the enemy will get the information. He said, Barry, these two groups are trying to protect the nation from the other group. Is this one of those polarity things? And I said, I think,

Maureen: is this one of those polarity things? That’s a great question.

Barry: And so, and she said, well, well, would you and Barry Fruit retired naval officer from, uh, from California who would invited me into the first place should, but the two you come and held, me and my executive team get a handle on this ’cause it’s not serving and protecting, uh, our country by fighting over these two issues.

So we went in and we did, as I described, we, [00:21:00] we generated with them a map. We looked at action steps, an early warning. We assess how well we, they were doing with us, which was not very well. And then they came up with action steps, an early warning to support them in going forward. And, and David used that map, shared that with, uh, wherever he went to make his, uh, his presentations, talking about the Pentagon, working the Department of Defense, working as an integrated system around, uh, information, uh, sharing and information security.

Correct. One example, another one is the Charleston Police Department. Whereas their key polarity was enforcement and engagements. It was built into their strategic clan. We need to escort the law, thus seen as the police department’s job, but we can’t do good enforcement without quality engagement that the community, so how do we both enforce the law and engaged the community?

Another one was with the Republic of South Africa. I was there and I was, uh, consulting with the woman who was in charge of having English. The common language throughout all South [00:22:00]Africa. Now there’s 14 national languages, I think 12 or 14 national languages in South Africa. So the push for having English or the common language got a lot of assistance until she switched and called and identified it as a polarity.

Were not asking you the ldo of your, what they called mother tongue. So the polarity they wrote up was mother tongue and English. How do we both can maintain and support the use of Mother Tongue and have English of the common language? Both as an integrating function within South Africa, but also as a connecting language for South Africa with the rest of the world.

Maureen: I assume in listening to your language and listening to the case studies, that in many cases when one points out that this is a polarity and that both are required, so the example you gave with national security and specifically security and sharing. When you point that out, are people able to understand that it’s no longer us versus [00:23:00] them, but that both play important roles in meeting the overall security objectives?

Often they are,

Barry: yes. It helps if you have a couple of examples of things like activity and rest or inhaling and exhaling that are obvious interdependencies, but, uh, often they will see the need for both, especially if you can engage them in creating the mat. So that in the map you’re seeing what are both of these upsides?

And all of a sudden both of them have a place to stand, which is, well, this is what I value. And the other thing, well, this is what I value, actually, it’s pretty clear. We need to value both of these things. So it is possible relatively quickly to see an issue, to have an issue shift from something that’s seen as an either or issue.

And to recognize that this is one of those where both end orientation is gonna be more useful.

Maureen: This seems phenomenally useful in an organization that’s in conflict with itself when people are seeing each other as the enemy, [00:24:00] rather than seeing that these are just two sides of breathing in, breathing out that their tensions, while we need to balance the tension and continue to recalibrate the importance of sharing versus security.

That that’s an ongoing leveraging balancing act that never goes away.

Barry: Exactly. It never goes away because, uh, four qualities of all polarities is, first of all, they’re unavoidable. Secondly, they’re unsolvable in that you can’t choose one pool as an ultimate pollution. The other thing is that they are indestructible.

The nice thing about them is you can tie a strategic plan to a few key polarities, and even if you don’t do it so well, they’re still there for you to work. The other thing is that that energy is unstoppable, but it’s the makings of a revolution. If you try to sit on one pole for too long, as an as an organization, you just become vulnerable to a more violent self-correction, but it will [00:25:00] self-correct.

Maureen: That’s where I need good early warning signs to realize when I’m slipping beyond. And so let’s use the security versus information sharing versus information security. If we are not sharing, I’m assuming then there are, there would be a terrorist or bad guy event and we realized that one agency had the answers and didn’t share it with the other.

Barry: Yes. And hopefully you have one these that are earlier than that. That would be a late morning, those consequences. But you’re right in terms of yes, what you would look for is, and you trust the people who are doing this. So I trusted the executive team that was in the room to think, okay, what would early morning look like that we had over-focused on information security to the neglective information sharing.

And it’s like, what would be those very early warnings that would let us know that we’ve been so tight on the security, we haven’t neglected adequate sharing and we’re in trouble.

Maureen: So understanding the maps [00:26:00] seems like important work for leaders, maybe even in the strategic planning process.

Barry: Yes, absolutely.

And one of the things that we, that we try to have people shift from when they, when they start talking about polarity rather than use, versus, we encourage people to use the word and because it stimulates in the mind the possibility that, well, both of these could happen. When they use verses, it tends to shift people into the assumption of one or the other.

So we, we encourage you to use and rather than, or or versus not either of those. If you are talking about a polarity.

