Should I be fun or serious, professional or personal, familiar or honouring, disciplined or relaxed, stern or serene? Clearly these questions are framed in dichotomised way of thinking about the world. But is it even possible to drill down on each of these spectrums and conclude a position. I’d be willing to bet that even if we could somehow define that position, we’d find ourselves faced, constantly, with the need to update and correct our viewpoint.
Have you ever watched a child learning to walk, it’s rather exhilarating. Opportunities open up, the child experiences agency, excited adults watch on, and the child…falls over…lots. In fact, the more you watch, the more you realise that ‘walking’ is a euphemism for ‘falling, just enough to create momentum, but not enough to face plant’. A child loses their balance just enough to start them going, and then throws their other leg under them so they don’t hit the ground. Then they remain off balance, just enough to need their first leg to come swinging back under them to save themselves again. Eventually learning how to fall from one leg to the next, correcting the imbalance only when they want to come to a stop. That is walking for a child.
In fact, that’s movement for all of us. We move by allowing ourselves to be off balance in one direction. Before we shift our feet, correct our balance or carry on in that direction. Forward motion comes from being in a constant state of unbalance.
When it comes to thinking in frameworks, we’ve already discussed; the dichotomy, which is a fixed perspective of black and white; the spectrum, which is a more comprehensive understanding of any situation; now I want to talk about the tension. The tension is a framework that allows two concepts to be simultaneously held and even accepted, even though they might be seen as contrasting or even contradictory. It’s not something that is intuitively easy to understand so let’s look at some examples.
Learning is a good example. The process of learning actually requires multiple almost contrasting thoughts to be held at the same time. The two thoughts in a nutshell are; ‘I know about this subject’, and ‘I don’t know about this subject’. In order to motivate the learning process we need to lean more heavily on the ‘I don’t know about the subject’ leg just enough to start moving. But then we need to be able to pivot back to the ‘I know about this subject’ so that we can scaffold our new knowledge into what we already know, and manage our fall.
One without the others restricts us to no forward movement.
What about the pursuit of the work-life balance. This nirvana state where can somehow find the exact balance needed to be happy and productive. But it’s the ability to shift from one to the other that creates forward momentum. Sometimes we may need to put more time into work, other times we may need more put into life, whatever ‘life’ is. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and, and they are going to be in tension, but it doesn’t make one wrong and the other right, it means we need to be able to hold both in tension.
In our overly efficient way of dealing with situations today, we often think of things as simply problems to solve. Two people might find themselves in a debate trying to convince each other of the right solution. This would be nice, putting the position and problem to bed once and for all. This positional thinking doesn’t allow for the flexibility that our complex lives and worlds required.
Now let’s be careful not to over extend this either, I’m not talking about being pro-murder and justice-for-all at the same time. You could say that even the tension, as a way of thinking, must be held in tension with having a position. What we are saying is that sometimes life is more complex than the neat boxes we try to put it all into. I don’t think that means we make the goal to simplify life further, but rather get more comfortable with it existing outside our neat, fixed, categorical boxes.
This little three part series on frameworks isn’t designed to help you develop the best way of thinking. I’m not trying to push one framework over the other. I’m trying to expose you to a thought pattern that can help you see the water your swimming through. It’s designed to help you understand the way you’re thinking and to understand whether the way you’re thinking can at times be the limitation to the outcome you’re after.