When you go into a negotiation, it’s natural to want to win. It can be uncomfortable to back down or give up something, but having an either/or mentality can hinder what’s possible, says Wendy Smith, coauthor of Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems. Humans default to either/or psychologically because we want a clear choice, she explains.
“An open decision can leave you feeling anxious and uncertain,” she says. “Uncertainty raises fears, and by making a clear choice, you quell those fears.”
There’s also a lot of ego in choices. “In either/or thinking, we want to be right,” says Smith. “If I’m right, somebody else must be wrong. We look at what’s good about our point of view, we surround ourselves with others who agree with us, and then we diminish the other side. It’s a very defensive reaction, and we fail to see that there could be multiple pieces that are right, even if they conflict in what they’re saying.”
Both/And Approach
Getting to broader truth requires listening to one another, putting the pieces together, and realizing that there are different ways to see a situation and value the differences. Smith calls it a “both/and” approach and getting to this place is a lifelong practice of pausing and shifting.
“Either/or might lead to some good short-term decisions, but in the long term, it’s limited at best and detrimental at worst,” says Smith. “‘Both/anding’ is a better alternative. It’s not easy to do, but it creates more creative and sustainable solutions.”
The first step is noticing our either/or questions or situations. Next, pause, shift, and invite them both to be right. For example, a question may be, “Do we spend money on this project or that project?”
“Pause and ask, ‘How can we address and enable both this and that together?’” says Smith. “That opens up new ways of just engaging with the question. Psychologist Paul Watson once said, ‘The problem is not the problem. The problem is how we think about the problem.’ If we frame an either/or, we will go down the road of trying to make a choice. If we frame both/and, we will expand the possible solution set.”
Getting to a Trade-off
With a both/and approach, you still have to make choices, says Smith.
“Some people will say, ‘Both/anding is all about the win/win.’ We actually don’t find that,” she says. “What we find is that sometimes both/anding is making small choices over time that allow you to accommodate both. It’s about accommodating trade-offs.”
Making effective trade-offs requires an ability to look at the big picture, managing for today and for tomorrow.
“The metaphor we use is tightrope walking,” says Smith. “If you look off into the horizon, you’re going to want to move forward. But to get there, you have to make micro shifts between left and right to balance. You’re also not overemphasizing one side and [underemphasizing] the other, because if you do you fall over. These micro trade-offs you’re making are in service of the broader, integrated, more holistic vision.”
Smith says trade-offs are dilemmas. “By shifting to think about underlying paradoxes and the potential for both/and, it shifts how we can then go back and respond to those dilemmas or trade-offs. Those dilemmas are chosen,” she says. “For example, if you think about political trade-offs, right now we’re stuck in an either/or world of polarization where everybody’s fighting for their position. But we’re not getting to a better point in the big picture.”
Taking a both/and approach can be applied to any part of your life when you stop to recognize the either/or questions and the situations you encounter, she adds.
“Let’s stop thinking about ‘I’m right and you’re wrong,’ and pause and listen,” Smith says. “It doesn’t mean we have to agree with the other person. But by stopping and listening, maybe we can learn something and work together to come up with something better.”
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If you’re feeling stressed about work, a nice vacation could be just what you need. Unplugging from the day-to-day pressures to unwind can help you recharge and refresh so that you’re ready to get back to work . . . right? Not always, finds a survey by Visier.
The people analytics platform polled 1,000 full-time U.S. employees about vacation time and overall job satisfaction. While 89% of employees did feel refreshed after taking PTO, the reset didn’t make them ready to return to work; 42% even said they dreaded getting back to work.
And it gets worse: Some 44% of respondents thought about quitting their jobs while on a vacation, and of this group, 44% followed through and resigned.
A contributing factor to wanting to quit, according to those polled, was bringing work on vacation instead of totally disconnecting. Visier found that 95% of employees worked by choice because they were worried about missing something important or having to catch up when they got back.
But in the group that thought about quitting, those who stayed very connected to work while on vacation were 36% more likely to actually do it. For those who were actually required to stay connected while taking time away, more than 70% thought about quitting.
So should managers be afraid of PTO? Not if they are aware of some of the dynamics in play, says Yustina Saleh, VP of research and value at Visier, noting that it’s imperative for employers to provide employees with a better sense of balance.
