The Power of Paradox by Robert Hanig

I recently had the opportunity to reflect on a long-term leadership and change intervention with an international finance and development institution I have been involved with for the last 15 years.

What makes this story so compelling is the fact that this institution grew not only in size, scope, stability, and operating results during a time of unprecedented global economic turmoil and during a time when it was also trying to adapt to different leadership styles of successive CEOs, but also expanded its developmental impact to a substantial and verifiable degree.

This unyielding commitment and capacity to hold the creative tension between ostensibly paradoxical goals may be at the core of what inspires individuals and institutions to rise to greater levels of engagement and achievement than they might otherwise.

This capacity to hold creative tension is essential in a world of simultaneous economic, environmental and social challenges.

Much of what seemed to emerge from this story that could inform and enrich our own approach to leadership and change requires not only our willingness to accept paradox but also demands a high level of cognitive and emotional maturity that includes:

• Steadfast aspiration and the recognition and acceptance of inconvenient, unexpected challenge
• Willingness to experiment in the presence of existing success
• Honest assessment of results while embracing and learning from ‘mistakes’
• Tenacious measurement and follow-through tempered with genuine listening
• Introducing fundamental change while accepting and recognizing the necessity and value of engagement
• Recognizing and regulating the balance of cultural and emotional stretch and strain
• Admitting and accounting for our own fallibility while in positions of leadership and authority

Distinguishing these causal elements and principles that led to this journey could be invaluable in building and refining our own theories and models of change — building and refining not in service of creating the ever-elusive and perfect blueprint, but in service of increasing our own resolve to catalyze positive impact in our systems inevitably characterized by overwhelming technical and human complexity.

Perhaps one of the most eloquent expressions of the importance of holding and being enriched by seeming paradoxes comes from Martin Luther King during the Last Presidential Address at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967:

Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites–polar opposites–so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power a denial of love.

We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality, which constitutes the major crisis of our time.