Both/And Thinking with Marianne Lewis
03/15/23 • 57 min
In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Marianne Lewis. Marianne is dean and professor of management at the Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati having previously served as dean of Cass (now Bayes) Business School at City University, London, and as a Fulbright scholar. A thought leader in organizational paradoxes, she explores tensions and competing demands surrounding leadership and innovation. Marianne has been recognized among the world’s most-cited researchers in her field (Web of Science) and received the Paper of the Year award (2000) and Decade Award (2021) from the Academy of Management Review.
Marianne Lewis’s book (co-author with Wendy K Smith) ‘Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems’ was published in 2022.
0.00 Introduction
4.36 Can you give us an overview of your work?
5.22 How do you distinguish between tensions, dilemmas, and the paradoxes in our lives?
7.16 Why is it so important to be working on paradox right now for leaders?
9.13 Can you walk us through the four types of paradox that you identify and how we experience them?
14.01 How does either/or thinking cause issues for leaders and can you give us some examples of how that sets us up to fail?
19.10 The trench warfare, or the war of defences seems to be prevalent in politics right now. What do you think is causing that either/or thinking?
21.26 You describe a pros and cons list as being one of the mechanisms that encourages either/or thinking. What other mental shortcuts are leaders and others taking that encourages either/or thinking?
26.05 How do we enable both/and thinking?
34.58 You mention that it’s not easy to look at the assumptions that we should consider if we want to build this paradox mindset. Why is that and how have you helped leaders find a different way forward?
39.48 Knowing that people want to move away from negatively experienced emotions, what other tactics or approaches do you take with leaders to arrive at this alternative approach without moving away from those negative emotions?
46.20 Organisations are designed primarily to align resources with their goals and minimise risk. Can you tell us about how your research and ideas can help leaders think about structures to stabilise the organisation in the face of uncertainty?
50.33 Can you tell us about the research you’re doing into how individuals manage building a paradox mindset?
54.19 Did you find a difference in motivations behind various people’s experience with either/or thinking?
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Marianne Lewis. Marianne is dean and professor of management at the Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati having previously served as dean of Cass (now Bayes) Business School at City University, London, and as a Fulbright scholar. A thought leader in organizational paradoxes, she explores tensions and competing demands surrounding leadership and innovation. Marianne has been recognized among the world’s most-cited researchers in her field (Web of Science) and received the Paper of the Year award (2000) and Decade Award (2021) from the Academy of Management Review.
Marianne Lewis’s book (co-author with Wendy K Smith) ‘Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems’ was published in 2022.
0.00 Introduction
4.36 Can you give us an overview of your work?
5.22 How do you distinguish between tensions, dilemmas, and the paradoxes in our lives?
7.16 Why is it so important to be working on paradox right now for leaders?
9.13 Can you walk us through the four types of paradox that you identify and how we experience them?
14.01 How does either/or thinking cause issues for leaders and can you give us some examples of how that sets us up to fail?
19.10 The trench warfare, or the war of defences seems to be prevalent in politics right now. What do you think is causing that either/or thinking?
21.26 You describe a pros and cons list as being one of the mechanisms that encourages either/or thinking. What other mental shortcuts are leaders and others taking that encourages either/or thinking?
26.05 How do we enable both/and thinking?
34.58 You mention that it’s not easy to look at the assumptions that we should consider if we want to build this paradox mindset. Why is that and how have you helped leaders find a different way forward?
39.48 Knowing that people want to move away from negatively experienced emotions, what other tactics or approaches do you take with leaders to arrive at this alternative approach without moving away from those negative emotions?
46.20 Organisations are designed primarily to align resources with their goals and minimise risk. Can you tell us about how your research and ideas can help leaders think about structures to stabilise the organisation in the face of uncertainty?
50.33 Can you tell us about the research you’re doing into how individuals manage building a paradox mindset?
54.19 Did you find a difference in motivations behind various people’s experience with either/or thinking?
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
Previous Episode
How We Build Beliefs About Ourselves And Others with Dr Joe Barnby
In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Dr Joe Barnby. Joe is a computational neuroscientist, assistant professor at Royal Holloway in London where he leads the social computation and cognitive representation (SoCCR) lab, and the founder of Senscapes. Through his research, Joe is working to develop better theories of the brain and behavioural basis of social interaction, and how these might be used to explain and treat psychiatric and neurological disorders.
https://www.senscapes.com
0.00 Introduction
2.49 Can you give us an overview of your work?
7.28 Can you explain how these mathematical models are built?
10.28 What are you learning from this about people with an open mindset versus a fixed mindset?
14.36 In some of your recent work you mention that there’s been a shift in how neuroscientists and psychologists look at social cognition and how it operates. Can you take us through some of the underlying ideas in this shift of thinking?
17.42 What do we do with the output of this work?
21.14 What are the moral implications?
23.58 In the past you have described the possibility of being able to analyse the nature of an individual’s social threat from others enabling us to build healthier teams. Can you tell us about that?
26.15 When we think about how an individual makes sense of the world, they are triangulating between their physical, emotional and all the other senses that are creating this map of the world plus the predictive element of it. How do you start to make sense of that huge amount of complexity and where are we on the journey of being able to capture that complexity?
34.49 In your recent research, have you had any ah-ha moments in terms of making progress with those building blocks?
39.34 What are the key pieces of insight that someone listening could take from with them from this conversation?
41.42 Tell us about Senscapes.
46.29 Where will your research go in 2023?
49.35 Through the work that you’ve carried out, what have you learnt about yourself and how have you put those learnings into practice?
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
Next Episode
How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World with Dr Tim Palmer
This week on the Evolving Leader podcast, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Dr Tim Palmer. Tim is a Royal Society Research Professor in Climate Physics, he is a senior fellow at the Oxford Martin Institute Programme on Modelling and Predicting Climate and a professorial fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. Tim is a major contributor to improving climate models and is among the researchers who won the 2007 Nobel Prize for authoring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.
In October 2022 Tim Palmer's book ‘The Primacy of Doubt: From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand our Chaotic World’ was published.
0.00 Introduction
3.46 In your work we see what appears to be an intuitive approach to embracing uncertainty. Can we start there?
6.52 Is it true to say that our economic systems are experiencing more uncertainty and non-linear occurrences recently?
9.19 Can we talk about some of the most fundamental scientific concepts of uncertainty that you explore in the book, and how we might take some of that thinking to the challenges that we might be facing in running organisations?
12.46 If we recognise that there will always be uncertainties, but also imagine a world in the future where there might be unlimited computing power where we have the singularity and an abundance of senses, does this increase in knowledge take us closer to a world with no uncertainty?
18.44 Can you help us understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?
21.48 If you could go back in time to the 2008 financial crisis, could you use some of what you know and have learnt about uncertainty to moderate that somehow?
33.26 How widespread has the adoption of ensemble methods been?
35.13 Can we talk about ensemble methods, specifically focussing in on climate change? How has your work helped us to develop our current understanding of the world’s greatest challenge?
43.24 How do you see the science of uncertainty developing over the next decade?
47.34 Where do you see uncertainty sitting in the educational curriculum because currently it feels like it hasn’t been adopted into secondary education or across other fields?
51.04 Can you bring to life what a typical day looks like to you?
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
YouTube. EvolvingLeader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
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