In today’s fast-paced world, leadership challenges rarely come neatly packaged. Whether you’re navigating cross-domain collaborations in healthcare, relations between government clients and contractors in a tight market, or innovation within a partner-driven firm, things can feel like a tangled mess. There are multiple players, shifting priorities, strong opinions, tight deadlines, and sometimes egos as well. Throw in some history or unresolved tensions, and it’s no wonder things can feel stuck.

As leaders, it is then tempting to want to fix this. We can do better – we are making this too complex! So we define a destination, add a little command and control, and turn our tried and true, linear problem-solving skills up a notch. And, lo and behold, things flow again! Unfortunately, the progress is often temporary. Like New Year’s resolutions – they work, but only for a while. Then ‘the system’ wins and we fall back into the same patterns we began with, the status quo restored.

When a challenge is predominantly complex and resists being fixed, we need a different kind of action, one focused on the here and now, rather than how things should be. This means creating the conditions for many things to emerge instead of rolling out a one-problem solution (often the leaders’ solution).

My colleagues Jennifer Garvey Berger and Keith Johnston suggest four categories of such actions in their book, Simple Habits for Complex Times:

• Taking multiple perspectives
• Asking different questions
• Seeing the system
• Safe to Fail experimentation

If you are facing a complex challenge and you would like to try out these different kinds of actions, please consider starting with Polarity Management. It is a practice that weaves together all four action types at the same time. 

We recently worked with a government tender team with representatives from procurement and technology. Preparing for a series of dialogues with candidate contractors, they wished to explore the tension between being open and ensuring a level playing field. Taking multiple perspectives and asking different questions helped them verbalize and map what was at stake for them. For example, the procurement team members were concerned that being too open with one contractor would lead to complaints from other contractors after awarding the contract. The technology team members, on the other hand, worried that by leaning too heavily into creating a level playing field, the dialogues would become rote and procedural, leading to low creativity in proposals and risks in the execution phase. Listening to each other and mapping the tensions out helped them to scan their present interactions with more nuance and free of blame. They agreed on a set of experiments that they would run during the dialogues to help each other realize the benefits of both being open AND ensuring a level playing field while avoiding the downsides. 

We’d love to learn about your experiences with making progress in this way. And please do let us know if you would like to explore how we might support you in trying this out!