261. Both/And Thinking with Dr. Wendy Smith

Welcome to episode 261 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Wendy Smith, co author of Both and Thinking. Ready?

Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people Buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello hello everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I am joined by Dr. Wendy Smith, Co author of Both and Embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems. I don't think we realize it all that much. It certainly isn't a term you hear used too often.

But but our lives are full of paradoxes.

Questions like how can we each express our individuality and be a team player? How do we balance work and life? How can we take care of ourselves while supporting others? How can we manage the core business while innovating for the future? Believe it or not, these are some of the many everyday paradoxes that make up our lives, and because our brains tend to default to either or choices, we choose one option over the other. We deal with uncertainty by asserting certainty. But this is not the best way, as you'll learn about in today's conversation with Wendy Smith, a co author of one of my new favorite books, Both and Thinking. Wendy is the Dana J. Johnson professor of Management and Faculty Director of the Women's Leadership Initiative at the Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware. She earned her PhD in Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School, where she began her intensive research on strategic paradoxes, how leaders and senior teams effectively respond to contradictory yet interdependent demands. She received the Web of Science Highly Cited research award in 2019, 2020, and 2021 for being among the 1% most cited researchers in her field, and received the decade award in 2021 from the Academy for the most cited paper in the past 10 years.

Wow.

That's amazing. Her work has been published in such journals as Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, and Management Science. She's taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton, while helping senior leaders and middle managers all over the world address issues of interpersonal dynamics, team performance, organizational change, and innovation. She is a wealth of information and I can't wait for you to learn from her today. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for everything, including related past episodes, links to articles and books, including both and thinking, of course, as well as ways to get in touch with Wendy and so much more. It's all waiting within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 261 now let's jump right in. Dr. Wendy Smith, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

It's great to be here with you.

Yeah. So excited to talk all about both and which is, you know, my favorite of, of all the things. Before we really jump in on that.

Though, can you tell everyone who's not.

Yet familiar with you a little bit about your, in your background and all of what you do?

Yes. I am a professor of organizational behavior at Business Leadership Management. I started studying how leaders navigate innovation and that opened up for me all kinds of questions about how leaders make decisions, think about competing demands. And so I study this idea of living in the both and both for leaders and for the rest of us and explore the nature, the notion of underlying paradoxes. And so I'm excited to talk with you about that today.

Oh yeah. So how does one get into paradoxes? Like, how did you kind of, did you stumble into it? Were you always fascinated and you specifically went in looking for paradoxes? You know, how, how does that happen?

You know, they say that research is me search and one of the reasons I stumbled into paradoxes was because of some of the challenges or issues that I had with making my own decisions and just getting stuck in decision making. Whether that was my career decisions when I was in college, whether that was trying to then figure out what I was going to do after college, my own career decisions and decisions about what I was going to study as part of my PhD and part of thinking about both, and was going back to try and help my previous self rethink my own decision making so that I would feel less stuck, less anxious, less fearful and more creative, more generative and see more possibilities.

Yeah. So if we dig in on that, was there a specific aspect of the problem? How did you even find that paradox is what you were, what you were looking for?

I think it's such an interesting concept.

In that we all know the term, right? You hear paradox and go, oh, yes, it's a paradox. But in reading your book, there's such a depth of information about what paradoxes actually are and what they aren't and how they work. And you define it in the book in a way that I read it I'm like, oh, okay, that makes sense. And I think a lot more things, well, I know now a lot more things are paradoxes than we would typically label as a paradox. So how did you decide, okay, this is paradoxical in nature and like, I'm all in on paradoxes. How does that even happen? Right.

