S1:E40 | Shifting Clients into Action When They are Entrenched in Opposition

COOPER: Welcome to another episode of the PPI Podcast brought to you by the Purposeful Planning Institute. My name is Cooper Biersach, and I’m thrilled to be hosting this episode. Today’s guest is a long time member of the PPI community. Many of you know her well, and I’m excited to highlight some of the new thinking that she’s brought to the world of Purposeful Planning. Cathy Carroll is a leadership coach and author of Hug of War, How to Lead a fFamily Business with Both Love and Logic. Cathy, I’ve got your book right here next to me, well worn copy. Welcome to the PPI podcast. 

CATHY: Thank you, Cooper. It’s so nice to be with you, and I’m really pleased to have you as my host, because not only have I known you for a long time, and you’re quite knowledgeable about today’s topic, but you are also a new member to the PPI community, and I’m really excited to welcome you as well. 

COOPER: Thank you so much. I appreciate your introducing me to this community, and already I’ve been quite impressed with the folks I’ve met in various spots. So thank you for including me. I’m excited to be a part of it before we jump into the topic of polarity thinking and start talking about your book. I’d love to start with this. What inspired you to write this book, Hug of war? 

CATHY: Well, when I led my father’s business, I looked around for like, what’s the guidebook for how to lead a family business, and there was nothing about the blocking and tackling of leadership. There are a lot of terrific family business books out there. They seem to be really focused on the best practices of governance and succession, which are important, meaty topics, but there was nothing about like, “How do I lead the family business on a day to day basis?” And when I compared, I had spent 20 years in corporate roles before I led my father’s business, and when I compared leadership in the corporate domain to leadership in a family business, I was struck by how profoundly different it felt. And so I wrote Hug of War to help family business leaders address the unique challenges of leadership in a family business. And one of the topics in the book is this concept of polarity thinking, and that has really resonated deeply with the advisory community. So I’m excited today to talk more about polarity thinking, for those of us who serve these families. 

COOPER: You mentioned how different and distinct the domain of corporate leadership is versus family business leadership. What makes it so different?

CATHY: Well, you’re teeing up the core thesis of the book, which is that family business leaders have an incredibly unique challenge that no other leader faces, and it’s that they have two competing mindsets that yield two completely different right answers, and here’s what I mean. First, you’ve got the business mindset, which is driven by logic, and it values competition and profits and meritocracy. And then you have the family mindset, which is driven by love and it values fairness and sharing and unconditional belonging. So when you have a leadership challenge, such as, my brother in law is really underperforming, when you use the business mindset, you get a really clear right answer, I need to let him go. And then when you use the family mindset, you say, “Well, gosh, he’s married to my sister, and gosh, they’re raising a special needs child. Maybe I should give him a raise.” And so those are two completely different answers, and they’re both right. They’re both right. And so this is the challenge of leadership in a family business, you’ve got two competing right answers that are in utter opposition with each other.

COOPER: So yeah, let’s let’s explore that a little bit. You mentioned the word polarity, and you talk about this specific example, what do you mean when you say polarity?

CATHY: So a polarity is a set of interdependent opposites. And when I say interdependent, what I mean is each word defines the other. Think of an inhale and an exhale. You don’t have an inhale without an exhale, right? Vice versa. Think of bold and humble in terms of leadership styles. Think of activity and rest in terms of how we manage our energy. Polarities are interdependent pairs of equally important values, and the challenge is they’re not solvable. There’s no answer to, “Should I inhale or should I exhale?” Your goal is to live. They are indestructible and because they can’t be solved, they have to be managed. They are ever present and constantly in need of management, not solutions.

COOPER: Yeah. This is the mind blowing piece for me when I first discovered polarities, and in reading your book, because I’m a problem solver. And there are probably a lot of problem solvers listening to this podcast right now. So when you say, “Polarity can’t be solved, but it must be managed,” what’s the practical implication of that? How does that work?

