Both-And Thinking, And Much More, With Wendy Smith

We live in a world of paradoxes. When we especially face competing demands, we easily slip into either-or choices. But why do we have to choose one over the other? Isn’t there a way to overcome these challenges without having to give up something? This episode’s guest says there is—through both/and thinking. J.R. Lowry is with Wendy Smith, the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and the faculty director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, at the University of Delaware. Wendy has co-authored a book called Both/And Thinking, where they explore the nature of the tensions we experience and how we can use them to be productive rather than stumble over them. In this conversation, she shares the idea that led her to write the book and the insights they have gathered to help organizations struggling to take the step towards innovation, diversity, and inclusion. Why do we suffer from either/or thinking? What does both/and thinking look like? How do we navigate the paradoxes in life? Tune in to find out Wendy’s answers and more!

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/wendy-smith/

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Both-And Thinking, And Much More, With Wendy Smith

My guest is Wendy Smith. Wendy is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and the Faculty Director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware where she has worked for years. She has earned a number of awards for her research, including the most cited paper in the past few years and the Decade Award.

Wendy obtained her PhD in Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School where she first began investigating paradoxes. Her work focuses on strategies that leaders and senior teams can employ to effectively respond to opposing and often contradicting challenges. She also spent time as a research fellow at the University of Cambridge and has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Political Science from Yale University. Wendy, welcome. Thanks for doing the show with me.

Thanks for having me.

I appreciate you doing this. Let’s start with your book, Both/And Thinking, which you published in 2022. Can you give the audience a brief overview of your book?

Here’s the bottom line. In this book, I and my co-author and longtime colleague, Marianne Lewis, argue that we all face tensions, competing demands, and challenges every day in our lives from the minuscule challenges to the large strategic tensions that we feel in our organizations. It’s not if we face tensions but how. This book is an exploration of the nature of the tensions we experience and how we can use them to be productive rather than stumble over them.

You and Marianne have known each other for a long time. How did the two of you first meet? What prompted you to decide to write the book together?

I like to say that I stalked her. She doesn’t always agree with that verb. I was doing my PhD. I was at Harvard Business School. I was exploring this idea of paradox, which is the underlying concept that informs how we think about tensions. There weren’t a lot of people writing about paradox in organizational behavior, organizational theory, and leadership. She had written a brilliant paper that was published in our top journal and then won the award for Best Paper of the Year.

I read that paper and thought, “I want to know everything this woman knows.” I emailed her and said, “Can we please meet at our conference?” We met, and we like to say the rest is history. We started talking, and there were so many cool ideas that started to emerge from that. I am a huge fan of the value of reaching out to people, particularly when you are interested in things they’re interested in, and inviting them to the conversation.

That’s how the two of us got connected. I reached out to you because I was interested in the work that you were doing, and here we are. I‘m curious to hear how the book has been received. What’s surprised you positively or negatively about this post-publishing period that you’ve had?

Maybe the most exciting part is that it has been fun. Writing a book is vulnerable. It does feel like you’re bearing your soul to the world because if you write a good book, then you are sharing something very important to you. That’s a vulnerable task to have people read it and say, “This impacted a decision that I was making. It has shifted the way that I lead my team.”

Marianne is the dean of her business school. She shared it with the entire administration of the university. They have qualitatively shifted the way that they have conversations about the way the university runs. That is empowering. I’m so grateful to anyone who’s reached back to us and said, “This is how it has impacted us.” This goes back to your last question. People don’t often reach back because they think authors are busy, but when we get emails like that which say, “Here is how this book has shifted my thinking or impacted a decision,” we are so grateful.

I encountered Both/And Thinking through Dolly Chugh. I don’t know if you know her. She’s a professor at NYU. She and I were classmates at business school. I interviewed her. I was reading one of her books. She mentioned Both/And Thinking. I went down that rabbit hole. For me, it was like, “That’s such a simple concept, but it’s so powerful in its simplicity.“

We share that as well. Dolly and I were classmates in our PhD programs. There too lies power. It has been fun to publish books together and learn together about this world of publishing, particularly when you are an academic mostly publishing academic papers. This is a whole new world. I’m grateful to her and the work that she does broadly in thinking about how we think about diversity, inclusion, and in her book, navigating the challenges of having both a difficult history, particularly in the United States, and being able to be very proud of our country, and how she has integrated this concept of both/and, showing us that it’s valuable in that very important space.

It is a good way of explaining pretty much any country’s history. There are things that are great and horrific about the history of any country on the planet. All of us as citizens of our respective countries have to make peace with that. She gave a compelling argument for how to do that in her book. I found it interesting.