Well, the place that we start when we talk about these ideas today are the tensions, dilemmas, challenges that we feel. So the argument is, is that we all experience these tug of wars in our lives. In my own decision making when I was in college, I was really stuck, for example, between wanting to make a difference and make an impact in the world. And what I saw in making a difference and an impact in the world was pre meditation. I really, I had a friend whose dad was an orthopedic surgeon. He took us into the, into several surgeries to watch this. I had friends who were pre med. It was both seemingly, you know, it's life and death impactful, very exciting. And it was a path that was very clear. And at the same time, I was a real campus leader involved in leadership, engaged. There was something exciting about that, but there was something incredibly amorphous about what does it mean to be a leader in the world? Is that really impactful? Which is kind of funny now that I think about it, knowing that that's what I teach. So, so I lived in this kind of tension between pre med and whatever amorphous definition of being a leader in the world look like that. So, and I, and I struggled with that. That said, I then go to grad school. I am studying innovation. I am exploring how IBM senior leaders are grappling with, trying to innovate, change, introduce new ideas, which at our time, or now we know is the world of cloud computing. At that time, they were just looking into what it meant to go online at all, while at the same time trying to manage their existing world. So this was the problem that they were facing at the leadership level, at the strategic level, and through the work of doing this work at IBM, I start to think about, or I'll just take a step back. Most of the research on innovation talked about how you have to move from the old world to the new world, move fast, rip the band aid from the old world so that you don't get stuck in the inertia of the past. But what I really saw them doing at IBM was something very different. It wasn't that their existing world and existing customers went away immediately. And they were in this space of trying to navigate between these two Competing demands, some doing it better and some doing it worse. And it was that experience I actually came across in my undergraduate experience. And then it popped up again in my grad experience. A book by David Berg and Kenwin Smith called Paradoxes of Group Life where they unpack and explore this idea that there could be these competing demands like in my own life, this leadership versus medicine, or in IBM, this today versus tomorrow, that are not just these oppositional ideas, but that they're also interdependent. And if we see them in that light, if we see the. The ways in which these opposing ideas define and reinforce one another, we can rethink how we make choices about them, how we decide in our dilemmas. So that's what got me into this. And I'll just say one more thing very briefly is that essentially what we argue in the book is that our decisions really have these multi layers to them. They show up for us as a dilemma in which we mean these competing ideas in which you feel like you have to make a decision. Am I going to, you know, go down pre med, the pre med track and go into med school or am I going to go into this amorphous, whatever track of leadership type thing I have to make a decision or am I going to spend more money on my innovation or my existing product at IBM? But if we look underlying those, we see these paradoxical elements of today and tomorrow, things that I'm passionate about or things that I think are pragmatic and practical, certainty and uncertainty, short term and long term, those are the paradoxes that underlie our dilemmas. And if we can understand those, that's where we get to our better decision making.

Yeah, I really love that. And I was going to ask the difference between a dilemma and a paradox, which I think will still go ahead and ask. And in that you have a great definition of a paradox. And that something like I was saying in the everything is a candidate for being a paradox. I guess I really liked the simplicity of the I am lying statement. I think that helps to kind of show some of it. So can you expand on that all a little bit?

Yes. So I'll just say this is our point of view. So people have different point of views about how you disentangle a dilemma and paradox from one another and that they point to different problems. Our point of view is that they actually point to different levels of the same problem. And what we would argue is that what shows up to us in our world are these dilemmas, these things that feel like they need a choice So a dilemma is, you know, I have a conflict between a work demand and a family demand and I have to choose where I'm going to spend my time. What we would argue is that if you, it's almost like pulling back and seeing the substructure of our decision making, if that makes any sense. It's looking a layer lower, layer deeper. We say that these, that underlying our dilemmas are these paradoxical tensions. They sort of are the substructure of our world. And so, you know, looking at this tension between do I go to my work commitment or my family commitment? Well, underlying this are these ongoing, persistent interdependent tensions between career and life, you know, work and life or self and other or short term needs and long term needs. And so indeed we, we would say that everything is a candidate for a paradox. Now we don't have to look at the paradoxes for every decision, but even our breakfast decisions are paradoxical. Like, am I going to eat the green smoothie that has these long term disciplined effects or am I going to, you know, go for the scone that has this short term hit that is more, you know, spontaneous and momentary. Well, the tension between spontaneity and discipline or between short term and long term, again, in that case, these go, these, these are the paradoxes that inform even those choices. I don't know, you have to go and think about them in your morning cereal, your morning decisions. But, but I would say that they in fact do define and inform our world and invite us into a different way of thinking about, than thinking about our dilemmas and how we make choices in those dilemmas.