CATHY: Well, some problems have a right answer. So for example, if you’re trying to decide, should I manufacture in Mexico and ship to the US, or should I manufacture in St Louis. You can do the math, you can scrub the numbers, and you can get a right answer. There is a best answer to that question. But some challenges don’t have a right answer. Let’s just pretend I became the CEO of my grandmother’s business. And I’m asking myself, “Should I honor tradition, or should I introduce innovation?” Maybe I’m thinking, “Should I challenge the leadership team, or should I support the leadership team? Should I invite my siblings’ spouses to the board meeting or not?” Answers to these questions are context specific. They may change over time, and they’re really different for every family, every family is going to have their own right answer at the moment to that question. More importantly, these are the wrong questions, right? Because these are either or questions, “Should I invite my sibling’s spouses or not?” It is an either or question, and with an adaptive challenge such as that, either or questions actually don’t work. When you face a polarity, you have to make sure that you’re not assuming that there is a single right answer, because there’s not a single right answer. If I only focus on tradition, for example, in my grandmother’s business, what’s likely to happen?

COOPER: Well, I mean, if you think about it, you could lose this, lose sight of the needs of your customers, and you may end up continuing to make something that’s no longer relevant, say, for example, buggy whips when the automobile is coming into fashion. I guess your brand could get stale and really not keep pace with the times. 

CATHY: Yeah, exactly. So there’s really a lot of value in innovation, right? But if I only focus on innovation, what’s that risk of happening?

COOPER: Ooh, so you could lose out there too. I suppose you could. You know, make the wrong bets, you could kind of lose sight of what made you great to begin with, and you could kind of go down some paths that that don’t make sense for your core business

CATHY: Exactly. So if I focus on only tradition or only innovation, I’m going to experience the overuses, and that’s one of the core properties of polarities. When you over focus exclusively on one pole of a polarity, you are guaranteed to get its overuses.

COOPER: So poles of a polarity have overuses. Sounds kind of like, overdoing strengths and and kind of how a strength can turn into something that is not so much of a strength any longer. So if a polarity has overuses, then that makes me curious about the benefits. What are the benefits? 

CATHY: Yeah. So the easiest example is to go back to that inhale, exhale example that I mentioned earlier. So if you think about, what are the benefits of inhaling? You get oxygen. What about the overuses of inhaling? Well, you get too much oxygen and you don’t expel carbon dioxide. So what are the benefits of exhaling? You expel the carbon dioxide. What if you over exhale? Well, you’re not getting enough oxygen, right? So if your goal is to live, you can’t answer ask the question, should I inhale or exhale? Clearly, you need both.

COOPER: Yeah, that’s such a wonderful picture of balancing both. So let’s take what you’ve shared so far and tie it back into the title of this episode, which is shifting clients into action when they’re entrenched—I love that—when they’re entrenched in opposition. How do clients get entrenched in opposition? 

CATHY: Well, the short answer is, they argue the diagonals, and let me explain what I mean. So let’s pick transparency and privacy, right? Privacy and transparency, are they polarity? Do they define each other? Yeah, so it’s a good polarity. And imagine you are an estate planning attorney, and you’re working with a couple who’s just completed their estate plan. So they come to your office and they sign the documents, and then just as they’re leaving, they ask, “Should we reveal or conceal our estate plan to our children?” One spouse wants to keep the plan private, and the other spouse wants to share the details. Well, this is definitely a polarity. So what the advisor can do is say, Well, this is not a problem. This is a polarity. Let’s map it out. And then once you map it out, you put a big plus sign. The simple way to map it out, the only hack you need in polarities, is the plus sign. So I get out a piece of paper, and I draw a large plus sign on the piece of paper, a horizontal piece of paper, and then I put one pole of the polarity on one side and the other pole on the other. So for the sake of this one, let’s put transparency on the left and privacy on the right of the horizontal line in the middle of the plus sign. Then you say, “All right, well, what are the benefits of transparency?” And they might answer things like, “Well, it helps us build trust. It helps prepare our children for the future.” And then you say, “Okay, great. Although you have transparency on the left side, what are some of the overuses?” And they might say, “Well, gosh, we’d have to defend our decisions, like whatever we decide to put into our plan, we’re gonna have to defend them to our children, and we don’t want to do that.” Or, “Gosh, if we tell them what’s going to happen, they might become entitled.” That’s usually the really common fear, is, “We’re going to raise entitled brats, and we don’t want that to happen.”

