Polarity Group Exercise

Rich shared something interesting on Twitter about managing polarities in groups.

how do you hold multiple divergent perspectives without needing to collapse them down to unity?

Rich Bartlett

@gitamar showed me a cool group process yesterday, based on Barry Johnson's polarity management:

1. start by naming a polarity that's present in a group: two competing values that are of most benefit when they are in balance

e.g. the diagram shows "tasks ↔️ relationships" pic.twitter.com/NIPo7bBGxF

— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) February 16, 2021

1. start by naming a polarity that’s present in a group: two competing values that are of most benefit when they are in balance
2. hold a conversation, starting at the bottom right quadrant: just look at one pole and describe what goes wrong when we are overbalanced towards this pole & neglecting the other e.g. what do you fear would happen if we only focus on relationships and neglect tasks?
3. then move to the top left: what do you value about the other pole? (e.g. what is good about being task-focussed?)
4. then bottom left: what do you fear would happen if we over-focus on tasks at the expense of relationships?
5. then top right: what do you value about the first pole? (what is good about being relationship-focussed?)
6. then we named action steps we could take to further embody values from both poles
7. and “warning signs”: indications that we might be getting too focussed on one side of the polarity and need to counterbalance more in the other direction

bingo

the "conversations we can't have" is the cultural equivalent of "technical debt" (engineering term for shortcuts we took that will cost us more eventually)

— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) February 16, 2021