I’m here in Sydney, Australia. One of the pieces that I am exploring or that I have been opening my eyes to is the history here in Australia, the relationship between the White man as a colonizer and the indigenous people in Australia, and how that conversation is happening. Indeed, it is a very powerful and challenging conversation.

There are parallels there with the situation in the United States with Native Americans and a troubling history that Australia at least is trying to come to peace with. You started studying paradoxes when you were working on your PhD. What was it that piqued your interest in that topic in the first place?

I could take that question in two directions, professionally or from a research topic. I was working with top management teams at IBM studying innovation. The question from a research point of view that we had studied around innovation is, “How do you not get stuck in the past to move to the future?” When I was studying these top management teams at IBM that were grappling with innovation, that’s not the question that they were grappling with. The question that they were grappling with is, “How do I move to the future knowing that I still have to hold onto my existing customers, products, or what have you?”

Wendy Smith: How do you not get stuck in the past in order to move to the future?

It’s not, “How do I move quickly to the future?” It’s, “How do I live in the future and manage to innovate while simultaneously living in my existing world?” When I spoke to, for example, Janet Perna who was the General Manager of their database management solutions, she would say, “I have to wear two hats, be focused on all this new stuff, and make sure that all of my operations are successful.” That was the paradoxical challenge that I was looking at in my research. I know that some of the conversations that you have in this show are around careers and career management.

I remember one of my advisors, Richard Hackman, who was a brilliant scholar around teams. He would always say, “Research is me-search.” Particularly in the social sciences, we tend to study ourselves. I was grappling with my career decisions, dilemmas, and tensions. I was in this space where it felt like I was in these contrasting demands that I felt like I had to make a choice between them.

It started with, “Do I want to be an academic who studies ideas? Do I want to be what academics like to call practitioners, a leader, or some amorphous person who does stuff?” It felt like that was an either/or that I had to choose between. When I went into academia and was studying academia, I was studying innovation, but I went into academia at the time soon after there were all of these massive ethical collapses or collapses of organizations like Enron and WorldCom because of these ethical lapses. At the same time, I had grown up in the era of seeing Ben and Jerry’s and The Body Shop trying to change the conversation into what is the social responsibility of corporations.

The other big challenge was I have all this amazing access to study innovation at IBM, and I’m interested in this question around sustainability and social responsibility. That felt like an either/or. It’s this notion of paradox, whether it was applied to my research on, “Do I focus on the future or the present, today or tomorrow in the innovation space or my personal profession with no personal career challenges? How do I think about what am I doing in my career? How do I think about what I’m studying?” Those all felt like they were competing demands that felt weighty and demanding on me. Paradox became a concept that helped me think about my research and my decisions.

That makes a lot of sense. Out of curiosity, you must have had some academic overlap in discussions with Clayton Christensen given the work that he did on innovation, The Innovator‘s Dilemma, and the challenge or the tension that companies that are incumbents feel in terms of having to disrupt themselves.

I did. I’m grateful to have been in a playground of brilliant academics like Clay Christensen and his work on The Innovator‘s Dilemma. My advisor was Mike Tushman who did a lot of work around this notion of being ambidextrous, which is being able to create the conditions in your company. You can have innovation and be a corporate innovator, and corporate explorer is the word that he and some of his colleagues are using now, while simultaneously making sure that the wheels are still running.

I will also call out two other amazing mentors. I had on my committee Amy Edmondson who many of your audiences might know for Psychological Safety. How do you create the conditions where people speak up and make sure that they’re sharing what’s going on so that you can learn together while simultaneously performing? I’ll also add in somebody that may not be as familiar to your audience. The brilliant Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer wrote a book on mindfulness in the 1980s to remind us of how we remain mindful at the moment. This is pre-Zen meditative John Kabat-Zinn mindfulness. Her definition of mindfulness is constantly noticing novel distinctions in service of letting ourselves be present. I’m grateful to many mentors.

There are a lot of great minds there. That’s for sure. The world is full of paradoxes. We all know this intellectually yet we all suffer from either/or thinking. Why is it that we fall into that trap?

First, I’ll start with how we all know this. I love that you say that. For the first, I can’t tell you how many years and even still now, there are many folks that want to relegate this word paradox to the world of philosophers and logicians and don’t want to recognize it as something that we experience in our social life because it’s challenging and because it brings up this confusing idea.