Yeah.

So I end every episode of the podcast and it's my signature line and the name of my community is be thoughtful. Right. So this again, we can't think about everything because we just can't. But being thoughtful about more things where you stop and go, why is that? You know, why do I do this this way? And when you, if you are always reaching for the scone and ignoring the, the green smoothie that you even like pre chopped all the stuff and have it ready to go, we've got some time discounting problems going on here for sure, you know, and why. And you might justify to yourself that it's, oh, it's just easier or whatever. But then if you take a moment for the things you really do want to change and, and look at what those polls are, the tensions, like you've said of it, I think that this idea of the underlying paradox again, or paradoxes in pretty much Everything is that it's just a good way to, I think, kind of get to that deeper level about habits we have. And when we're looking to change the way that we've always done things and to try and break ourselves of something. When we do want to look at change, you know, kind of in a new way.

Yes. And the invitation that we would make would be to say it's not that we're trying to choose between being always super disciplined or spontaneous. And in fact, what we would say is that, okay, let's say we take the breakfast example. We look at this tension between discipline and spontaneity. The problem is, is that if we go extreme on the discipline, it becomes problematic in so many ways. And in fact, it becomes problematic because we. Well, a couple of things. First of all, extreme discipline sort of limits or creates these conditions where we become so enmeshed in that that we lose out on any sense of what we're trying to be disciplined for. In fact, like oftentimes we're trying to be disciplined in service of being spontaneous and more joyful and enabling in life. But if we then become so extreme on the discipline, on our routines, on our restrictions, we then, you know, sort of kill the fact that we're actually trying to do those things in service of spontaneity. I mean, the same is true with spontaneity. If we go extreme on spontaneity, then we lose almost any sense of the joy of what the spontaneity is about and the benefit of it. And, you know, so. And in fact, sometimes we want spontaneity in service of creating more routines along the way. And so. So the goal here is to recognize that there is a relationship between discipline and spontaneity that in that discipline enables us to be spontaneous as long as we don't go so extreme. Extreme. And spontaneity enables us to have more sort of guard, you know, kind of structure in our world. And invites the question, okay, how do we accommodate both and not become extreme in one or the other? What's detrimental about being extreme in one or the other? How do we accommodate both?

Yeah, well, it's a perfect segue into wrecking balls. And looking at some business examples I know you talk about, I think Lego was one that came up in the wrecking balls space. And I really love the idea of the S curve. And where, when we're looking at. My second book is all about change management in organizations. And so it's like very much my jam, especially now, because that book came out in October. So I'm like all, all in on that. So if you can expand a little bit on those concepts, you know what, what's a wrecking ball? What does LEGO or IBM have to do with any of that? And how do those S curves help when we look at change?

Yes, well, congratulations on the second book. That is super exciting.

Thank you.