“If your work-life balance is not strong and you have time to pause, you may start to think there must be something better out there,” she says.
If an employee hasn’t taken five days off in a row for more than 18 months, it should sound an alarm, Saleh says. Employers should encourage employees to take time off and give them permission to disconnect completely when they’re away. Managers should make arrangements before the employee leaves so they won’t be worried that things will fall apart when they’re gone.
“Encouraging employees to take time off says ‘I care about you. I care that you are healthy,’” Saleh says. “Have some level of redundancy when planning for employee vacation time. Take into account your deliverables. It’s summer. People will take time off, and that means you may have to adjust your plans instead of expecting the same KPIs. Doing that will change the dynamics quite a bit.”
For example, adjust delivery schedules on projects, or cross-train employees so that the work can be covered. Managers should also create a safe environment where employees can speak up and share if they’re feeling stressed and need to unplug.
“If the manager is only about the deliverables, it won’t be good,” Saleh says. “It’s doesn’t mean that you’re not meeting your KPIs. It just means that people have feelings and families. If you don’t build redundancy, people don’t see a way out. They will meet your deliverable but quit later. Absenteeism and vacation need to be part of your operational planning.”
It’s also important for managers to lead by example. “If you know that your boss is off on vacation and is working nonstop, that guilt of not working becomes real for their employees,” Saleh says.
The bottom line is that vacations won’t fix bad culture. “People are not robots,” Saleh says. “If everything was messed up before their vacation, time off won’t fix that.”
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With so many people contemplating a career change, it can be tempting to take a leap of faith. Quitting your day job and going all in can feel empowering, but it may be smarter to slow down and take small steps toward uncertain goals instead, say Nathan and Susannah Furr, authors of The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown. The Furrs call this approach having “personal real options.”
“There’s this myth that you have to go all in on a project or initiative to be successful, when it’s actually better to do a personal real options approach,” says Nathan Furr.
The Furrs were introduced to the concept after interviewing Ben Feringa, recipient of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on molecular machines. The Furrs asked Feringa if he faced uncertainty on his road to a scientific breakthrough.
“He laughed and said, ‘It was all uncertainty,’” recalls Nathan Furr.
Feringa told the Furrs that he encourages his students to have at least two projects going, one certain and one uncertain. “Striving for certainty will lead you down false paths or lead you to commit too long to projects that won’t work, or to uninteresting projects that will work,” he explained.
Research from the Academy of Management found that hybrid entrepreneurs—entrepreneurs who keep their day job while they try their new venture on the side until it shows it has legs—are more successful than entrepreneurs who quit their job to do their venture.
“Why? Because they have more time and less stress, less anxiety from the uncertainty, and they’re able to figure out the right way to go forward,” says Nathan Furr.
Defining Your Steps
Instead of quitting your day job and taking an all-in approach, the Furrs recommend defining the actions you can take towards the uncertain goal in a day, week, month, or three months. Set up in a series of tests, breaking things down into small experiments, learning and changing course as you go. Start with what feels the most important.
“It’s asking, ‘What has the greatest curiosity for me?’” says Nathan Furr. “That’s the source of energy that you want to tap into. The more successful people were the ones who focused on the thing that was most important instead of thinking they had to do everything at once.”
For example, if you want to write a book, carve out time before or after work to work on chapters. Roald Dahl worked for Shell Oil and Margaret Atwood was a barista in a Toronto coffee shop until their writing careers took off.
From there, take an uncertain project step by step, moving forward. The Furrs say it’s important to take stock every few months to make sure the project is still providing enough value for the effort you’re putting into it. Ask yourself, “Am I still excited about this project, or has it become a chore? Am I still learning enough to make it worth it?”
Schedule check-ins and deadlines, holding yourself to them. And, perhaps most importantly, avoid doing nothing. Susannah Furr calls this regret minimization. “What are the things that keep needling you?” she asks. “The things that you really want to be a part of and you’re just not taking time for? How could you plan to make it happen?”
Uncertain goals can feel challenging when you take them step by step. Failure is a possibility, but the lessons it brings can lead to new opportunities that are even better, says Susannah Furr. “Reframe uncertainty to being the portal to possibility,” she says.