For many years, I spent the first part of my career convincing my colleagues in the social sciences and organizational theory that this is a concept that does apply to the tensions and experiences that we experience. I’ll start there. For the sake of your audiences, I’ll say that to me, the word paradox means that there are these opposing ideas that are not just in opposition with one another. They’re also interdependent. They define and reinforce one another. They persist over time so we’re not trying to solve them or resolve them. We’re trying to live with them.

They underlie every single one of our decisions. They underlie a decision of, “What should I have for breakfast? Should I have that beautiful almond croissant or chocolate croissant? Should I go for the green smoothie? Do I go for discipline, momentary pleasure, or long-term discipline?” The long term or the short term, the disciplined or the pleasure, the self and others, today and tomorrow. These are the tensions that underlie every one of our decisions. If we stop, look at any of our decisions, and pull them back, we will see these paradoxes. That’s what we mean.

Some people want to say, “The world is not paradoxical. It’s much more clear-cut. There is a single truth in the world. We don’t live in this duality because it’s complex and confusing.” Briefly, why do we go back to either/or thinking, which we all do? It’s supernatural because it’s so much easier. It’s complex to sit in a world where there are multiple truths that are opposing one another and say they’re both true.

I’ll think about this in terms of a conversation I had with my husband where we had to remind ourselves that he has a point of view. I like to say my husband and I are aligned when it comes to the big picture of how we parent and partner, but we have some real differences in the nuance of specifics like bedtime. We get into these conversations where he is a little more permissive at bedtime, and I like to be a little more disciplined around it.

Now that we have sixteen-year-olds, it’s a moot point, but the point is that we get into these conversations where it feels like we have these opposing ideas, and one of us has to be right and the other has to be wrong. It is emotionally hard to sit back into that space and say, “Maybe there is a space where we’re both right.” That’s hard for people.

Physiologically, we’re wired to sometimes make snap decisions in the interest of survival. We want to judge people as either this or that. We’re all a little bit of this and that. That’s the part that goes against that wiring or the part of our brain that makes those flight–or–fight and friend–or–foe decisions that we all had to rely on at one point in human evolution.

I’ve been intrigued by a broader conversation exactly about this point. How do we move beyond the mammalian brain that has these quick thoughts and invite ourselves to pause, take a deep breath, and think about something in a more complex and collaborative manner? Paradox and thinking about both/and falls into that category. It requires us to step back from the gut response to categorize or put something in a box, leave it there, and then choose between opposing ideas. The other pressure we have is to be consistent. Our culture reinforces the need to be consistent. It also invites us to pause and say, “Is there something more complex? Can I look at this in a different way?”

You use some colorful metaphors in the book. We won’t have time to get into all of them, but one builds on what we were talking about. You’ve got the mules or this integrative thinking and then you’ve got tightrope walkers who are constantly balancing. It would be great if you could elaborate on both of those and how they fit into the framework of both/and thinking.

When people think about both/and, they tend to go to this place where there is this perfect win-win. That’s what we call the mule. The mule is one of the oldest biological hybrids that man has bred. It’s stronger than a horse and smarter than a donkey. Bring them together, and you have this biologically smarter and stronger beast. We have been breeding them for 3,000 years. That’s this ideal win-win.

One of the things that I learned from my dissertation from my IBM study is that when we go to the both/and space, we think, “There’s going to be this ideal win-win.” That doesn’t happen all the time. At IBM, I went to study these top management teams as they were making decisions. I thought, “They’re going to find all these places where they can bring their existing products and customers into their innovative space. There’s this better possibility.” That’s not what happened.

The example I used in the book is more of a personal example, which is what happened when I first had my kids. I have three kids, but my sixteen-year-olds were my first kids. They’re twins. I remember when I first became a mom. I’m tired and exhausted. I’m going back to work and thinking, “I study this both/and thing. There has to be a better space where I’m not feeling torn all the time between this either/or of work versus home and my kids.” I remember thinking, “There is.”

The idea of both/and is that I open a daycare down the street. Work becomes life. Life becomes work. I don’t have to worry about leaving my kids in the morning and bringing work home at night. That’s lovely. I know people who have done that. That would never be me. The idea is that there are mules and ideal creative integrations. They happen, but they don’t happen all the time.

We argue that another way to live in the both/and is what we label as consistently inconsistent. That is what the IBM senior teams were doing. That was what I found as a big a-ha in that study. That is what I did as a new mom and still do in work and life, as many of us do in work and life. The metaphors live on the tightrope. We live with these competing demands. Sometimes we make decisions that focus on one of them, and sometimes the other over time.

It’s about looking at our decisions not at any specific moment but the broad over time. In that over time, we’re making decisions between the two and making these micro-shifting oscillations so that at some moment, I might be home with my family for dinner, but the next night, I’m finishing a work project, but the idea is that we’re not overemphasizing one or the other so that we fall off the tightrope. We are balancing these micro-decisions.

