Editorial
White Paper
The Future of Leadership Development: AI-Driven Manager Enablement
A familiar frustration shows up again and again in leadership. You make a decision. You commit. You push things forward, and yet, somehow, the same issue resurfaces. The debate returns. The tension remains. It can feel as though you’re failing to land on the right answer.
Part of the pressure comes from the framing of many of the challenges we face. We’re expected to decide. To prioritize. To pick an option and move on. Progress, we’re told, depends on clarity, and clarity often gets translated into an either/or decision.
But not everything we’re dealing with fits so neatly into that framing.
Some challenges don’t respond well to being “solved” once and for all. Treating them as final decisions can actually make things harder, not easier. The issue doesn’t come from indecision or lack of capability; it comes from trying to force a choice when, in practice, the situation is asking for something else.
When Choosing One Doesn’t Work
Take a simple, familiar example: planning and doing.
At various points, teams and leaders find themselves debating whether they should slow down and think things through, or stop analyzing and get on with it. Both arguments have merit. Both can feel urgent.
But choosing one over the other doesn’t resolve the tension, it just creates a different set of problems. Endless planning drains energy and momentum. Constant doing, without reflection, leads to rework or confusion. Treating this as a decision to be made can feel like progress under pressure, but it misses the point. Planning doesn’t replace doing, and doing doesn’t replace planning. Picking one would be ridiculous.
This way of thinking isn’t new. It builds on the work of Barry Johnson, whose work on Polarity Thinking helped leaders recognize that some challenges aren’t problems to solve, but tensions to manage over time. Johnson showed that in these situations, both sides matter, and that over-favoring either creates predictable downsides.
What often gets lost in practice, though, is how this actually plays out in the moment. Knowing that both sides matter isn’t the same as knowing how to work with them as conditions change.
At this point, it’s tempting to say: of course we need both. And that’s true. But it’s also where this gets oversimplified. The work isn’t to do a bit of each. It’s to recognize when one deserves more weight than the other, and to move between them deliberately as conditions change.
People often start talking about balance here, but that doesn’t really fit the reality of complex work. The situations we’re operating in aren’t static. They don’t reward stillness.
So, if these situations aren’t something to balance, we need a different way of understanding what’s actually required.
What if the work here isn’t to make a better decision, but to let go of the idea that a single decision will resolve it?
When Deciding Isn’t the Work
Think about skiing — not racing through gates, but skiing for pleasure. You don’t head straight down the hill, and you don’t zig-zag randomly either. You choose a line. You lean into a turn, aware of your speed, the gradient, the edge of the piste. You stay with that turn for a while, until it’s no longer the right response to the slope you’re on. Then you shift your weight and turn the other way.
Staying on one edge for too long isn’t commitment; it leads to loss of control. Turning isn’t a failure; it’s how you stay upright and moving. As with any dynamic system, staying fixed eventually puts you at risk.
This kind of movement isn’t flitting back and forth. It’s not indecision or hedging. It’s deliberate. You lean into one approach fully, long enough to get its benefits, while staying aware of the wider terrain. You’re paying attention not just to what you’re doing, but to what the other side offers, and you’re looking for the signals that tell you this approach is about to stop serving you. Ideally, you’ve thought about those signals in advance, so you can recognize them when they appear and move in anticipation, rather than waiting until the costs become obvious.
Where Either/Or Tensions Show Up at Work
Once you start looking for them, these tensions show up everywhere.
Operational Delivery and Strategic Ambition
Leaders are expected to deliver results now while also shaping what the organization needs next. Lean too far into delivery and the future gets crowded out; lean too far into strategy and teams lose clarity and momentum.
Treating this as a choice doesn’t help. What’s required is the ability to lean into delivery for a period, then recognize when it’s time to turn toward strategy, and back again, as conditions change.
Agility and Control
Many organizations want people to move fast, take initiative and act with autonomy, while also maintaining standards, controls and consistency. Over-lean into agility and things fragment; over-lean into control and energy drains away.
Framing this as freedom versus control misses the point. Both are needed, at different moments, and the skill lies in knowing when to lean into autonomy and when to turn toward control.
Global Consistency and Local Responsiveness
Across regions and markets, leaders navigate the tension between shared standards and local knowledge. Too much centralization and responsiveness suffers; too much localization and coherence is lost. No single answer works everywhere.
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Leaders have to lean into consistency when alignment matters most, and turn toward local discretion when responsiveness becomes critical; staying alert to when one approach stops serving the situation.
Reframing the Work
If movement matters more than balance, the real question isn’t what choice to make next, it’s how you’re currently framing the challenge in front of you.
Is there a decision you’re trying to “get right” once and for all, rather than staying alert to when it’s time to lean a different way?
Where might you have leaned into one approach for good reasons and what signals tell you it’s starting to give you diminishing returns?
And what would it look like, not to abandon that approach, but to lean the other way, deliberately, in response to what you’re noticing now?
The work isn’t balance. It’s movement. Complex situations don’t reward stillness. They reward movement; the ability to commit, learn and then turn when the conditions change.
Editor's Note: Read more on the challenges of leadership today:
- The Dirty Secret About Agile Organizations — Organizations can mistake motion for progress in pursuit of agility. Agility requires unglamorous structural work that most leaders skip in their rush to act.
- Deciding How to Decide — While we all like to believe we make rational decisions, the reality is we jump into decisions we justify later, with demonstrable impacts on our businesses.
- Working Faster, Thinking Better — Navigating speed, volume and meaning in an AI world.
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