Change Management Innovation is where we started with these ideas because so many tensions surface in managing change. Again, the tension between short term, long term, today and tomorrow, operational efficiency and excellence and innovative creativity and experimentation, they really bump up against one another. The big picture that we argue is that these tensions drive us into either or thinking, pulling them apart and making a choice between them. That kind of thinking is limited at best and detrimental at worst. And it's limited because of what you're pointing to, these vicious cycles. And what we mean by that is that by either or thinking, we go down these problematic patterns. And so we identify three of them. And LEGO is a great example to, to depict that. The first is that we, we call a rabbit hole or the intensification. And the idea is that we pick an approach to something and we get stuck in it. So in the language of S curves, this is like being on an S curve over time with a set of competencies that of the things that you do and a set of customers and you get entrenched or committed to that approach over time. We see this all the time in organizations where they are so committed to their existing customers, their existing processes. We saw this with lego. So the story of LEGO is that like many companies, they over time became incredibly successful. For them it was the interlocking brick. And they were really resistant to change because their success had led them to become the toy of the year. And they were so resistant to change that they have stories that they were four or five colors, yellow, red, blue, white and black. And it took them years and years and years to decide to add in green. Or they were so resistant to change that there's a story about how the George Lucas group came to them and said, let's co brand with Star Wars. And they said, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what we do. And so like many organizations, they became so enmeshed in the way that they do things that they, that when the technology shifted, they failed significantly. So in the early 2000s, there was this introduction of all kinds of electronic toys. And the question was, could they transition into that market where all of this digital, electronic, video based toys were happening? And they couldn't and so, like many companies, they almost fail. So we call that first approach the rabbit hole. Because essentially you pick a, pick a way of doing things, this interlocking brick. You intensify that, you go down the rabbit hole and it's hard to get out. That's being on the first S curve. Well, what ends up happening is that when change happens, oftentimes you feel like you have to change and change significantly. And essentially you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And this is what happens for Lego. Instead of failing, they realize, oh my goodness, we are about to fail. We've got to make change, we've got to innovate. And so what they do is they move from being so committed to the way they've always done things to innovating as much as possible. They introduced every kind of innovation at this time. At that time, they introduced, they started to open up their parks, their Legoland parks. They started co branding with everybody that wanted a co brand with them. You know, it wasn't just green, but it was like hundreds of different colors. It was all these different little pieces and parts that they started to introduce. And what they found was this actually was even more problematic because while they were increasing their revenue significantly, they had no control over their costs. Their cost went up so much that they ended up losing significant amount of money. So indeed, they moved on to the next S curve, but they did too many at once with no discipline. And so we call that pattern overcorrecting or the wrecking ball. Because essentially it's like the wrecking ball, you're like losing all the good with the bad. Right? And here we'll go back to our breakfast cereal example. Anybody who's ever dieted knows what that explains. Experience is like, you're totally disciplined and then you fall off for just one thing and all of a sudden you've given the whole thing up. Right? So instead of just like, okay, I'll have a little cookie here and there, it's like, no, now I'm done. And you, you kind of overcorrect. And I'll just put out the. The third reason that either or thinking is problematic. It's just, you know, first you go down one path, then you switch completely to the other path. But the third is actually what happens when you're either or thinking and actually you are in opposition to another individual or group. And this is the experience of polarization, which is that you go down a path and you're sure that if you are right about the way that you're thinking about something, someone else must be wrong. And we talk about that polarizing experience as trench warfare because it's the experience of like building out your own trench, surrounding yourself with people that reinforce, support your point of view. Because we need to do that emotionally and cognitively to feel like we are legitimate. But essentially we're shooting out at the other side without really understanding or being open to what's the other position and can I learn from it and can I actually accommodate it into my way of thinking? And so, so, so that's the third sort of really pernicious problem that happens with either OR thinking is that we double down, intensify in our own position and then reject, resist, like almost dehumanize people who have a different point of view than us.

Yeah, I will definitely be linking to the episodes on confirmation bias and the focusing illusion in the show notes. And when I talk about this too, I always say that, you know, looking.

For ways we can both be right.

And even if we're saying completely opposite things, we can still both be correct because there's a big old world out there full of paradoxes, right? So there are lots of ways that we can be finding those collaborative points with, you know, vastly different views. And so with the piece of the S curve and you talk about change in this way, so that a problem that happens with businesses is they get too stuck in the thing that's working, right. If it ain't broke, don't fix it mentality. And we say we're just going to ride the wave and it feels like it can go forever. And when the time comes that we know that we have to, then we can start looking for something. Of course, as it says in the book, it's a slippery slope off the.

