THE KOAN: PARADOXICAL THINKING

Peter Koestenbaum raises an interesting comparison below which gives a another perspective to leadership and change.
“Paradoxical thinking is the key to enhanced systemic thinking. If you can think in terms of opposites, you can see trends in systems. Many people are familiar with koans, the provoking questions of the East. “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” is a familiar example. They are meant to provoke innovative thinking, to instigate change in how we see a problem, a radical transformation of who we are as leaders and how we approach our work.

The koans are part of a general creativity tool. Paradoxical thinking stretches the mind. … Progress in vision occurs at the paradox interface. Learn how to distend the mind, and then let it integrate, as in dreams and alternation (such as recreation and sleep), and be sensitively attuned to collect the results. Many scientific breakthroughs and technological inventions arise in precisely this way. The idea is to present you with an ambiguous stimulus, one that makes no prima facie sense, and then “hypnotize” you, or strongly suggest to you, that there is an answer, that a solution exists, but you just don’t see it. You can push your own mind in this way to transformation, to see things you did not see before, to contact a logic that usually appears to you only in the penumbra before sleep and the haze of a dream. This is how originality in art can be generated. It is that part of vision that we harness for change and innovation in business”.

What are you hearing but not listening to, what are you sensing but not acknowledging, and how can you see that, which in the first place seems impossible, if you opened to the four ways of seeing: intuition, perception, insight, and vision. Intuition is the source that sparks external seeing (perception); internal viewing (insight): and holistic seeing (vision).

These times call for a leader to see in different ways. The courage to take bold steps, to walk where others may hold back and wait for others to take the first step. We see this playing out on the world stage, especially after Copenhagen. Future-thinking businesses are taking the initiative. Concerned people are making their voices heard.

The process of paradoxical thinking is a way to initiate what is possible. How are you as a leader initiating what is possible? How are you shaping the way your people ’see’?