It’s not that I am making decisions that I am so committed to work. I have no time for my family. I’m starting to burn out. They have no connection to me. Things are going awry at home but rather, I’m making these micro-oscillations. Living in that space can feel a little dizzying. It’s hard to live on the tightrope. At the same time, it can also be empowering when we think about the big picture. We’re trying to get to the other side of the tightrope, which is our long-term calming vision that encompasses our competing demands.

You go on to talk about a toolkit that you can use in building your ability to think more in a both/and fashion. It’s Assumptions, Boundaries, Comfort, and Dynamism. It’s a nice and easy ABCD framework to remember. Can you give us an overview of how all of that comes together in that toolkit?

I love that you said that because writing the book took us quite some time to get to ABCD. I love that. The reason we wrote this book is because people accept that there are paradoxes. The question is how. That is the world that we see ourselves in. We are so grateful to have so many amazing academic colleagues that are now studying “how you do this thing?” We saw this book as bringing together that research to how you do this thing and to help people realize that it’s not just one.

We can talk about what might be the first step, but there are multiple tools, and they work together. Briefly, we think about the tools as, “What do I need to do as an individual to inform how I think about both/and thinking? How can I change? What are the things that the system or the context can do to help inform both/and thinking?” A and C are about assumptions. How do I change my mindset or my thinking? C is Comfort. How do I navigate my emotions around this? This is emotional. I get anxious, defensive, fearful, and resistant. That is what brings me back into either/or.

Head and heart, how do I change my thinking and my emotions? B and D are, “How do I create the context around me to scaffold the decision-making process?” B is Boundaries. It’s the structures that we put into place to enable us to think both/and. D is Dynamism or the practices that allow us to continually shift and change over time. We then do a deep dive into each of these and what would they look like.

I’m happy to unpack a little more, but I want to say that, as a big picture, one of the refrains that we repeat in the book multiple times is the idea that navigating a paradox is paradoxical. What we mean by that is that sometimes when people talk about change, they say, “For something to change, individuals have to change. We have to change the way people think about things. We have to change the way they experience things.” The system has to change. We have to change the way the system structures things.

This is a conversation, for example, in the space around women and women’s leadership. Do we change the women? Do we change the system? It’s around diversity. It’s both the individual and the system even though sometimes those are at odds with each other. People will say, “Head or heart?” It’s both. In the system, is it about the things that we can structure, schedule, and plan? Is it the things that are changing along the way? It’s stability and change. Embedded into this idea are these four tools. They work together. They are inherently paradoxical in helping us navigate a paradox.

You talked a little bit about some of the challenges that people will face in this. Let’s go a little bit deeper into some of the challenges that women will face. You lead the Women’s Leadership Initiative back in the US at the University of Delaware. What are the kinds of challenges apart from the obvious ones? Being a working mom in general is a tightrope act all the time. What are some of the other things that you tend to work with women on that are either/or and both/and?

I lead the Women’s Leadership Initiative. Many of the people reading this are mid-career. They’re thinking about their next steps. Part of what we do is focused on our students at the university and women at that mid-career level where I know the metaphor is hitting the glass ceiling. I know that’s been contested, but the idea is, “How do we help women move from that mid-career space into their next adventure, whether it’s into the C-Suite, entrepreneurship, or what have you?”

One of the interesting conversations that we had when we launched this initiative is you’re trying to advance conversations about inclusion and diversity, but you’re being exclusive to do it. I had a conversation with a colleague who is from New Zealand. She came over and was here in Sydney. We had lunch. We had smaller conversations with our colleagues with women around the table. Some of the male colleagues say, “Why do we have to be excluded from those conversations?”

That is an important conversation to address. There too is a both/and. We both need spaces where we can engage with people who share our identity to reinforce and provide the power, context, and support so that we can be in conversations with people who don’t and then engage more broadly. This is where the power of employee resource groups comes in and the power of being able to find people who are similar to you that you can feel like you can connect to in a different way in service of to enable us to connect with people that are different from us. There’s an important conversation here about how we navigate diversity in both of those spaces.

The topic of diversity is a balancing act because, to your point, you don’t want to do it in a way that becomes exclusive in the other direction. You’re seeing even some legal challenges to that going on in the US in particular. There’s a little bit of backlash against the push that’s been made on diversity. It‘s challenging. There’s ample evidence to point out that there’s significant benefit from having more diversity in your organization yet it’s hard to make it happen and to do it in a way that doesn’t have the pendulum swing or that tightrope pole that you’re holding onto go too far in one direction or the other.

