Rethinking Leadership | Implications of polarity thinking for performance and change

In this episode of Rethinking Leadership, Roemer Visser speaks with Barry Johnson, author and co-founder of Polarity Partnerships. For more than fifty years, Johnson has explored a simple but far-reaching idea: not every leadership challenge is a problem to solve. Some are ongoing tensions to manage well.

That distinction shapes the entire conversation. In organizations, tensions are often framed as choices between opposites: more change or more stability, more autonomy or more coordination, more entrepreneurship or more control. Johnson argues that many of these are not either-or choices at all, but interdependent pairs that need each other over time.

Don’t treat tensions as problems

One of Johnson’s central insights is that leadership becomes more effective when leaders learn to distinguish between problems and polarities. Problems can be solved. Polarities cannot. They are recurring realities that require movement, adjustment, and balance.

As he puts it: “Solving problems and leveraging polarities is itself a polarity.” Rather than replacing problem solving, polarity thinking adds to it. Leaders still need either-or thinking when a situation calls for a clear decision. But they also need both-and thinking when two competing values are actually interdependent.

Johnson puts that clearly: “So with either-or thinking and both-and thinking, since they're a polarity, each have something positive to bring to our lives, and each without the other becomes dysfunctional.”

This matters because many frustrations in organizations come from misdiagnosis. When leaders try to solve a polarity as if it were a one-time problem, they often overcommit to one side and eventually trigger the downside of that very choice. The result is not resolution, but resistance, overcorrection, and a swing back in the opposite direction.

How do you know you are dealing with a polarity?

Johnson offers two practical questions.

First: is the tension ongoing?

Second: if you focus on one side for a while, will you eventually need to pay attention to the other side as well?

If the answer to both is yes, chances are you are not facing a problem with a final solution, but a polarity that needs to be managed. Johnson uses the most basic example imaginable: breathing. You can inhale for a while, but eventually you must exhale. The same is true, he argues, for many leadership tensions. Stability and change, employee interests and company interests, autonomy and integration: over time, both poles matter.

He adds a third consideration once the polarity becomes visible: what is the higher purpose that requires both sides? In other words, what can only be achieved when both poles are taken seriously?

Why resistance to change often makes sense

A particularly strong part of the episode is Johnson’s example of a global company that deeply valued autonomous business units. That autonomy made sense. Operating across dozens of countries required local responsiveness and decision-making power. But there was something missing from the organization’s values language: no equally explicit value around coordination, integration, or collaboration across the system.

Johnson pointed out the likely consequence. If the company overfocused on autonomy and neglected integration, it would sooner or later run into inefficiencies, internal competition, and siloed behavior. That turned out not to be a theoretical point at all. The company had already spent years trying to become more integrated, with little progress.

What changed the conversation was not pushing harder for integration. It was starting somewhere else. Johnson first made explicit how the company could protect what it already valued. Resistance, in other words, was not simply opposition to change. It was rooted in a fear of losing something important.

That shift is crucial. Once people feel that what matters to them is seen and protected, they are often much more willing to engage with the other side of the tension. This is where polarity thinking becomes especially relevant for leaders navigating change.

Every change hinges on stability

From either-or leadership to both-and leadership

Another example in the episode broadens this insight. At Harvard’s Learning Innovations Lab, Johnson worked with organizations that all placed themselves in the same spot: the downside of administrative leadership. These were companies that had become efficient, controlled, and well managed, but had lost entrepreneurial energy along the way. Their challenge was not to replace administration with entrepreneurship, but to recover initiative without losing the benefits of structure.

Again, the key was not choosing a side. It was asking a different question: how can we do both well? Once leaders see that both poles carry value, and that both have downsides when overemphasized, the task changes. Leadership becomes less about backing the winning side and more about building the capacity to work intelligently with interdependent demands.

Leadership as the capacity to hold tensions well

Taken together, the episode offers a compelling reframe of leadership. Strong leadership is not always about choosing decisively between alternatives. Often, it is about recognizing when the situation asks for something more demanding: holding two truths at once, seeing how they depend on each other, and resisting the urge to turn an enduring tension into a simplistic choice.

That is what makes polarity thinking so relevant for leaders today. Organizations face constant tensions between short and long term, local and global, efficiency and innovation, control and empowerment. These are not passing dilemmas. They are part of the ongoing reality of organizing. Leadership, then, is not only about solving what can be solved. It is also about learning to manage what must be lived with well.

About Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson created the first Polarity Map® and set of principles in 1975. Since then he has been learning and applying Polarity Thinking® with people and organizations all over the world. He continues to explore and promote supplementing Or-thinking with And-thinking to enhance our quality of life on our planet. With humility And self assurance, Barry is passionate about creating an international community of Polarity Practitioners who are dedicated to the study and application of Polarities in a variety of disciplines and situations. Barry’s newest publications, And: Volume One – Foundations and And: Volume Two – Applications represent what he and his colleagues have learned about And-thinking since his first book, Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems, came out in 1992.

About Roemer Visser

Host Roemer Visser is an expert on the human side of organizations and is Executive Professor and Academic Director of the Executive MBA at TIAS.

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