Maureen: If we think of our political structure, we do this pendulum swing, extreme right, extreme left, and the correction ends up being we miss some of the virtuous stuff and we end up spending a lot of time in the downside.

And so part of the gift of this framework is it allows us to avoid the whiplash maneuver and the. Overcorrecting and [00:27:00] overemphasizing time on the negative part. So at this point then, let’s look at the polarity of populism versus globalism and how we are seeing in the US we’re seeing in Germany, we’re seeing with the uk, we’re seeing Catalonia try to withdraw from Spain as only a few.

Can you walk us through on a polarity map? What that looks like and things that we as leaders might be able to leverage from that walkthrough.

Barry: This polarity is some version of what I call the part hole polarity, where you’re talking about a part of the spen, and the part could be like, uh, Catalonia within.

Spain, or it could be the UK within the European Union, or it could be the United States within the United Nations. But when you’re focusing on the part of part whole polarity, what parts want is the freedom to express their uniqueness and to take initiative without having to check with the whole, those who are advocating for the whole, [00:28:00] they want bounce that freedom off with some, uh, kind of equality between these parts.

Make sure they’re being treated equally. The uniqueness of each part. Uniqueness of the uk, for example, within the European Union. That uniqueness, you wanna bounce off with some kind of connectedness. How are we all connected within the European Union? And then the initiatives for cart, the initiatives for the uk, for example, the CAKE Initiative, without having to check with the European Union.

There’s a natural tension there between the European Union, which was designed as a way to create some synergy. Among all the countries in the European Union. So there’s a natural tension between those two. And it shows up within the organization between different departments and the organization as a whole.

And we a natural tension between, between the shows up at every level of system from within a small organization. To, uh, a country within the United Nations, for example,

Maureen: we would see that in a company when departments are competing that [00:29:00] marketing wants something and finance wants something else, or divisions different p and l groups where we made more profit this quarter and why are we carrying you,

Barry: right?

Right. I was brought into a bank, a very large bank, and they wanted me to deal between two departments, which was sales and risk management. Sales is trying to get money, you know, in the community to make money off the money and risk management is trying to make sure it doesn’t go down a rabbit hole. So they’re, they’re, they were both trying to save the banks from the other, from the other department.

So there obvious natural pensions. This power whole thing shows up even at, at the level of the family. So if you think of, of, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, there’s this story of Joseph, 12 brothers, give one brother a fish coat and see what happens. I mean, you get sold into slavery. This is what happens when you overfocus on a part and their uniqueness without paying attention to making sure there, there’s some sort of equity between these parts.

So also capitalism, [00:30:00] socialism. Exactly. That The macroeconomic struggle during the, during the whole Cold War was between, between socialism and capitalism. And that fight itself can be seen, to your point, as a Polaris, that needs leveraging. Rather than a problem to be solved,

Maureen: and I try to avoid politics, but it’s hard to miss that these polarities are playing out all over the place with healthcare and tax, not just in the US but globally.

Barry: Yes, absolutely. We’re dealing with it more or less well, not that we, uh, that these polarities, the polarities have been in play all the time. I think a democracy, for example, a well-functioning democracy is better suited to leveraging polarities than a dictatorship is because the problem with the dictatorship is that that the dictator, whether it’s a dictator or the group or the dictator of an individual, what happens is the dictator, whatever poll the dictator prefers.

Which who [00:31:00] stand up for the other poll, which is absolutely necessary, can the kills or disappear or whatever. So you end up creating an inability to oscillate back and forth between the two polls. Now democracies. Have built in mechanisms for self-correcting. It’s called an election or an impeachment. So without having to cause the revolution, you can self-correct, you know, a democracy that’s well-functioning can self-correct around key polarities that the, that the nation state is dealing with.

Maureen: With democracies, if we are seeing these again as problems to be fixed, then we become entrenched on my guy or my woman, needs to win and beat you and keep your people and your policies more specifically at bay so we can save the country. And it seems like that’s a lot of what’s going on right now with this entrenched right and entrenched left that we are not leveraging.

The oscillation [00:32:00] we’re in fear and, and you talk about this, that there’s a right and a wrong, and we’re both convinced you call it a false choice. And to each side we see it as obvious. Of course, you, you should have voted for my person and the opposing side. Things that I’m an idiot for seeing it differently, and it’s often played out to that extreme rather than looking at the oscillation.

So can you say more about this idea of false and obvious choices?

Barry: Yes. For example, um, if you look at deregulation and regulation. Again, it’s a part whole polarity. We, we need to deregulate as much as possible to support entrepreneurial initiative, and that’s the capitalist side, if you will, entrepreneurial initiative and, uh, free people up to, to not be burdened by big government.

