I skateboard for the life lessons. Every Monday night while I was in business school, I laid my books to rest while I hurled my body at various obstacles. Between the emotionally supportive skoaching (that’s skate coaching) and the repetitive attempts to finally land a trick, I make sense of complex business theory through the lens of skateboarding.
Balance is crucial in skateboarding. Maintain it and you can pull of what seem like impossible feats of physics. Loose it and well, hope you are wearing your pads.
This was on my mind as I watched one of my favorite skateboarders, Leo Baker, tilt forward, slanting their skateboard to roll on just the front two wheels.
Without further investigation, it is easy to say that Leo has incredible balance. Watching closely, I notice that Leo is not still or passive, they actually make many small movements to maintain this precarious balance.
In the classic Harvard Business Review article The Balance Needed to Lead Change. Authors Kerry Bunker and Michael Wakefield advise leaders to bring six tensions into balance during times of transition.
Is balance about reaching and maintaining a non-moving equilibrium? My insights from skateboarding suggest balancing is not static, rather it is a series of responsive movements.
In organizations, people are constantly moving, making decisions, and oscillating between various points of view. Leaders seeking balance are better served by moving with a changing environment rather than attempting to arrive at a steady state.
Leaders can engage teams to notice and name collective dynamics. (Watch out for that rock!) Then, teams can make decisions to adapt and co-create effective responses.
A useful tool that invites groups of people to notice, name, and evaluate various states of being is Polarities. Polarity Management, conceptualized by Dr. Barry Johnson in 1992, is a method to describe the movement between seemingly opposite, yet interdependent states, such as Bunker and Wakefield’s six balances. Polarities imagine each pair not as a set of opposites, but rather two interconnected poles that are constantly in motion.
The balances Bunker and Wakefield list are:
Change and Stability
Urgency and Patience
Decisive and Empathetic
Optimistic and Realistic
Self-Reliance and Teamwork
Focus on Strengths and Trying Something New
From the perspective of Polarity Management, urgency and patience are both necessary at different points in time. Deciding when we have exhausted the usefulness of urgency (perhaps when people are feeling burnt out or skeptical of the need to continually move fast) and need to move to the patience (where people can integrate learning and develop consistency) is an awareness that everyone can develop.
When faced with complex changing environments, teams can use polarities to discern where their team is and decide if and when it is beneficial to move to a different state. To do this, first identify the two states of being that seem like opposites such as Optimism and Realism. Write one word on each pole of the polarity. Draw an imaginary line horizontally through the middle of both poles. Taking the top of the first poll, identify the advantages of this state.
For example, the advantages of optimism are an influx of creativity and inspiration. But too much optimism takes us to its underside underside: namely idealism or decisions made without data.
These circumstances can be minimized by moving up the polarity to the top side of realism where advantages include: grappling with difficult questions and admitting mistakes. Spend too long being realistic and your team might be overcome with fear, pessimism, and cynicism.
When teams are experiencing negative results due to an overemphasis on one way of working, teams and leaders can create better outcomes by moving to the upside of each pole.
The following polarities are adaptations of Bunker and Wakefield’s six balances along with early warning signs that every person, not just leaders, can use to diagnose where a team is in their precarious balance.
I make polarities for everything and included a blank template to try your own.