To bring us back to both/and, we call that the wrecking ball. It’s a vicious cycle of a wrecking ball where you swing from one end and swing back to the other. To bring us back to both/and, one of the tools that we say is important is, “What’s your broader goal?” The idea here is we’re not trying to create space that is distinct in service of holding people out and advancing one minority group. The bigger goal is that we’re trying to do it in service of creating a more diverse and integrated culture.

Wendy Smith: We’re not trying to create a space that is distinct in service of holding people out and advancing just one minority group. The bigger goal is that we’re trying to do it in service of creating a more diverse and integrated culture.

It’s the same thing. I am a strong proponent that men need space to be with men to talk about the issue of how they could engage more effectively in a diverse conversation. I am a huge fan of the work of David Smith and Brad Johnson that advocate for how men can be better allies. That’s different from, “Men need space to be with men so that they can stand in the locker room and offer up awful jokes about women.” It’s not, “Men need space to be with men.”

It’s, “Men need space to be with men in service of this broader goal. Women need space to be with women in service of being able to come back together and know how to work.” It’s the same thing across races and other kinds of identities where it’s not in service of advancing one minority group or one group against the other. It’s in service of being able to come back together in a more inclusive space.

Coming back to career–related topics more generally, you talk about some of these in the book like the decision between staying with a company and a role you’re in versus going to another company. When you think about some of the either/or kinds of situations that we’re all presented with and how we can turn them into more both/and situations, what are the big career ones that come to mind for you?

There are so many. One of the things about our careers is how quickly we, starting from when we’re kids, get stuck in assuming that our career is a total identity. The other vicious cycle we talk about of either/or-ing is what we call a rabbit hole. We go down a rabbit hole, meaning we take on the labels and expertise. Our expertise is reinforcing. We connect with a broader community of people that reinforce that expertise. The next thing you know, we can’t pop up and make changes or see alternatives.

I run the Women’s Leadership Initiative. One thing that I’ve done as part of it is do a season of a podcast with some amazing female leaders. There are a lot of favorite conversations, but I had a great conversation with a woman named Tabassum Salam who is an administrator at a major hospital in the United States. As a doctor, you become incredibly entrenched in your identity around medicine.

The question that she asked herself was, “Is there a way for me to have a broader reach in the medical world by jumping into and taking on more leadership roles?” To do that, she was going to go back and get her MBA, but she couldn’t even fathom going back to school and rethinking her identity as a medical professional. Here she was. Medicine is about the one-on-one relationship with the patient.

She had to have a support team around her. Her husband in particular said, “You’re excited about this. We will support you. Go back to school. Try this out. This does not deny your commitment to medicine. It expands it.” Thinking about what would it look like to shift is so scary for some people. We don’t do it. We stick with what we know because it’s scary both emotionally to think about a different identity and take the time to do it.

It strikes me that there’s a linkage. The example you gave is an example of all of the work that’s been done on change and why people struggle so much with letting go of one thing, trying to embrace something else, and maybe having the thinking that would allow them to do a bit of having their cake and eating it too.

We tie this to the idea of an S-curve, which is a popular framework innovation. Over time, you can imagine an S where you have a new idea. It takes some time to gain some traction and then quickly gains traction and performance but, at some point, falls off the edge and is no longer relevant. The argument in the innovation space is you want to start exploring your next S-curve before you fall off the end of that first S-curve, but people plan to take this, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” mentality. You only have the motivation to look to the new S-curve when you’re falling, but that’s too late.

That’s true in your company, entrepreneurial venture, and career. The time when you have the most resources and power which are valuable to explore the S-curve is when you’re at the peak of what you’re doing. If you’re at the peak of what you’re doing, you have no motivation to look to the next S-curve, the new innovation, or the new thing you’re going to do professionally.

Here is the paradox of learning and performing or in our careers being both heads-down in what we’re trying to do and heads-up in looking to the next thing or the next possibility. This is back to Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety in teams, which is being able to learn effectively, fail, and try new things in service of and at the same time enable ourselves to perform well. You can think about the feeling of that tug of war of what it means to be heads-down or heads-up in learning, performing, and trying new things while being at the top of your game. That is an embedded tension that we experience. That’s a paradox right there.

The adage, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it,” is very common in the business world because, in the near term, it’s a safer bet to keep doing what you’re doing. What’s always interested me is how the leaders are thinking about their time horizons more than they’re thinking about the company. They’re thinking, “I can ride this for another 3 to 5 years. I don’t have to do anything radically different. I‘ll get out on top.” The company has a crash after they leave because they haven’t done anything to prepare it for that next S-curve.

