Polarity Management: A Tool for Managing Complex Problems

30 years ago or os my brother Ron (Dr. Ron Newman, a PhD psychologist) introduced me to the concept of polarity management. For Ron, thinking about polarities and finding balance has been a lifelong habit of his, almost an involuntary obsession. Once you become aware of the variety of ways polarities emerge, you can't help but notice them yourselves. 

Examples abound. Security vs. freedom, efficiency vs. creativity, competition vs. cooperation. Polarity management is a tool to help us manage or resolve complex issues. The key idea is to understand that opposites are not necessarily enemies.

The goal is not to find a solution that eliminates one of the opposites, but rather to find a way to manage the tension between them in a manner that is productive and sustainable. 

Here's another example that happened with an acquaintance of mine. After a very busy time in his life he decided to go live on a beach in Florida for a year. After four months he was so bored he found a job that was fulfilling for 18 months but not something he wanted to do for the rest of his life. During this period he recognized his calling and followed that for the rest of his life.

Too much activity left him exhausted and he opted for inactivity. This resulted in a sense of meaninglessness, which propelled him to think more deeply about why he was here on earth. Ultimately he found fulfillment in a career that involved helping others.

My brother publishes a column about seeking balance that we hope will become a book or series of books. Topics he's written about include seeking balance with anger, depression, anxiety, happiness, grief, aspects of parenting and more. As a Christian counsellor he has spent more than two decades training church leaders in South America and elsewhere on this principle of finding balance.

Aristotle's Golden Mean is a similar concept in philosophy. Moral virtue lies between the two extremes of excess and deficiency. For example, finding the balance between recklessness and boldness is the path to virtue.

Giving is an example of this challenge. Stinginess is one end of the spectrum, extravagant giving to the neglect of paying your bills and neglecting your children is at the other end of the scale. How do we find the Golden Mean? For each of us this can be a perplexing problem in a world where there is so much need.

What about fun? Is "fun" the purpose of life? Or is laughter something that we enjoy because it lightens our load as we pursue our responsibilities? You can read my thoughts on that topic here: Eudaemonia vs. Hakuna Matata: Two Views on the Pursuit of Happiness

Much more can be said but I have to catch a plane. You can read a few of my brother's articles here... and encourage him to continue his writings. He's thought deeply on this topic for a very long time and has a bundle of useful insights.

Have a great weekend.

An Example of Polarity Management: The Grateful Dead's Truckin'

A few decades back my brother Ron, a psychologist, shared a concept with me that seems to have endless applications, the idea of Polarity Management. The concept is illustrated perfectly in two lines from the Grateful Dead's lively hit song "Truckin'." 

If you remember the song, it's essentially about life on the road as a band, with commentary about the various places they stayed or performed from Houston and New Orleans to New York, Buffalo and back to Bourbon Street. It talks openly about life on the road, which for many if not most bands included drugs at the time, so it was a counterculture anthem, not mainstream. 

The stanza that sums up polarity management is this one:

You're sick of hanging around and you'd like to travel
Tired of travel, you want to settle down
I guess they can't revoke your soul for trying
Get out of the door - light out and look all around

Who hasn't had the experience? You get tired of doing nothing and become restless, so you get busy. At a certain point, if you're too busy, you crave a break, a downtime.  So we pause, and it refreshes, but then that pause generates a longing to be active again. It's a cycle

There are dozens, even hundreds, of polarity cycles. Finding the balance between work and play is a problem that leads us into cycles. Some people like structure in their lives and create rigid lifestyles which at times feel like constraints or even shackles that we need to shake off. In our relationships, we may find our natural inclination to be supportive of whatever friends pursue, but then we fall back into a sense in which we feel a need to challenge them a little. ("Are you sure you're marching down the right path? Remember what happened last time.")

In our current post-covid business environment many executive and management level workers are struggling to find a balance between working in the office again (centralization) and continuing the "cocooning" style of working from home and connecting on Zoom. One thing for sure is that the benefits and weaknesses of each style have been experienced so that at least alternatives to what used to be a historical method have now been questioned. What comes next? It waits to be seen.