COOPER: Right, of course, very calm, yeah.

CATHY: So then you flip to the right side and on above the word privacy. So this is in the upper right quadrant. You ask the family, “What are some of the benefits of privacy?” And they say, “Well, we don’t have to defend our decisions, so that’ll minimize some conflict, which is a benefit, and we’ll actually raise our kids to develop their own set of skills and have a good work ethic, because they don’t know that they’re going to inherit money and live on easy street the rest of their lives.” Great. What are some of the overuses of privacy? What happens if you are overdoing the privacy? And they might answer things like, “Well, we’re not educating our children for the future and we’re not preparing them for the responsibilities of wealth.” Then you sit back and you’ve got all four quadrants. You’ve got the benefits of transparency, the overuses of transparency on the left side, then you’ve got the benefits of privacy and the overuses of privacy on the right side. And you step back and you see a fuller picture of the challenge that you face. It’s not a simple thing to do, but when you map out the polarity, you can get a little distance from the challenge. But the problem is, most couples don’t see it that way at first. What happens is one member of the couple argues the benefits of transparency in the overuses of privacy, so they’re arguing the diagonal on one side, and then the other argues the benefits of privacy and the overuses of transparency. They’re arguing the diagonal on the opposite. So if you imagine just taking that plus sign and drawing a big X on it, they’re arguing the x right. They’re arguing the diagonal. And it just does not serve them and the in it, they continue to argue and over, argue and argue.

COOPER: Wow. And it keeps them stuck, you say?

CATHY: Yes.

COOPER: When do they do that?

CATHY: What keeps them stuck is they’re both right. They’re both right because they’re both arguing the truth, right? There are benefits to transparency and overuses to privacy. There are benefits of privacy and overuses to transparency. So when they’re stuck in arguing that diagonals, they don’t get out of the argument because they’re both right.

COOPER: Wow, yeah. And this, I love your use of this piece of paper. In my mind, this is the most brilliant, simple way to help that couple see the challenge, right? So really see otherwise they are so hard in arguing their diagonals, but you put a simple piece of paper divided into four quadrants and then began to just write down in their words, that’s brilliant, really, really helpful. Talk a little bit more about that challenge, though. It sounds so simple, but you know,  the forces of that stuckness. Talk a little bit more about that.

CATHY: Yeah. Well, when you do argue the diagonals, you just are putting force against force, and that’s what also brings things to a halt. In fact, when a couple has an ongoing, decades long debate, they’re often arguing about polarity. In fact, one of the really common polarities in marriages is spend and save, right? “Is it a polarity to spend and save and vice versa?” Yeah, they kind of define each other. So we’re in a polarity. “Are there benefits to spending?” Yes. “Are there overuses to which are there benefits to saving?” Yes. “Are there overuses of saving?” Yes. So when a couple is arguing over and over. And over again, spend and save, they can step back by mapping the spend and save polarity, giving them a whole new, fresh look, and getting out of the arguing of the diagonals, because again, they’re always going to both be right if they just argue the diagonals, but stepping back forces you to see the bigger picture and acknowledge the blind spots that you may not see when you’re only arguing half of the equation. 

COOPER: Wow, yes. So, and that happens so often, right? People get stuck for years. And some of these right against right? So when advisors see that, and those are our listeners today, when they see this happening, how can they help that couple or help their clients get unstuck.

