Introduction to Polarity Thinking

Living, learning and leveraging Polarity to build capability for working with paradox in our lives 

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Expand your meaning making

Within the LDF, an increasing comfort with paradox, contradiction and uncertainty is a sign of later stage development. Working with Polarity provides one route into this territory and a language and process for engaging with the tensions in our lives.

Paradox and Polarity thinking

We live with paradox, and much organisational life drives us to make choices between interdependent opposites, which are both ‘right’. Barry Johnson calls this kind of dilemma, a “Polarity” in which binary opposites feed each other, support each other and both answer "Yes" to the question “which of these is right?”.

Polarity thinking suggests we see these issues less as ‘problems to solve’ and more as sources of creative energy.

Some great examples include -

• On a personal level, we will each have preferences  for Candour over Diplomacy or Relationship over Task, but we learn to our cost if we overplay one at the expense of another
• In an organisation, we may have to choose between Integration and Differentiation/Specialisation but we need to put in place processes to compensate for structural choices
• On a national level, countries like the USA and UK are currently struggling with the dilemma of how to manage the tensions between “our country” and “our place in the world”
• At a global level, we have seen a year in which the tension of economy and health has played out

Interactive, practical workshop

This four-hour session provides an introduction to seeing Polarity in our lives and a process for actively working with these tensions in the interests of improvement and sustainability. During the session, we will work with a couple of different common polarities, with at least one personal and one more social, modelling the Part and Whole Polarity which occurs constantly in our lives. This will require some brief pre-work (30 minutes) so we have a live example to wrestle in the workshop.

For those who would like to take their learning further, there will be a second session in the Autumn.

Sophia Christie has been working with Polarity Thinking since 2002, when as a CEO she invited Barry Johnson to work directly with 100 NHS clinicians and managers in Eastern Birmingham. She has been an independent consultant since 2012 working largely on strategy and large group interventions for system change, with a growing interest in more intimate work and some long standing coaching relationships.

DATES:  24 June

TIME: 1300 - 1700 UK

COST:  £140 + VAT