That’s a very successful strategy for a very short period. You do asset management. You’re thinking about companies. The question is, “What is an indicator of a great company?” It’s a great leader who is constantly looking out to the horizon and thinking about the long term outside of their leadership. There’s an indicator that you’ve got great leadership willing to take risks, explore, and see beyond their own needs and self-goals.

The timing is the challenge. The art of this whole thing is, “When do you start tearing down? When do you start diverting attention to build the next version and to hit that next S-curve?” It’s an art to know when to do that, which by definition means it’s impossible to do it perfectly, but that’s one of the bigger challenges of leaders, particularly in a world now that’s more volatile, more uncertain, and moving more quickly than probably we have ever seen. It‘s a decision you’re constantly wrestling with as a leader.

One of the opportunities there is making sure that you have good people around you to advise you on that and that you’re listening to them and that you’re not ignoring them. In the book, we feature a good friend and colleague of mine, Jeremy Hockenstein, who was starting a social enterprise when I was doing my PhD. I watched and studied this social enterprise. It’s called Digital Divide Data. It’s an amazing organization that started in Cambodia as a work integration organization.

They’re now twenty-something years into this venture. He’s still their CEO. This is rare that a founding CEO stays with the organization because they’re so passionate about the ideas that they’re not able to make the transition between an early startup mentality that’s exciting to get something going and being able to have something more stable, expansive, and operationally efficient. Jeremy has this wonderful line. Early on, he brought on a board to advise him, and he had to listen to their advice.

What he knew is that his job or the ways in which he had to operate changed every six months. Sometimes he was ahead of that curve and was able to see the change and anticipate it. Sometimes he was behind that curve and had to catch up as a leader, but he had to be dynamic in how he saw his job changing. One of the ways to do that was to bring on advisors that he trusted, to ask them, “How does my job change? What do I need to do?” and to listen to some of their advice along the way to do that. That’s not easy.

It’s a rare founder. It’s a rare CEO in general that can be in the role for that long that’s willing to do enough reinvention, personal growth, and corporate growth and change. They go through those time periods and don’t get stuck in their ways. It’s a very difficult thing, which is why most companies typically want to change their CEOs every five years or so.

We said, “Research is me-search.” As you noted, I am here in Sydney on a sabbatical. At this wonderful moment when our book came out, the question is, “What’s next?” It is a provocative and emotionally challenging question to ask along the way. I am grateful to great advisors. You asked about career decisions. One is, “What is out there?” The next is, “I have achieved something. What’s next?” It’s also a hard question to ask.

Is that a conversation that you are having with Marianne? Is that a conversation more that you’re thinking about on your own?

It’s a conversation I’m having with anyone who will have it with me. I am curious to hear how people think about their what’s-next and inform my thinking.

How are you thinking about that?

The exciting piece is it goes back to this idea of experimentation. Next could be the next book. Next could be a leadership role. Marianne has a leadership role at a university. It could be more leadership within our broader industry of academia. I am learning from the idea of learning as experimentation. In the S-curve process, it looks so nice and neat. You have one S-curve and jump to the next, but what happens in this learning process is that you have one S-curve, and then you’re in this almost funnel where you’re trying all kinds of different things so that something eventually comes through the other end.

That’s what experimentation looks like. You’re not jumping to the next S-curve. You’re trying all these different possibilities so that when you’re ready to make that jump, you have set out these possibilities along the way. To me, it’s a bit of moving into that experimentation of different options and being okay that I’m not sure which one will come through the other end of the funnel. When we have a conversation on your show a couple of years from now, I’ll come back and report what came through the other end of that funnel.

Wendy Smith: You’re not just jumping to the next S-curve, you’re trying all these different possibilities so that when you’re ready to make that jump, you have set out these possibilities along the way.

That’s fair enough. I‘m curious back when you were an undergraduate at Yale. What did you foresee yourself doing when you were in your college days?

That too was the start of me feeling like I had to make very clear decisions and not be experimental. I’m a huge fan of being able to be in your college years, experiment, and try out different opportunities. I took my daughter. We went to go see the TEDxSydney stage. It was super fun. One of the speakers was talking about how you get jobs now and the value of experimentation, whether it’s trying out different jobs or internships and different volunteer roles so that you can get experience so that you’re not coming to the table without different experiences. His main question was, “People are so curious. What’s my job or profession? They don’t try out enough jobs to get themselves into the job that they love.”

