The concept of paradox
How to lead when two answers are both true
There’s a French children’s game called Ni oui, ni non or “Not yes, not no”. One player asks questions, the other answers, and the moment a “yes” or a “no” escapes, the round is over. The standing joke is to open with “Do you want to play?”, because most people lose before the game has properly started.
What makes it hard isn’t the missing vocabulary, since a child has hundreds of other words available. The question arrives shaped for one of two answers, and the answer is already forming before you look for a third way to say it. Remove the two easiest words and you must think sideways to express what you mean.
Senior leadership runs the same exercise, without the fun.
In July I wrote about the language of growth mindset and the list of words my team and I have retired. The first swap on that list is “but” to “and”, because “but” erases whatever came before it while “and” sets both positions side by side.
In this article, I’m diving even deeper into “but” vs “and”.
The trap in the question
A paradox is two ideas that look like they cancel each other out, while both turn out to be true.
Either/or thinking is what many of us choose and it’s attractive because it resolves the tension quickly. Under pressure, with a room waiting on you, a decision that removes one of the two options feels like progress. It sounds like either I’m strong or I’m vulnerable, either I’m committed or I’m free, either we protect the standard or we provide room to move.
Each of those sentences forces a choice between two truths that belong together. The tension goes away and the quality of the decision goes with it, because you’ve resolved how it feels rather than the situation.
Both/and thinking does the opposite. It keeps two truths on the table at the same time, including the stretch of time where that feels unresolved, and it sounds like I am strong and vulnerable, I want freedom and commitment, we protect the standard and we provide room to move.
Choosing “or/but/either” feels like progress and it usually isn’t. The moment you settle on one (strong or vulnerable; freedom or commitment), you stop looking, because as far as your brain is concerned the question is answered and your attention moves elsewhere.
Keeping both options (strong and vulnerable; freedom and commitment) keeps the question open, so you carry on looking. What emerges is the answer that gives you both, which was never going to appear while you were busy picking a winner.
Where the alternative comes from
In Built to Last Jim Collins and Jerry Porras named this the “Genius of the AND”, set against the “Tyranny of the OR” (the conviction that you take one or the other and never both). Stanford scholar James March described leadership itself as a paradox, calling it plumbing and poetry, two demands that share no obvious common ground and both belong to the job.
The academic backbone came from Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis, who gave the practice its name. Their 2011 paper in the Academy of Management Review set out a theory of paradox in organisations and their subsequent book put both/and thinking into the hands of practitioners.
Brené Brown brings it all together in Strong Ground, where paradox sits at the centre of what she asks of leaders. Her instruction is to stay present with the paradox, resist the pull to resolve it early and let the next right step emerge from clarity rather than from anxiety.
That last distinction is the one I return to with clients. Many premature decisions are anxiety management wearing the costume of decisiveness.
What both/and asks of you
Staying with an unresolved position in front of people who are watching you for a signal asks a lot at exactly the seniority where you’re expected to look certain, which is why the resolution usually arrives too early.
Underneath that sits a trade most of us make without noticing, because either/or delivers speed while both/and delivers clarity, and the two arrive on different timetables. The pressure of the week rewards the first, whereas the quality of the decision depends on the second.
Which brings me back to language. The way you frame a choice determines the range of answers available to you, so the sentence changes before the strategy does.
Case study: 15 leaders in Indonesia
I facilitated a session in Indonesia with the CEO and global leadership team of a multinational consumer brand: 15 people, from markets that operate very differently.
They were tackling consistency vs autonomy: one standard everywhere, or enough local freedom for each department to work independently, while reaching its own specific KPIs? They had been here before, more than once, and people had always lined up behind one option or the other.
So I took the binary out of the equation.
For the length of the exercise, we played my version of Ni oui, ni non: nobody could argue for either option on its own; every contribution had to hold both halves.
Naturally, the first attempts were clumsy and several were unusable. That’s the mechanism rather than a flaw. Constraining the language forced the group sideways into territory the either/or debate had never reached, and the volume of ideas rose sharply once the obvious two were off the table.
One idea in particular was excellent, and nobody in the room had considered it across all the months they’d been going around it, because the debate itself had made it invisible.
What stayed with the team was the recognition that their strategic disagreements had been shaped by the grammar of the question they kept asking.
How to put it to work
Take an either/or sentence you’re carrying at the moment, the one that keeps arriving in the same shape. Write it down as you would say it to yourself.
Now rewrite that sentence with “and” in place of “or”, and sit with how false it sounds at first, because that resistance is the useful part of the exercise.
Then work forward from the new sentence: with both sides true, what does the coming week ask of you that it wasn’t asking before?
Run it with your team as well. Name the paradox openly, then rule that for the next twenty minutes no one argues for one half alone. Those first few minutes are the sound of a group finding a wider space to think in.
One question for the week
Which either/or are you currently treating as settled, and what becomes available to you when both halves turn out to be true?
With thanks to Brené Brown, whose work in Strong Ground this article draws on, and to Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis, who gave both/and thinking its name.
About the author
I’m Dorothée Oung, Executive Coach and Neuroleadership Expert. I work with senior leaders and executive teams to apply neuroscience in practical, results-driven ways. My goal is to guide emerging and established Neuroleaders through deliberate, evidence-based practices that elevate how they lead, think and show up in the world.
