Polarity Thinking as the Management Pitfall

People with binary thinking processes need to train themselves to gain true critical thinking,  systems thinking and multi-dimensional thinking competence, in order to improve leadership and management effectiveness and maturity.

In the industrial world with silo and knowledge scarcity, the majority of people were used to binary thinking with rigid polarity, take the side without deep understanding. However, in the real, physical, or business world, most relationships are nonlinear, the emerging digital world is hyperconnected, interdependent, and multipolar. Overly rigid polarity creates blind spots in decision making and causes management pitfalls to stifle collective progress.

Polarity thinking: In today’s “VUCA” business world, many leaders and business professionals still keep the old binary judgment habits in the industrial age, for many of them, people are either good or bad, friend or enemy; things are either right or wrong; win or lose; the state is either blue or red, and the world is either black or white; there are no shades in between. Either you call it “extreme thinking,” “binary thinking,” or “bipolar thinking,” such mindset is too rigid in the outlook; too judgmental in managing relationship; too static to sense the change; silo to think the big picture, and too linear to fit in the non-linear digital world. The extreme or binary thinking of only embracing the opposite sides and take the two-dimensional lenses to perceive the multi-facet world can limit your view to observe the world objectively; distort the picture of reality, restrict the scope of your thought process, and cloud your mind to make good judgment either in decision making or problem-solving.

Rigid polarity: Overly rigid polarity stifles innovation. The leaders or business professionals with binary thinking are resistant to listen to the diverse viewpoint; they have no intention to understand the other side of the coin; push the people to take the side, many times, they become the part of problems which they try to solve. In fact, the extreme or binary thinking of only embracing the opposite sides and taking the two-dimensional lenses to perceive the multi-facet world can limit your view to think creatively and make sound judgments. Innovation is simply about mixing something old with new, and developing a better way to do things. Being innovative means being open to see the commonality even at the seemly “polar opposite” viewpoint. Running a hybrid digital organization is about how to balance change and stability; innovation and standardization; existing structure and emerging digital platforms and tools to drive changes and catalyze innovation cohesively.

Group polarization: More often, the binary thinking just focuses on symptoms, and lack of systems thinking and nonlinear thinking skill, only catches the conventional understanding of content, not the contextual insight beneath the surface. Collectively, group polarization becomes one of the biggest pitfalls in decision making. Based on the varieties of industry studies, group polarization means that a group of people can make a more extreme decision than an individual. You'd think that a group would tend to democratize the diversified viewpoint and to moderate individual points of view. In fact, the opposite often occurs. In a phenomenon known as group polarization - the group of people more often “think the same,” deliberation can intensify people’s attitudes, lead to more extreme decisions. Usually, group-level binary thinking is caused by the homogeneous team setting and culture of inertia.

The multidimensional digital transformation provides impressive advantages in terms of the speed of delivering business solutions and the ability to adapt to changes. People with binary thinking process need to train themselves to gain systems thinking (to see how the parts connected with the whole), independent thinking (to leverage different resources for information collection, and more importantly how to abstract knowledge into insight and wisdom) and multi-dimensional thinking competence, in order to improve management effectiveness and maturity.

Posted in: Digital Pitfalls,Innovation,Lessons from Failures