When I was in college, I felt this pressure to know. I was so jealous of my pre-med friends because what they had was clear certainty of a path on how to get from where they were in their freshman year of college to their profession all laid out for them. Some of them felt constrained by that path. I jumped into being a pre-med partially because I had a friend whose dad was an orthopedic surgeon and wanted us both to be orthopedic surgeons. First of all, I loved the idea that it directly impacted people. That felt profound to me. I loved the certainty. I was able to put aside the fact that I got queasy at the sight of blood because I wanted that certainty.

I would suggest that if I were to go back and coach my younger self, it would be to live in the uncertainty while you can, experiment, try different things, and not feel the pressure that we have to come out of universities so clearly with a job. I had a roommate. My roommate said to me, “How can you not know what you’re doing? You’re going to lose all these years of income because you’re not ready to go to grad school immediately.” That’s the greater pressure that we put on undergrads that don’t give them time to explore and experiment more broadly.

Some of that has subsided. My kids are a bit older. My youngest will turn 27 in 2023. They’re largely into their career journeys. There’s a lot more parental willingness to let kids have a bit of that time in their twenties. Back when I was in college, I did ROTC. I was going into the military. I didn’t face the same pressure that you’ve described, but it felt like looking around at a lot of the people that I was in school with. They did feel that pressure. That has subsided somewhat, at least parentally. I don’t know if it has subsided so much in the pressure they put on themselves as 19 and 20–year–olds.

I hope so. The other trend that I’m seeing as a university professor, and I would love to figure out how to reverse this a little bit, is that the undergraduate majors are increasingly pre-professional and that we are losing sight of and losing support for broader intellectual pursuits around humanities and even the social sciences. Several years ago, I was teaching an undergraduate class. The students wanted to know, “Here’s the assignment. Tell me exactly what you need from me on this assignment. Do you need this question answered? Do you need that question answered? What about the margins of the paper? How many words does it have to be?” It got very specific, “How are you going to grade this?”

I had a moment of frustration that they weren’t engaging with the question and content of the assignment. They were thinking about the structure and the grading of it. In a moment of unease, I said to them, “I’m curious here. If you were all to give me $100,000, I handed you your graduation certificate, and you didn’t have to do any work, how many of you would take that deal?”

Unapologetically, 90% of the hands shot up in the room, which said to me that they were there for this instrumental need to push forward. That might not be true everywhere. That was a business school class. I know that business school tends to be a little bit more pre-professional and instrumental, but it struck me that the idea of learning for the sake of expansion and exploration was not being conveyed in that conversation.

I would like to see more of that so that we can go back to this experimental value of seeing the role and value of the humanities and philosophy to inform science. This is a both/and. The hard and the soft science is coming together. The fantastical, imaginative thinking is coming along with our clear, logical thinking. We need more of that to expand our world and our next steps in a world where there are lots of crises that need to be solved. The more diversity of thought we have to solve these problems, the better off we are.

One of the consequences that have come out of the tech boom that we have had over the years is this. Look at Harvard. Harvard’s number one major now is computer science. Years ago, it would have been something in the humanities. That’s going on at universities all over the country in the US and probably all over the world. We’ve got people who are chasing more of those science-based backgrounds. The humanities have been kicked to the curb to a degree.

My twins are boy-girl twins. They’re a little bit particularly gendered in the way that they think about the world, which I always find fascinating how that happens. We’re starting the conversations about college. My son is very interested in computer science, robotics, and coding, and my daughter isn’t. She is an incredibly expansive mind who understands human interactions and is emotionally intelligent to the extreme.

I think about their college paths and career paths. His is very clear and certain about what’s possible for him, and hers is not yet the value of what she brings to the table is more amorphous and ambiguous. I always tell her, “This is what I teach people. That’s what’s going to bring collaborations and enable us to put some of these massive challenges, bring together people who can understand different ways of thinking, and solve problems.”

I would love to see us value that more ambiguous kind of thinking in kids and help them to engage with that. To be clear, girls should learn how to code, be encouraged to code, and get over the identity that it’s a boy’s space, but I also think that we should value the boys and the girls that learn how to bring people together and understand the emotionally intelligent social dynamics that help people work together.

One of the pitfalls of the classic college major approach is it sends you down a particular discipline. All along, the problems that we need to solve in the world, and probably not just now, but going back in history, are interdisciplinary in nature. What you want to be teaching people is how to bring together those multiple disciplines yet most colleges are still in the, “Pick a major.” You spend a lot of time studying that and taking some other classes for fun. You don’t stitch it all together in that interdisciplinary way.

