Harmony and Dissonance
The YinYang has been a powerful framework for me when endeavoring to frame and evaluate what are ahead, my decisions. The importance of considering the duality of opposing, mutually defining forces or dimensions, as fundamental to evaluating completeness, is very thought provoking. In fact, I use it frequently when discussing that a group of observations have dimensions that can be described in terms of how they are alike (statisticians like to call it central tendency, …. , alike sounds better) and also how they are different. The point being that by looking at both leads to better understanding of what we are evaluating. In fact, the YinYang views are essential for running and succeeding at any endeavor, personal or organizational. Sounds positive, completing, harmonious, and all that good stuff, right? It does, most of the time.
There is one view that this YinYang lens provides that is universally disturbing to me, particularly its pervasiveness. There is the condition of overabundance and scarcity coexisting throughout. We find it in so many challenges and we can find it obscured by our desire for a single view, the search for a value, too often an average that fits a point to be made or a decision demanding comfort. The tendency to want “an answer” or a value in our decision making, simplifies our inner need for “placing” a condition or an issue, and may blind us to the messy realities of a situation.
The examples of this coexistence of overabundance and scarcity are currently endless for me, but let’s look just two:
- Real hunger, the type that hurts the tummy and devastates lives. Too much food here and none there. Restaurants are required by laws to trash or discard left-over or un-served food only feet away from starving people in their communities. Many restaurateurs will share their frustration about the constraints. There are thousands across communities worldwide that do marvelous works to solve or improve this situation daily. Their work is wonderful and deserving of all our help. Yet, the paradox is daunting. The global challenges are even more daunting.
- Resources, talent and tasking across organizations suffer terribly from the symptom. Many of the mechanisms that we employ to allocate costs, resources, funding, targets, goals and controls are underpinned by legacy financial control mechanisms or oversimplified attempts at demonstrating compliance with rules and regulations. That means that the way we chose and decide is often guided by a criteria and process that is not reflective of the outcomes we seek. What looks to be in harmony from the top, is really in dissonance at the operational level. We sent “everybody” to a training program designed with good intentions, yet delivering too much, too little or miss-timed content and knowledge to achieve the real objectives. Compliance drove the decision that resulted in predictable non-compliance ensuing from the execution.
So how so we look at the decisions ahead of us? Are we creating the paradox of overabundance and scarcity? Do the very tools and methods we put in front of decision makers create the dissonance? Do we seek simplicity too often?
“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler.” Albert Einstein