End of the S curve.

So it's going to be very quick to fall out at the end and often too hard. And then in that way, you look to this sort of wrecking ball mentality, go way too far in the other direction in a way that can be.

Often even more detrimental.

And if you get rid of, well, obviously this doesn't work. So, like, throw it all out and try to start from scratch when you're already falling off the edge of the curve. It's just really a setup for disaster. So instead of getting stuck in that way, what is the advice, what businesses should be doing as they're looking to be continually innovating and stacking up their S curves like stairs?

Yes, this is the. So this is the idea of living into that dualistic mode of continuing to be operationally successful as you move up your S curve. This is what we were watching IBM trying to do. Continue to service your existing customers and be efficient with your existing products and at the same time be scanning, exploring, experimenting, innovating to figure out what the new S curve looks like. By the way, this is a similar kind of issue with individuals. How do we continue to heads down perform well in the things that we're really good at while simultaneously heads up looking out, exploring new ways of expanding our competencies and expertise and passions. Because soon tomorrow is going to become today and you no longer have new you know and we become obsolete in our experiences.

Yeah, if you get too stuck I'm also going to be linking to. It's moderately related but the Dunning Kruger effect comes up for me here a little bit of the you don't know what you don't know and so we're overly confident and you get too stuck in the things that you do know and we need to like step back and look around every so often to see what's out there and you know what the next step is for us.

Yeah, I don't know if you've come across this notion also of a competency trap. The extent to this is the idea of intensifying in our experiences is that we end up our competencies which are what enable us to show up and really connect and contribute to a situation then become the. You know, if I have a hammer everything becomes a nail and it's the things so you know, we have these competencies. We surround our. We surround our. We go down the road of being a pre med. I surround myself with other doctors. All I know about is being a doctor. The idea of switching to get an MBA or to go into administration or to try something new is so unheard of because I'm so enmeshed in the trap of how I my ideas, my talents, my skills, skills, my identity, my networks trap me in along the way.

Yeah you can't even imagine what else is out there because you're so stuck in that and so yeah functional fixedness episode linked in the show notes too for the hammer and nail problem there on that. So the one of the things that I found so I love the book obviously I have tons of things like.

Ooh, ooh, ooh and I always have.

To pick what to grab here. I really love the idea of the problem isn't the problem but the way we're framing and thinking about the problem is the problem. That's all I talk About I feel like all the time. So I think that is a very interesting direction on this and the other thing. So you get to, you get to have your own sort of both and moment or choose your own adventure in which path you want to go down here. I really enjoyed the statement when you were talking about the woman from Nova Scotia and that for the, the people on the island that they had to change to stay the same. And I think that is such. When you really step back and realize that, that because things around you are changing, you can't keep what you have.

Like it's going away anyway.

It's, you know, something where say, even if you're on the right track, you're going to get hit by a train if you don't move. Sort of an idea there, you know, it kind of got me thinking about that and I just loved that idea of you have to change to stay the same. So however you want to expand on either of those aspects.