Roller coasters are exciting, but if we went to an amusement park and spent 98% of the time being flung all about, arms akimbo, we'd be ill. The excitement is fun, even terrifying, when it is temporary. Finding balance between equilibrium and drama is big part of life for many people 

Truckin' was penned by Robert Hunter, the only songwriter in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame who was not a performer, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Bob Dylan and Hunter collaborated on Dylan's 2009 album Together Through Life, which I listened to almost continuously as I set up a major art show that summer in what is now called the Lincoln Park District here in Duluth.

To learn more about Polarity Management ask Google. Or see what's available in your local library. Numerous articles and books have been written on the subject. At the heart of them all is an apparent desire find the Golden Mean, a life of balance of sorts betwixt and between all the forces pulling us back and forth in various directions.

For me, there's a lively sophistication in the arrangement in which all the players seem to dance around the melody in this song while no one actually plays it. The singer carries that melody, surrounded by an entourage of sound that is lively, pressing ever forward. It's catchy.

If interested, you can learn more about Truckin' (not necessarily polarity management) here at http://artsites.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/truckin.html

Watching the River Flow--Dylan Wrestles With His Complicated Inner Self

"All rivers run into the sea, and yet the sea is not full." ~Eccles. 1:7

Here's a place I like to go to watch the river flow. 

Some of the great books that I've read featuring rivers include Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Nobel Prize-winning author V.S.Naipaul's A Bend in the River, Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. This past year I began an interesting book called River of Doubt about Teddy Roosevelt's journey up the Amazon. Hollywood films featuring rivers include Deliverance, The African Queen, Apocalypse Now and The Man from Snowy River, among a host of others.

At one time rivers were the primary means of transportation. Before the infrastructure of highways and byways, of rails and roads, the rivers were our transportation routes, hence all the major cities that we find along bodies of water. In Herman Hesse's novella Siddhartha, the river is a symbol. As he encountered the river in various stages of his life, its wisdom was revealed to him as it reflected his soul.

By this river I want to stay, thought Siddhartha... Tenderly, he looked into the rushing water, into the transparent green, into the crystal lines of its drawing, so rich in secrets. Bright pearls he saw rising from the deep, quiet bubbles of air floating on the reflecting surface, the blue of the sky being depicted in it. With a thousand eyes, the river looked at him, with green ones, with white ones, with crystal ones, with sky-blue ones.

I think I associate this song with Siddhartha because I was reading Herman Hesse around that time of my life when this song, and then the album, came out. But Bob Dylan's "Watching the River Flow" is a different kind of contemplation.  Recorded in March 1971 it was released as a single after which it appeared on his Greatest Hits, Volume II. It's a more energized song than the one he wrote with Roger McGuinn for Easy Rider. "The river flows, flows to the sea, wherever that river goes I want to be." (I used to play a harmonica lick with that when I was in college. It was very relaxing.)

The power in "Watching the River Flow" comes from the inner conflict that sits at the core of this story. It appears to be an autobiographical sketch that correlates with theologian Paul Tillich's intimate autobiographical sketch On the Boundary. In it Tillich explores the various polarities of his life and how they influenced him in different ways, between city and country, between social classes, between reality and imagination, between theory and practice, etc.

At the beginning of the song the narrator's been all night at an all-night cafe, "walking to and fro." This to and fro is the first clue of his inner restlessness, his life on the boundary between competing desires, two competing selves. There's a universality in this image as we all must learn to manage the polarities in our lives.

I love the matter-of-fact storytelling, similar to "I went to see the gypsy...saw him in a big hotel, he smiled when he saw me coming..." --just telling what happened, simple things, yet so much more. And in that song to he's been up all night so as to see the sun coming up "on a little Minnesota town."

As dawn is breaking, he here heads to a bank of sand by the riverside to mull things and watch the river flow.

What’s the matter with me
I don’t have much to say
Daylight sneakin’ through the window
And I’m still in this all-night café
Walkin’ to and fro beneath the moon
Out to where the trucks are rollin’ slow
To sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

This is a person very different from Siddhartha. Dylan is youth, Siddhartha full of years. Dylan is restless, Siddhartha inwardly at peace.

Wish I was back in the city
Instead of this old bank of sand
With the sun beating down over the chimney tops
And the one I love so close at hand
If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly
And watch the river flow

The real Dylan was raising a family at this time. He had some little ones to look after, a father role to play. He states he'll sit here contentedly, sharing this quiet life with the one he loves. And yet... As he notices people in disagreements, it might be that he notices this external feature because he has his own disagreements within himself.

