Like fences, polarity thinking is a mental framework for taking ownership over entropy. Just as the north pole of a magnet doesn’t “beat” the south pole, recognizing polarities in life and work allows us to recognize when we need to approach challenges by bringing balance to the forces at play rather than beating them.
From Melinda Butsch Kovacic’s TED talk, What is Polarity Thinking?
<aside> 💡 Polarity: an interdependent pair values or points of view that are seemingly unrelated and different, competitive, or even opposing, but that meet each other over time to achieve outcomes that neither can achieve on its own.
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– Melinda Butsch Kovacic
In other words
Signal of a potential polarity: “if you have a cycle of problems and fixes and your fixes just don’t seem to fix and over time problems keep arising, then consider that you have a polarity and not a problem” – Melinda Butsch Kovacic
<aside> 💡 Polarities are not problems because they are not “solvable”.
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Examples of common polarities include