Oh, so much there. Well, I'll just tell the story really quickly of Zita Cobb because it is a great story story and it's a great example of these ideas of both and thinking and paradox. The story very briefly is that Zita Cobb grew up on Fogo Island. Fogo island is the northernmost or one of the north island in Newfoundland. It's an island off of an island. It's in the middle of the North Atlantic. And it was settled eight generations ago by people coming over from the uk, Ireland, Britain, Scotland, that, that had been living there for generations, surviving on cod. And they were fishermen that would boat out in these punt boats, inshore fishing for the day, come back with these cod. There's this great picture that she shows of two kids with a COD the size of these two, like 8 year olds right in the middle. And she says cod was just part of our family. And it's a story like any other rural community community where there is one resource and the resource dries up. So for them, the Scandinavian countries would come in with these large trawler boats that would, would trawl the big open seas for days and the inshore stock of fish dried up and then the province put a moratorium on fishing. So people left the island because then there was no economic, you know, resourcefulness on the island and the population started to dwindle And Zita, like many others, left the island with her family. She ends up going to Ottawa for university and then she ends up becoming the third highest paid female executive in Canada and cashes out when she's in her late 40s and says, how can I go back to this island that was so special to me? And by the way, she talks about growing up on this island in the late 1900s as if it was the 1800s. People were illiterate. There was not running water. There was. It was pretty rural and primitive that had moved into the 1900s, but that hadn't moved into the. You know, into our century today, in part because they were still so locally driven with very little connection to the rest of the world. And fast forward, essentially what she ends up doing is saying, what would it take? The reason I want to rebuild this island is because it feels so, so important to honor the very unique and distinct ways of knowing so that we're not all moving into this kind of heterogeneous urban experience where everybody is the same around the world and there is real, unique, distinct approaches, and we can honor all of these distinct, unique places. What would that take? So they end up building an inn on the island because they are honoring and valuing what was really key to the culture of Newfoundland, which is that they were a deeply hospitable culture. They are a deeply hospitable culture. Anybody who's ever seen the play, the Broadway show Come From Away, which is the story about how all of the planes in 911 landed in Gander and how hospitable gander, which is in Newfoundland, was to all of these thousands of people that came off of these planes from around the world will know and will see the resonance of hospitality in Newfoundland. Well, this raised all kinds of tensions for them because there were people that really wanted to hold on to their tradition. But in order for them to be able to hold on to their attrition, they had to modernize, because otherwise they would be dead. Their whole culture and the island would diminish, or they would have to, you know, connect to. This is an incredibly local culture. The way to honor what's local about them and unique is for them to connect into the global economy. And so Zita Kabishi built out this. This organization called Shore Fast. And the Fogo Island Inn would say things like, it's not a contradiction. It is a paradox. We have to live in both. She would argue that the liminality of living between the space of the water and the land on Newfoundland would sort of gives them this mindset to shift into what it means to move from very linear thinking about, are we focusing globally or locally, to are we focusing on the old or the new? To thinking about this in a Much broader, more holistic approach where you're not, as she would say, reducing to one or the other in a very linear fashion, but truly integrating the different parts in with one another. And, and in fact, I'll just say one other thing which is that they designed their inn. It's a 29 bedroom inn in Newfoundland, caters to the high end traveler who wants to get out to a remote corner of the world and connect in with the community. They designed their inn in an X because their idea was that it was both the public and the private. So there's one wing that is all the private rooms for the guests and there's one wing that is the public wing wing that crosses over which is a library and a theater and their dining hall which helps to create the conditions where the members of the island, the citizens of the island could be in conversation with those people that come from away in bringing out a more holistic and robust relationship, connection and way of being. And so it's a pretty, it's profoundly driven into how they run the entire island, which is a bit of a microcosm and invitation for all of us of how we think about our lives and our organizations.

Yeah, it's such a great example of that multiple things can, can all be true at once. And I just, I really do love the idea of that to keep what you have, you have to change and to embrace that instead of fearing it, which I know some you talk about in the book too. And to be able to look at both and thinking, you know, you. We hear yes and a lot and I know you talk about improv in the book a little bit but that both and of we have all, all the options and, and why not and how might we. And really great questions. I'm also going to link to my interview with Warren Berger and his book A More Beautiful Question, which is one of my very, very favorites as I think that for everyone who has been really loving this episode, you're gonna love that one too as well as of course both. And thinking the book before we close out, I had let you know, leading up into our conversation, I always like to ask because we have so many people who listen to the show who write books or aspire to write a.

Book or you know, in this content.

Driven world that we're in, you know, we have to be doing a lot of collaborative writing and putting things out into the world. So what sort of tips do you have or insights from the writing process? You've talked about how we wrote the book. So you had A co author, of course. And so, you know, what's. What are tips for people that are looking to do, to have a co author? Any, any of that, that you have insights for people?