But we also though we need to have enough regulations to protect the common good from abuse by those who might concentrate power in that process of, of the [00:33:00] deregulation. So we can look at that, that, uh, at deregulation and regulation as in fact not an either or issue, but how do we regulate enough to protect the common good and deregulate enough, uh, to allow for entrepreneurial initiatives.

And that needs to be seen as the polarity and, and the early warnings become very useful unless you know you’ve over-focused, you’ve irregulated too much or you’ve regulated too much. Early warnings can help us. Address that effectively over time.

Maureen: So this is akin to the example you gave with the bank, where we’ve got risk and we’ve got investment, and both sides are important.

Yet, if I’m in the bank and you’re the enemy, ’cause you’re doing the opposite thing, I’m, I’m moving into this false choice,

Barry: right? It becomes a false choice and it becomes a vicious cycle. But the natural tension between the two groups can become a vicious cycle as we both. Complain about each other’s downside, if you will.

All the pointing becomes, I’m pointing in your [00:34:00] downside, you’re pointing at my downside, which is all true. There is a downside to each pole, but what that gets you caught in is a trap of just accusing each other and defining each other in terms of our downside. But what you need to do that the polarity is actually you need to somehow.

After both upsides and point to them and say, how do we get the benefit of, if you will, regulation and the benefits of deregulation? That’s a polarity question, rather than fighting over whether we’re gonna regulate or deregulate.

Maureen: So let’s then talk about another one that that is, I think fresh. In the public discourse, and I wanna use Germany as the example of refugees ’cause that that has happened over the last few years and other countries are now facing it.

What polarity is that and how do you navigate the tension rather than making refugees the enemy?

Barry: Well, I think, but then, um, a friend of mine, uh, Michael Bootman from Germany, who’s done a lot of cross-cultural work and shared that, that an earlier, uh, workshop [00:35:00] was in the conference, and then he defined the two pole as core culture for Germany and welcoming culture and Germany as a reaction to, you know, it’s, uh, it’s a tragic, uh, era During the Third Reich is as a culture, you know, they’ve, they’ve, they wanna be extremely welcoming.

And they were at the And when people first started coming as refugees, and they were so welcoming that they weren’t actually being clear about their core culture and being clear about what was required in order to be functioning well within the German culture, and that they weren’t even checking people who were arriving on the train, and it became overwhelming.

So they over-focused on being a welcoming culture to the neglect of holding onto their core culture. What happens is then you get the downside of that and you end up with a flip where they end up reaffirming their core culture and now blaming the, um, you know, the immigrants who were coming in, the refugee who were coming in, um, out of their fear of losing [00:36:00] their core culture.

You can see that as a polarity. Then again, you can be more intentional about both being welcoming and support your core culture. It doesn’t have to be an either or strike.

Maureen: This is another illustration of virtuous cycle or the negative side of not paying enough attention to the early warning signs and getting into the vicious cycle.

Barry: Yes, it’s a great example and it’s happening at a lot of places that you mentioned, Mike.

Maureen: Let’s move into wrapping up. Barry. Can you give us, you have an assessment on your website, you have a book coming out, and you have contact information. So for listeners who have heard something that they would find valuable, and there’s so much more we could do hours more of conversations with Barry to talk about vertical development and other topics and how polarities support.

Port all of this. I really do encourage people to dive more into his work. So why don’t you give us the quick two minute rundown of how to reach you. [00:37:00]

Barry: It’s very simple. You just go to www.polaritypartnership.com. It says P-O-L-R-I-T-Y, and then partnership. It’s all one word, P-A-R-T-N-E-R-S-H-I-P-S.

www.polaritypartnerships.com and uh, the access to my book is there and access to our assessment. We think that have, being able to assess polarity is very helpful in terms of an ongoing leveraging them. You need to assess, well, how well are we doing and how might we self correct over time? So that’s where we think it, it’s neutral and since it’s web-based, it could, uh, work at any level of system globally.

It’s, uh, if that were desired to put example by a multinational or a city could use it. For example.

Maureen: Great. So I can go out on your site and get a hold of it.

Barry: Yes, you can.

Maureen: Cool, Barry, thank you very much. Anything you wanna say in closing?

Barry: Well, I just want to thank you for getting me the opportunity to share polarity, uh, [00:38:00]thinking with others and just appreciate the opportunity and the conversation.

Thank you.

Maureen: Thank you so much, Barry, and hopefully we will extend this conversation into other topics in the near future.

Barry: That’d be great.

Maureen: Thank you.