Published on: April 2, 2025 at 7:22 pm
Business leaders and managers know disruptive technologies such as AI are going to upend a significant portion of what their company does. But does that mean that they have to throw out much of what they currently do? Many executives struggle to deal with strategic plans for dealing with a future marketplace where AI, machine learning, and related technologies are omnipresent, while simultaneously maintaining their company’s current business model and core competencies.
Academy of Management Scholar Wendy Smith of the University of Delaware said that she’s done research on business leaders who’ve had to grapple with these kinds of tensions and issues balancing the present (the current technology and business model focused on short-term profitability) and the future (innovation and long-term sustainability).
“We teach leaders to face these dilemmas and make really clear choices and move on and be really consistent within their strategy, but that’s not what I found in the most successful leaders,” Smith said. “The leaders who did it well were able to hold both the past, present, and future—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—the short term and the long term, the existing world and the innovation, hold them in their mind simultaneously and commit to both at the same time, and that’s what we refer to as paradox.”
Such issues and tensions related to that paradoxical mandate come up in leaders’ meetings about strategy, innovation, and sustainability. But it also comes up in our personal lives and how we make career decisions.
“There are all these questions that emerge, and we tend to experience them as either/or tradeoffs, but underlying those binaries or paradoxical decision trees are the question of innovation and his relationship between the short term and the long term,” Smith said. “What we mean by paradoxical is that these dual experiences seem conflicting, or they are indeed in conflict with each other creating tension, but they’re also interdependent contradictions that define each other.
“And successful leaders can look at that paradoxical relationship, hold both aspects of it in their minds, and recognize that they have a much more creative, sustainable way of navigating these tensions, and that’s what we call both/and thinking, which is our lay language for explaining how leaders can accommodate the yin and yang, hold both opposing ideas in their mind, and embrace paradoxes.”