Yes. I wrote this book with my dear colleague, collaborator and friend, Marianne Lewis. I think my number one tip is just to sit and do it. And I know that people will say all the time, but just. I once had a professor when I was at Harvard who said, you know, it's just like butt and seat. Get it done. And that's important. And I am so grateful to collaborate on this book because Marianne and I have been working together since I was in grad school. I, as I said earlier, came across this concept of paradox and then looked around to say, who else studies this idea? And there were very few people that were talking about paradox in the context of organizations and organizing and leadership, in part because it's a quite irrational idea, or it does. It does not feel linear and rational in the ways that we like to think that our science that is informing our science. She had just written this brilliant paper on paradox where she drew on ideas of philosophy and theology and Eastern. Eastern ideas, Eastern philosophy and psychoanalysis and physics. You know, and in some ways, what I like to say at this point is that we in the world of organizations and economics and sociology and psychology are late to the paradox party because our colleagues in physics and our colleagues in psycho. And now, well, because first of all, these ideas have been around for 2,500 years from the east or from Greece, Greek philosophy. And second of all, we, our colleagues in physics or psychoanalysis have been playing with them for the last hundred years to understand how is it that our material world or our internal psychoanalytical world are paradoxical. And that was only now in the last 20 years, that we are saying, okay, well, how does that mean that our social world and our. Our behavioral world is paradoxical? So she had written this paper, and I like to say that I stalked her because I saw the paper, I emailed her and said, oh my gosh, tell me everything you know. We met at a conference and we like to say the rest is history. And what's been really important is that we have both anded our writing process, learning both how we come to a collective understanding of our goals and our vision and our purpose. And yet also. And also knowing and being able to articulate what is distinct about each of our talents and being able to work together to create synergies between them. So I am the crappy first draft writer. She is the brilliant structure. We work together to think about and generate the ideas and structure them. I write a crappy first draft. She makes it sound so much more beautiful and helps to structure it even more. And then we go back and forth. And that has been. And having a partner who can also emotionally help in the process. When you feel stuck and you're wondering, is this any good? And is anybody going to read this besides my mom? That's also been incredibly helpful. So it's been a great partnership and I'm so grateful to her and to the ways that that's helped our ideas and our ways of expressing our ideas.

Yeah, I love that. And I think, you know, both ending your writing process there. I hear the tip in that of not everyone is great at everything. Not everyone enjoys everything. And to be able to write a really great book, if one person was to say, I'm either going to write a book or I am not, and that is like, that's your either or, right? Do I write a book or do I not write a book? You say, well, I'm not a great. I'm not great at writing. The, like sitting down and writing is difficult for me or whatever. There's someone else out there who is saying, you know, am I going to write a book or not? And they may have that their strengths perfectly complement what your weaknesses are. And you could find the person that you could do this together and, you know, both. And your own book out into the world where you can write a book without having to do the thing that you know you're never going to do.

Right. And trust that the other person can honor, respect you, even as you acknowledge, here's the things that I'm good at and here's things that I'm not good at.

Yeah, I love it.

Well, thank you so much for all of that. Are there any things that I. I.

Should have asked about any.

I know I. I kind of teed you up before we started of stuff you don't get to talk about much in, in the interviews or something that didn't make the book or is there.

Anything that you wish you would have.

Had a chance to. To touch on before we close out the show?

Well, what I've been thinking, what I love and what I've been thinking about is just how engaged you are, given that this is a podcast on behavioral economics, in part because one could go to the. The world of economics and just think it is a very linear, rational science that looks for means and averages and tries to unpack sort of linear relationships between things. And the behavioral part shows just how messy those linear relationships are. So there is something deeply paradoxical about behavioral economics living in the both end of the messiness of our world amid a very linear science. And I love the invitation to those people that two more linear thinkers about trying to let go of that and live into a more holistic and sometimes irrational, sometimes absurd reality and see what that feels like and how to do it. Because that's the overall invitation here.

