These are so central to leading people that leadership is vacuous without them. We will explore how great leaders high-grade their team, instigate freedom that is effective, manage tension, let loose directed creativity, and build harmony devoid of unhealthy consensus.

Invite People In & Send People Home

Managing this paradox starts with believing that it is possible to have an organization in which people are not “normally distributed.” Brilliant leaders can fall into stupefaction in a misguided effort to apply statistical tools to people and organizations. When we start with the mindset that people always fall along a bell curve, it is amazing how easily that expectation will be met.

Increase Freedom & Clarify Boundaries

Freedom - the ability to safely exercise the free will that all of us inherently possess - is the primary source of creativity and useful endeavor. It is a driver like no other. It is so in societies and it can be so in organizations. Organizations that refuse to access the power of freedom - right now this includes most of the organizations embedded in free societies - are unnecessarily assigning themselves to lesser results.

But freedom is a dangerous thing. It acts in ways that we can’t even understand, much less control. It makes people uncomfortable. Its unpredicitibility can produce tension, fear, and even hatred. It highlights and magnifies differences when most people want conformity. It pushes, challenges, insists, creates, destroys.

Increase Pressure & Reduce Stress

Great leaders, we are told, “hold people’s feet to the fire.” They “turn up the heat.” They “push people out of their comfort zones.” They are expected to increase the pressure on people to perform.

At the same time, we know that stressed-out organizations and people are unlikely to perform at a high level. The internal resources to deal with problems and opportunities simply aren’t there. People are struggling to stay afloat, bailing water out of a ship that actually needs to be redesigned.

Expand Creativity & Eliminate Ideas

Expanding creativity doesn’t have to produce a flood of bad ideas, require a massive feedback infrastructure, or force leaders into a gladiatorial “thumbs down” mode with their people - if we approach it properly.

We also know that there is no way to pursue every idea even to the rejection phase, and that an incredible amount of resources can be wasted on “Phase 1 trials.” We need to eliminate a high percentage of ideas very quickly.

Encourage Cooperation & Encourage Conflict

Since almost everything we do involves other people, cooperation is a practical necessity. In the sciences, extraordinarily open cooperation is encouraged - the voluntary sharing of ideas, research, analyses, data, methods, and findings. Many forums are provided, and not sharing is considered a professional discourtesy.

Conflict is almost without exception viewed as a negative. Conflict can indeed be disastrous, but so can cooperation. Managing in a world of paradox requires us to avoid putting a halo on cooperation and horns on conflict. Either can be bad. And either can be good.