This brings up a challenge if you’re an HR professional in an organization. Some of the best, most creative, and most effective organizations aren’t out there saying, “We need coding. Let’s find a computer scientist.” Indeed, we need those technical skills. They are also saying, “What we need is critical thinking.” This is on the conversation for people. We need critical thinking. We need people who could think broadly. We need emotional intelligence. How do we find that?

This is where I value companies like IDEO, the product development company that says, “We’re going to bring in biologists to study and address product design. We’re going to bring in philosophers that value those professions.” They’re not relegated to sit on the sideline, read lots of good books, and maybe write a couple of books. They’re brought into the conversations. Here’s a both/and here. They know how to both hire for those kinds of professions and how to bring them into the conversation so that their way of thinking is valued at the table and in the discussions as part of a contribution to how we solve problems, not seen as a distraction from the hard science that we’re talking about.

IDEO has always been one of my favorite companies. I admire the heck out of what they have done over the years. They were way ahead of the rest of us in terms of bringing together a very broad range of backgrounds and embracing the idea of the diversity of thought and how people can look at a problem from different lenses and come up with a creative solution.

I want to go back to the emotional part because sometimes when we talk about both/and-ing, that diversity of thought is a both/and challenge, “How do I sit down at the table, be able to listen to somebody who has a very different way of thinking and expressing themselves, and know that there’s a kernel of right in that conversation?”

I’ll go back to my husband and me. He’s a statistician. The way that he conveys and explores the world is different from the way that I convey and explore the world. We have had to learn how to talk and listen to one another in ways that we can see the value of what each other has to say because we had different ways of thinking and talking about things. If we go back to that, part of the challenge is how we create the conditions where we can sit around the table, listen, hear different components and ideas, and value those.

There’s a both/and challenge and opportunity. Understanding and being able to do this is also an emotional challenge because it’s hard to listen to people who sound, talk, and say things that are different than you because you have to listen in a different way. Sometimes it’s threatening. There is an emotional component to that challenge.

You brought up that point earlier in our conversation about developing that comfort with paradoxes, being able to be okay when somebody is coming at you from an angle that may feel initially threatening, and giving yourself time to calm down enough, get comfortable enough to hear them out and understand the why behind what they’re saying as opposed to the superficial what, but that takes skill.

I want to add to that. We talk about finding comfort in the discomfort. The important part of that is sometimes the way we try and do that is to reject the discomfort, “We shouldn’t feel anxious. We shouldn’t feel fear.” What we say is, “You have to live with the discomfort.” The fear, the anxiety, and the uncertainty are all real. How do we honor that rather than try and sweep it under the rug? If we sweep it under the rug, all we know is that we’re going to step on it, and it’s going to explode into a pile of dust. It doesn’t go away. The important component in the emotional sphere is honoring the discomfort rather than rejecting it.

This has been a very interesting conversation. We have flowed through a lot of different topics. Are there any last bits of advice you want to offer to our audience in terms of how to apply this in the way that they think about their careers?

I’m so grateful to engage in this conversation. Maybe the last thing I’ll say is where we were headed, which is that when we talk about both/and-ing, it can sound easy, “Switch your mindset. Switch the questions you ask from either/or to both/and,” but it is a lifetime reminder of living in a more collaborative, less linear, more holistic, and more integrative space that requires us to continually remind ourselves. I want to empathize with your audience as they engage in this and invite them along on a journey that we’re all grappling with.

We are all grappling with it. Thank you. I appreciate this. Have a great day and enjoy the rest of your time in Australia.

Thank you so much.

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I want to thank Wendy for joining me to discuss her book, Both/And Thinking, her broader research, her career journey, and some of the decisions and paradoxes that she’s dealt with in the course of her career. If you would like more regular insights, you can become a PathWise member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Thanks. Have a great day.

Important Links

• Wendy Smith
• Both/And Thinking
• The Innovator‘s Dilemma
• Psychological Safety
• Women’s Leadership Initiative
• Tabassum Salam – LinkedIn
• Digital Divide Data
• IDEO
• LinkedIn – PathWise
• Twitter – PathWise
• Facebook – PathWise
• YouTube – PathWise.

About Wendy Smith

Wendy Smith is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Management and the faculty director of the Women’s Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, at the University of Delaware, where she has worked for the past 17 years. She has earned a number of awards for her research, including the most cited paper in the past ten years and The Decade Award.

Wendy obtained her Ph.D. in organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, where she first began investigating paradoxes. Her work focuses on strategies that leaders and senior teams can employ to effectively respond to opposing and often contradicting challenges. She also spent time as a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and has a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Political Science from Yale University.