Yeah, I am reminded there I have both with students and with clients where all the time. And there are some people that are very in the black and white thinking of I want it to be a yes or a no. Is it. Is it framing or is it loss aversion? Is it priming or is it anchoring? Like, which is it? And you know, everyone knows I'm, I'm. I come. I always say it depends. And I always. I had a. When I was in my corporate role, I worked with an executive coach at one time. And I remember it really stuck with me for a long time where I was, you know, doing one of these, like, should I do. Should I. And I think it was actually I was asking how we should start this meeting. Should I talk about this or should I go into this? And his answer to me was yes. And so I do that. I do that to people now all the time. Because I remember having that moment of, huh, like. And so, you know, when people ask questions and say, well, is it A.

Or is it B or is or is it C?

And I say yes, yes to all. It's all of those things. And we really need to embrace the gray and know that there's so much in there and it's all of those things and none of those things. And however you choose to look at it. And we can keep digging and finding stuff in a way that I think is so, so fun.

So, yeah, I'm sitting here smiling. Cause I think you have captured the essence of this book right there.

Oh, good.

The invitation is if you just start by noticing how often you say or and start with that. Yes. And shift the or to the. And it shifts up neural. And we have a whole bunch of studies that show that just changing the question will invite you. This is the reframing will invite you into just a whole different way of thinking. So there, there is the entree pointed.

To the both and oh, I love it. Well, I think, like you said, a perfect point to move forward. And for everyone who is now so excited to go get their copy of both and thinking and to connect with you and to learn more and all the things with you and with Marianne of course. We'll put the link to the book in the show notes and what's the best way for people to get in.

Touch with you and to learn more.

The best place to find us is our website both and thinking.net and we are posting there.

Wonderful.

We will go ahead and link to that as well. And so so excited. Thank you again Wendy for joining me on the show. I look forward to many more conversations because I can tell that we we.

Could talk for a really long time indeed as well. Thank you for such a great conversation.

Thank you again to Dr. Wendy Smith for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I can't choose just one thing and I'm glad that because of the nature of the topic I don't have to.

So first off, I love the S.

Curves of change and innovation and how well Wendy and her co author Marianne talked about them in the book. It makes it really easy to understand and bring something tangible to the always be innovating language. We hear that that's become cliche by grounding it in something that's actually doable. Along those same lines, this idea of the wrecking ball of change where people or businesses swing way too far from.

Side to side because of this need.

For either or thinking when a both and approach can be so much more effective. When you ever feel the need to abandon everything and do a 180stop and ask yourself where the either or is and what your both and opportunity might be, it doesn't have to be so extreme. And for one last thing that has really stuck with me since reading this book and speaking with Wendy is just how prevalent paradoxes are in our lives. While this has become normalized for people like Wendy and in a lot of forms of academia, I don't think the average person thinks thinks about the thousands of competing paradoxes in their life at any given time. It's a term we tend to reserve for the most extremely complex and difficult situations. But really, even the most mundane choices are often built on a paradox. So having this tie in to our.

Paradoxical lives as well as those of.

Our employees, co workers, customers and more can make such a difference for businesses. It's a simple shift in your mindset and the way you think about things. But embracing paradoxes can be a huge, huge impact. There's so much opportunity there and I highly encourage you to pick up your own copy of both and thinking so you can learn more about this and the opportunity that awaits you. There is of course a link in the show notes to make it easy for you to do just that, as well as ways to for you to connect with Wendy and to related past episodes and other books, including Dolly Chug's A More Just Future, which is where I first learned about Wendy and her book. So thank you Dolly for including it and for the kind introduction you made to Wendy. All those links and goodies are waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 261 and thank you again to Dr. Wendy Smith for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday to learn all about the Network Effect. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.