Polarity Thinking as a Tool for Managing Dominant Thinking in Our Organizational Culture and Evaluation Practice
/by Kimberly Braxton and Pilar Mendoza
Every day we deal with “polarities,” or dynamic tensions, in our work, personal lives, and broader society, yet we may not always notice them or recognize them as such. For example, the continuous battle this year to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic has been an exercise in shifting between patience and urgency. The Biden administration has heavily pushed to make the vaccine widely available, and it has been a practice in patience to convince people to get vaccinated and wait for them to respond. As vaccinations lagged and patience wore thin, the sense of urgency increased, and many organizations announced vaccination mandates.
What do polarities have to do with evaluation? Equal Measure and Engage R+D recently embarked on a joint learning experience to explore this question. As two organizations committed to deepening our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practice,* we explored some common polarities that exist in our work and organizational cultures. Polarity thinking can prompt us to increase our awareness about values that may be in tension with one another and which ones are being prioritized. How might applying a polarity lens help us advance DEI in our work? In this blog, we share some of what we learned.
See CoCreative’s blog posts to learn more about polarity thinking.
1. Some polarities are steeped in white dominant cultural norms that we try to push back against.
As part of our evaluation practice, we seek to disrupt traditional notions of evaluation and its purpose. And, as professional services firms - meaning that our bottom line is tied to client needs and scopes of work established through grants and contracts - we must operate efficiently to deliver high-quality work. These factors create a daily tension, sometimes resulting in personal and collective stress.
We enjoy our work very much, but we often wrestle with “moving fast and taking time” along with “maintaining harmony and encouraging debate.” Moving fast can diminish the quality of our work when we override processes to include varied perspectives through debate and to create space for refinement while avoiding perfectionism.** How can we create more balance between getting things “done” and doing things “well,” knowing that pushing back against dominant norms is essential to shift organizational culture and evaluation practice toward diversity, equity, and inclusion?
2. The ongoing pandemic and protests for racial justice have prompted our teams to exercise polarity thinking.
The COVID-19 pandemic and protests for racial justice in 2020 required our team members to rethink our values and priorities, both organizationally and personally. During the onset of the pandemic and racial justice protests, we grappled with “Should we move forward with our data collection plans or not?” “Should we pause our evaluation work acknowledging the level of stress felt by others, or do we move forward recognizing that there is much to learn from this moment?” Colleagues and clients alike ranged in perspectives – some wanted to proceed as planned to maintain a sense of normalcy or uncover new and important information, while others wanted to pause and process the unknown impact of the moment on our lives.
During this time, we slowed down to listen to one another and acknowledged the tensions that we were feeling within our organizations, with our clients, and within the communities they serve. We recognized that some colleagues needed space to process collectively, which made room for new ways of thinking about how we might engage community members virtually and test new ways to facilitate sensemaking sessions. Ultimately, by slowing down and creating space in our practice to acknowledge what we were feeling, our teams were able to practice embracing multiple truths of our human experience to imagine new ways of working.
3. Polarity thinking helps us to slow down and recognize which values are prioritized and how those values advance or impede equity.
One exercise that our joint learning process reinforced is slowing down and pausing to build awareness. If you are committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, then you need to first recognize tensions and then acknowledge them. So how do we hone the practice of awareness-building? One approach is to build an understanding of polarities in our organizational cultures and evaluation practices. We can use polarity thinking as a tool to shift away from dominant ways of thinking.
One dominant way of thinking is “either/or” thinking, which presumes that there is a singular best approach. As an example, our organizations participated in a learning session where we broke up into two teams to debate the value of facts “versus” stories. This exercise demonstrated the disadvantages of either/or thinking: Facts and stories are interdependent. Stories not based on facts can be dangerous. Facts without stories can fall flat and be ignored. Our efforts to advance DEI depend on our ability to hold and honor both facts and stories, especially America’s historical record and current experiences of marginalized communities. As evaluators, we have power in our interpretation and dissemination of facts and stories, not just for clients and stakeholders, but also for the broader public.
Final Thoughts
Our organizations collaborated to support personal and organizational learning related to our DEI journeys. In embarking on this shared learning journey across our two organizations, our teams deeply appreciated the opportunity to pause and take stock of the polarities that surround our organizational cultures and evaluation practices. Using polarity thinking within our daily work continues to evolve.
We invite you to reflect on the same questions we posed to our colleagues:
What are some of the value tensions (polarities) that show up in your day-to-day work?
How might applying a polarity lens help us advance equity in our practice?
Below we offer a few tips and resources for recognizing and navigating polarities:
Arguments are often grounded in polarities; understand the roots of the tension.
Seek awareness of the polarities. Polarities do not always present themselves neatly.
Polarity management means embracing “yes, and.” Typically, there is no “one” right answer.
Think about how one polarity works with another to create harmony. What are the upsides and downsides of each?
Understand the greater purpose when you are managing a polarity: How can we move forward together with an overarching, unified purpose?
*To learn more about Equal Measure’s commitments and how we define diversity, equity, and inclusion, see https://www.equalmeasure.org/our-dei-commitment.
**Moving fast and perfectionism are known white-Western dominant cultural norms. See, for example, the work of Dr. Edwin Nichols and Tema Okun.