CATHY: Yeah, they get to be the heroes, right? Because they can see the polarity, and they can help the couple recognize that they are in a pernicious either or question that doesn’t have a right answer and that they need to change the question to, how can they get both the benefits of one side and the benefits of the other. How can they get the benefits of saving and the benefits of spending? Let me think it’s just an entirely different approach to decision making, really. And if we go back to our transparency and privacy example. Advisors can change the question, “Should we reveal or conceal our estate plan to our children?” Two, “How do we get the benefits of both, like, how can we build trust and minimize conflict and prepare our kids for the future and raise kids with a good work ethic?” It’s a completely different set of questions. And what’s so great about it is that it drives innovative thinking and creativity in problem solving. For example, in this particular situation, when your kids are five, seven and nine, you might talk about family values, right? When they’re 15, 17, and 19, you might introduce the languages of a trust, like, here’s a trustee and a grantor and a beneficiary, and there are terms for trusts. And then when there are 25, 27, 29 you might reveal more of the terms of the trust, or maybe share some of the dollar amounts it’ll and the right answer, frankly, will likely change over time, and the right answer is going to be different for every single family, because every family has unique set of contexts, and it’s those contexts that drive how the decision is going to be useful for today and might change in the future.

COOPER: Wow. That’s so helpful, and it just it really changes the whole script, because so often, as an advisor, I see a two individuals in a situation wanting to pull me in to their diagonal stuckness, and you know, this allows, you know, the whole situation to be telescoped out and say, “All right, let’s look at what we’ve what we’re dealing with here. It’s so helpful. Gives me a whole new set of questions.” I’d love to walk through how an advisor can maybe do another example. So could we use the include, exclude example? Often I get the question of, “We’ve got board meetings or owner meetings, and do we include married ins for those?” How might you help a family have that conversation?

CATHY: Great one. I love that. All right, so let’s get our hack out, let’s get our big plus sign, and let’s define our polls, because word choice actually really matters, and it’s important when we define our polls that we use language that’s neutral or at worst or at best, it’s neutral or positive. So you don’t want to use language that’s negative, so include and exclude. Although I find that to be perfectly fine, some people have an aversion to that word exclude, like it makes it feel negative, like I don’t want to exclude people. So when that happens, I invite the clients to define the polls in their own language. And let’s just assume, for the case of this one, they include, they choose inclusive and selective. Like, are we going to include them or are we going to be selective about who attends the board meeting? So step number one is get really specific about the poll names, and, frankly, use the client’s language, because they’re going to define the language that they’re comfortable with. And so let’s decide which one goes on the left. Which you tell me, Cooper, which would you like done the left? So we’re going to put inclusive on the left side of the plus sign, and we’re going to put selective on the right side. Now I start asking the family in their idea, what about, what are the benefits to being inclusive by including the married ins in the board meetings? And just to make sure that perfect isn’t the enemy of good, I write down, you know, 1, 2, 3, maybe four benefits before I move to the next quadrant. So I also strive to. Get approximately the same number of benefits and overuses in every in every quadrant, and that kind of, you know, it’s a good discipline, frankly, in best practices, polarity thinking there’s an energy cycle between each one of the benefits and overuses. But I think that’s a degree of complexity we don’t need to get into today. But yeah, so I try to get an even number-ish. So let’s explore the benefits of inclusive. Might be it feels like everybody belongs in the family, and the family has more ideas to draw from and thinking through challenging board topics. So that’s two benefits for inclusive. Now let’s go for two overuses of inclusive. Maybe one is having married ins participate in board meetings makes us have to consider their ideas, and even if we don’t want to, and once they’ve spoken, we have to acknowledge what they’ve said, or, gosh, the worst case is what happens if they divorce. That could make things really complicated, because now these married ins, know a lot of information about us, a lot of information about our business. That’s really scary. That level of inclusivity makes us nervous. And so though we’ve got two benefits of inclusive and two overuses of inclusive. So this time, I’m going to flip the script, and I’m going to invite you to explore some of the benefits of selective like, what do you think are the benefits of select? And I’ll give you a hint. They’re often the opposite of the overuses of the other pole. And I said that slowly, on purpose,

COOPER: They’re often the opposite of the overuses of the other pole. That’s so helpful when folks often have a struggle with thinking of the benefits of their non preferred polarity, right? Well, I guess the benefits of selective could be that we don’t have to consider the married ends ideas and your other and divorce is less complicated, so it’s a little bit simpler, cleaner.