People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah
Makes you stop and all wonder why
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
Who just couldn’t help but cry
Oh, this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though
No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow
And as long as it does I’ll just sit here
And watch the river flow

We live in a world today where there's more verbal conflict than ever. It might be best for all of us to get off social media and read more books, or sit on riverbanks.

People disagreeing everywhere you look
Makes you wanna stop and read a book
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
That was really shook
But this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though
No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow
And as long as it does I’ll just sit here
And watch the river flow

Watch the river flow
Watchin’ the river flow
Watchin’ the river flow
But I’ll sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

Copyright © 1971 by Big Sky Music; renewed 1999 by Big Sky Music

He began by asking, "What's the matter with me?" This is interesting because his accusation is turned inward. He's not saying, "Why are you so screwed up?" He's not finger-pointing. (He's not finger-painting either, but I'm curious if he'd paint his masterpiece with brushes or some other tool.)

He ends by taking a seat at the riverside. There's something refreshing and healing about rivers and water. They can be dangerous, too, when they rage and overrun their banks. But rivers, like people, have their rhythms.

Dylan has played this song 500 times live. Here is a YouTube video that has the first two of these live performances from 1978, courtesy someone who calls himself Mr. Tambourine Man. This is not a high-end production, but it's historical value can be underscored.

* * * *

Love the energy Joe Cocker delivers in his version of the song.

Rivers are cited more than three dozen times in Dylan's songs. His Hibbing home wasn't that far from the headwaters of the Mississippi and a rare triple watershed. Every river begins somewhere.

You can find insights from Robert Shelton, Greil Marcus, Clint Heylin, Christopher Ricks and others here on Wikipedia.

For a nice closure here, let's borrow these lines from Oscar Hammersteiin.

Ol' man river,
Dat ol' man river
He mus' know sumpin'
But don't say nuthin',
He jes' keeps rollin'
He keeps on rollin' along. 

* * * *

This week is Duluth Dylan Fest, a virtual event this year due to the literal disruption caused by the pandemic. For the first time you can participate from anywhere without being here. For the schedule of event, culminating Sunday on Bob's 79th birthday, visit Duluth Dylan Fest Goes Virtual

Polarity Management: Bouncing Between Busy and Burned Out

My brother Ron introduced me to the concept of polarity management more than two decades ago. He had been introduced to the idea when he was working on his Ph.D. at Temple.

Polarity management is a means for resolving contradictory forces at work in our lives or in situations. There are dozens of examples which confront us on a regular basis. Finding balance between being alone and being social, between doing and delegating at work, between being tough and tender as a parent (lenient or firm).

According to Barry Johnson, author of the book Polarity Management, "Polarities are ongoing, chronic issues that are unavoidable and unsolvable. Attempting to address them with traditional problem solving skills only makes things worse. There is significant competitive advantage for those leaders, teams, or organizations that can distinguish between a problem to solve and a polarity to manage and are effective with both."

When theologian Paul Tillich wrote his autobiography, aptly titled On the Boundary, the chapters were essentially an overview of the various polarities in his life. Theory and practice, reality and imagination, between two temperaments, between rural and city living, etc.

Recently I've been thinking about polarities because of observations I've been making regarding myself and also regarding people in organizations that I've been observing, specifically with regard to busy-ness. There's a certain kind of temperament that feels most satisfied when one is productive, as in busy accomplishing things. But busy-ness for busy-ness sake or the drivenness that sometimes occurs because people can't, or won't, delegate can ultimately become a grind.

I enjoy being busy, and find being productive to be satisfying, internally rewarding. But I've also seen where busy-ness that accomplishes nothing can become very depressing. Ultimately we begin asking ourselves, "Why am I doing this?" and unless we sense some kind of meaning in all this activity, our motivation can be sapped. Responsibilities that once brought satisfaction become obligations that are just another life burden.

In the diagram above the most fulfilling quadrant for me is the upper left where I am energized, engaged, enthused and productive. The danger comes, however, when I fail to take time to re-charge my batteries, my energy is depleted. To regain enthusiasm I move to the upper right quadrant, less busy and re-charging, but it isn't long before I feel a twinge of emptiness when I am not being productive. You only live once, so there is a subtle pressure to return to my projects.

This is one of my cycles. What are yours?

For this reason, it is essential to become self-aware. What are the signs that you have taken on too much? What are the rewards you need to keep going? Is your struggle situational and unresolvable or is it more due to the way you're interpreting things in your head? What are the clues that you're facing impending burnout?

I find it essential to make time for reflection on a regular basis. Otherwise one can start to feel like a squirrel running on one of those wheels in a cage, exhausted and getting nowhere, with no end in sight. What's the point of that?

For more on this topic read Dr. Johnson's Polarity Management.

Here's another good article by Peter Schulte.

The above is just one kind of quandary we can get into. Here are some others I've observed:

People focus vs. self-needs focus.

Pursuit of passion (activity/adrenaline) vs. withdrawal.

Purpose Driven vs. live and let live.

Busy vs. bored.

Helping too much and helping too little.

Some things just aren't cut-and-dried. What works for me may not work for you... we just do the best we can.

Meantime, life goes one. Enjoy the rest of your weekend... if you're not too busy.

Parenting 101: Insights on Vitamin C and Vitamin E from Dr. Ron Newman

Dennis the Menace at the Newseum.

One of the recurring themes in my brother's work as a psychologist is the concept of polarity management. There seem to be countless applications, in business and in life, to the concept of polarities. This weekend we we talked about parenting, Vitamin C and Vitamin E.

Ron (Ph.D., Temple U.) explained that raising children is not an exact science, but in three decades of counseling he's observed that many conflicts emerge because of a lack of balance with regard to Vitamin C and Vitamin E.

Vitamin C is the Caring function of a relationship. It's easy to illustrate this in the parent-child relationship, though it has application to all relationships including politics. Vitamin C is one end of a polarity.

In addition to being cared for, loved and nurtured, however, children also need rules and regulations. Vitamin E is the Executive function of parenting, which means you are setting rules and regulations, and consequences for violating those rules and regulations. It is also a necessary part of relationships.

In a family, with children, a fundamental issue (and responsibility of parents) revolves around these questions: how do you teach children to grow up and become responsible adults and take responsibility for their decisions? How do you raise a child to be confident and free to explore the world and the use of his or her gifts?

And how do parents correct their children when their children violate rules by staying up all night or when their kids say disrespectful things to their parents or other people? This is a Vitamin E function.

When a parent corrects in anger in a hostile way, it makes the child feel that the parent cares more about the rules than the child. If parents deal with things in anger they are neglecting the Vitamin C.

If parents compromise on E and allow the child to do whatever it wants, then they and the child are in peril because essentially the parent is enabling the child to make the rules, strengthening his or her selfishness and self-centeredness. The child's sense of connection in a balanced way gets compromised.

In some of the worst-case scenarios you have the polarization of parents along these lines. The Vitamin C parent's over-concern with connection undermines the Vitamin E parent's authority. Conflicts ensue and children can take advantage of the situation to get what they want. We've all seen this where children play one parent against the other.

In a healthy home, the child internalizes the Vitamin E and they learn, as they mature, to negotiate rules. In an unhealthy home the child simply rejects Vitamin E. She might reject it because the parents are inconsistent enforcing the rules.

* * * *

Ron went on to use this concept to explain how not understanding Vitamin E and Vitamin C causes confusion for some people in their ideas about God.

God is love, he stated. God communicates that love in what we see as falling into these two categories. God cared enough to come live in our broken world and die on a cross for us. John, as an author, communicated God's care for us in a multitude of ways. You see it in God's reaching out to mankind. Forgiveness is a Vitamin C function. Listening is a Vitamin C function. God wants us to communicate with Him. God's mercy is a Vitamin C function.

But the Vitamin E is communicated in God's having given us the Law, the ten commandments. The Law of God is for our benefit, summed up in the commandment to love one another. The two (the commandments and love) are not mutually exclusive. Thou shall not kill, thou shall not steal, etc. are designed to help us live in relationships of love.

"Now if we strive for perfection in following the law," he said, "if we overdo the emphasis on keeping law we end up with legalism, perfectionism, hypocrisy, judgmentalism of others, Pharisseeism... and we forget our connection to others. We compromise our Vitamin C."

* * * *

Additional applications to politics and business can be drawn, but I have a plane to catch and you can make your own applications from here. This is simply a tool to help bring understanding.

As you face the week ahead think about your own vitamin balance. And if you are a publisher, Ron's got a book's worth of insights on this topic of polarities.

Have a great week.