CATHY:Yep, exactly. What about the overuses of selective

COOPER: Well, gosh, we miss out on possibly new perspectives, new ideas, and married ins might feel a little left out, a little like second class citizens. 

CATHY: Yeah, that’s the way I see it as well. One little stylistic note when I’m working with the clients. And I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again, because it’s important make sure to use their language and their ideas, and sometimes they get stuck, and that’s okay if they get stuck, I might offer an observation and let them decide if it’s relevant for them or not, but each polarity map will be unique, and the benefits and the overuses may change actually, over time, especially as the family context changes or the business context changes. And as we’ve said before, there’s not a single right answer to this, which makes it actually really fun.

COOPER: Yeah, yeah. So we’ve mapped this polarity. We’ve had some fun coming up with the benefits and the overuses of both. What comes next?

CATHY: Well, this is when we change the question. Instead of asking, should we include them or should we not include them? We change the question to how do we get the benefits of selective and the benefits of inclusive? So it might sound, “How do we make sure our married ins feel like they belong and we limit the the complexity in the event of a divorce, and we get the benefit of their ideas, and we don’t have to consider their ideas if we don’t want to?”

COOPER: So basically, you want them to have their cake and eat it too well. 

CATHY: Yes, of course, it’s really achievable. In fact, here’s one way to do it. Invite the mariannes to the board meetings as silent observers, right? I mean, that’s one way to do it. What other ideas come to mind?

COOPER: Gosh, you could, you know, share the meeting minutes with them. You could invite them to portions of the meeting, and then they wouldn’t. Maybe come into the Executive Session portion, you might have them come to dinner the night before. You could designate certain meetings each year as large these larger meetings for the married ends. There’s just lots of possibilities.

CATHY: That’s exactly right. There are a gazillion different possibilities, and every family is going to come up with their own answer for this question at this time, but you can see how when you change the question from an either or question to a both and question, you get all sorts of innovative, creative ideas that wouldn’t have come up otherwise. And you actually dissolve the factions, right? You dissolve the factions who are stuck in that endless loop of arguing the diagonals.

COOPER: I love that you dissolve the factions, those entrenched oppositional forces. I love that you make it sound pretty easy, and I know it’s not, because I struggle with this in my own work and practice, and quite frankly, as an individual, if it were so easy, we’d all be doing it by now, right? So how do we begin to think about this?

CATHY: Well, it’s, I really appreciate that question. This concept of polarities has been around forever, if you think about it, other words for it are dichotomy or paradox or duality. I mean Yin Yang is ancient wisdom when you really think about it, and that is exactly a polarity. Polarity thinking is relatively new. And Barry Johnson is actually the, I would consider him the father of polarity thinking. And he started noodling with the concept in the mid 70s. And it took some time to see. But now polarities are being taught at Harvard. In fact, Betsy Miller, who delivered the keynote address at the 2024 rendezvous, is now teaching a course on polarities at Harvard. So, I mean, it’s starting to really take root. But there are, I think, a few other reasons this is hard. Our brains seem to be wired for this either or thinking. It takes our brains a beat to actually hold a little bit more complexity than we’re used to doing, and it frankly takes sustained practice to recognize a polarity in the moment, and then change the way you think about the challenge polarity thinking requires that we hold more complexity than we’re used to holding. One of my favorite quotes is from F Scott Fitzgerald, and he wrote, or he said, “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

COOPER: I love that one that well, you know, it is hard. I mean it. I love that. You know, thinking about this idea that my brain is hardwired for either or thinking it’s a lot easier requires a lot less energy, emotionally, mentally, physically, to have clear cut answers. This tension can be a little exhausting. And you mentioned practice, it almost sounds like exercise. Getting exercise for the brain. How do we get this practice? How do we begin to practice with both?

CATHY: Well, the thing that really kind of sparked my ability to recognize a polarity was listening intensely for the word “or.” When I hear an either or question, I pause for a beat and I ask, “Is this truly an either-or question?” Because there are plenty of good either-or questions out there, or is this a polarity? And I’ve gotten to the point now where I can assess pretty quickly whether we’re facing a player. And frankly, if I’m not sure, I just say, “Hey, do we have a problem here, or do we have a polarity?” And then we’ll just talk about it. We’ll actually define the the problem. And defining the problem in and of itself is really helpful. But if we determine it’s a polarity and not a problem, I start looking for the both and solutions, right? And so listening for that either-or question is the key to finding whether or not you are facing a polarity or you’re facing a problem. It’s actually kind of fun. 

COOPER: It is kind of fun. It’s like a treasure hunt, right? You’re looking for those clues and trying to determine, is it an either-or or is it, in fact, a more complex interaction of a polarity. I use it in my work, for myself and with my students. I’ve really enjoyed learning more about it.

CATHY: Tell me more like, tell me how you’re using it in your work. 

COOPER: Yeah. So one of the two situations that comes up a lot is with siblings that are working together that have fabulous complimentary skills. And if they can recognize that and harness that, they can be incredibly successful. Sometimes, what I see, though, is that they butt heads, because of those differences and those polarities at play. The big one I see—I’ve seen a lot—I saw yesterday actually, and I have with a former student. I see a lot with entrepreneurs and their next gens coming into the business. This polarity between flexibility, being able to make decisions by the seat of your pants and structure. So flexibility and structure is a big one, and often the diagonals come into play. Because I’m just thinking of this one next gen who really thrives and is excellent at creating needed structure to grow their company to the next level. He sees his father’s flexibility is creating chaos, waste, confusion, and his dad sees his structure as being a stick in the mud, putting in place bureaucracy that’s not necessary. And they’ve really begun to see that if they can harness the two, they can actually take the company to the next level, and don’t have to constantly fight, but it’s taken time and really mapping that out for them to see that.

CATHY: Wow. And how do they respond when you use polarity thinking,

COOPER: Well, it’s once they see it. It’s almost this huge light bulb moment, like, “Oh man,” because it’s so much easier for one of them to be right, but when they realize, “Hey, wait a minute, we’re both right. We need both.” Then I think it’s very freeing, and it often allows them to just see, to be able to be creative, as opposed to that hunkered down, “I’m right, you’re wrong.” It allows them to see things that either one of them could not have seen or done on their own, and that’s pretty exciting. Really exciting. So Cathy, thank you so much for bringing this concept to the advisory community. Where can we learn more

CATHY: Succession and estate planning, in governance, in family office, challenges in philanthropy. I mean, these polarities are everywhere in life. And so this is not unique to family business. This is really very, very relevant for the pPurposeful Planning Institute community. And I’m excited to do that. Of course, I can’t not mention my book, Hug of War, which has actually two chapters dedicated to the step by step process of using polarity thinking with clients. And I also would like to mention family businesses paradox, which is which was published almost two decades ago, written by Amy Schuman, who wrote the foreword for hug of war, along with John Ward and Stacy stetz, and they look at polarities through much more of a consulting lens, with a keen focus on governance and succession.

COOPER: I’m going to also put in a plug for your book, because I will say I have given it to several clients, and it has really open their eyes to be able to read it together has kind of been a wonderful support to my also mapping that out for them. So thank you so much, and I hope this podcast today inspires listeners to attend the symposium and continue to learn more about polarities. Thank you, Cathy, so much for your time and your passion in writing this book and in really doing this work, and thank you for your time today

CATHY: Thank you, Cooper, it’s so nice to be with you.