Misuse of Dualities
There are two sorts of misuse.
- Misuse in describing your situation.
- Misuse in acting within your situation.
Misuse in Describing Situations
Some people have a dualistic mind-set—everything is seen as having two sides that oppose or fight each other. (Like a stopped clock, this may sometimes be correct.) The identifies this approach as part of our natural repertoire.
When people are facing a topic which is poorly understood and unstructured, one way to investigate it is by identifying a dialectic. (Like a stopped clock, this may sometimes be correct.) The identifies this approach as part of our natural repertoire.
Another common tactic is reverting to a metaphorical account e.g. postulating that the phenomenon is like "a pendulum that endlessly swings between one extreme and the other". The framework provides for this approach.
None of the above tendencies, useful as they may be in some specific situations, are relevant to handling practical challenges in general. Their value lies in giving you that feel-good illusion that comes when you think you understand something, even when you are actually ignorant. By contrast, taxonomic analysis provides a deep and practical understanding.
Example
The taxonomic-analytic perspective has revealed 7 distinct hierarchical Levels of .
No one Level (or type) of purpose in this Framework can oppose another—because each has important and distinctive functions, and all complement, imply and support each other. However, the commonest analyses of purpose in the academic and management literatures dichotomize purposes into two opposing types:
- general v specific
- high-level v low-level
- qualitative v quantitative
- abstract v concrete
- ambiguous v specific
- achievable v aspirational
Such distinctions mostly give the illusion of knowledge without the substance. This is not an isolated case. Bi-polar discriminations are all too frequent manifestations of lazy thinking. Such analyses can cause more harm than good by engendering a false sense of clarity and missing significant discontinuities and transitions.
This is not to say that there are not natural dichotomous divisions of a taxonomic hierarchy like : a topic examined here.
Misuse during Action
Many examples of misuse in action are provided in relation to specific frameworks, and are best studied there. Not all dualities are equally subject to Action Misuse, but here are some examples:
Approach/Executing dualities can cause psychosocial difficulties if a person resolutely selects just a Type on one diagonal and denigrates and rejects operating with any Type on the other diagonal.
Example
: CEOs who espouse the value direct, rapid, opportunistic action to get quick results. In government agencies especially, they may easily avoid any compensating decision-method from the other diagonal that provides for systematization. The result is that cutting corners, fire-fighting and short-term boosts escalate, amidst growing chaos that weakens functioning, makes immediate staff ill and slowly overwhelms everyone.
In dynamic dualities, one pole of a duality may be emphasized excessively. This generates an unbalanced state in the Tree structure and hence in the person or organization to which it applies.
Example
In organizations, the dynamic duality in is logical-systematic versus emotive-responsive (i.e. similar to the approach duality in the decision methods). A moment's reflection will confirm that being responsive and emotional is far easier than being systematic and thoughtful. (This parallels or possibly exemplifies Kahneman's thinking fast vs thinking slow.)
Business: the endless impact of events and the constant pressure for achievement leads many managers to be purely responsive and to drive results through intense, emotion-laden activation and pressure. As a consequence, planning work does not get done and activities become disorganized, inefficient and ineffective.
Public Sector: An excess of rational-systematic activity can occur defensively to protect politicians. Bureaucratic regulations, legalistic precautions, multi-tiered planning systems and requisitions for information proliferate. As a consequence, staff are suffocated and the organization becomes unresponsive and even irrelevant to its citizen-users.
Unfolding dualities seem to cause the most intense public debates and academic/philosophical battles. The lower pole of these dualities is always more conservative, more essential and may be automatic, while the upper pole is more progressive, more aspirational and possibly developmental. So debates are a waste of time. The eventual conclusion from the wisest and most senior players that «both are important» is a waste of breath. Reassurance that the «truth lies somewhere in the middle» is mindless. People need to understand what it is all about so as to operate effectively with both poles. And inquirers need to grasp the psychosocial reality that they are investigating.
Example
In the , the «body-mind» problem is a typical unfolding duality. For , the body is the sustaining pole while the mind is the developmental pole.
This is another way of saying: you may feel angry as your stomach knots up, your muscles tense, your head feels like splitting and retaliatory urges to assault the other person dominate your thoughts. However, the mind can (in principle and with effort) take over and recognize the anger, analyse the situation and manage the interaction constructively. The anger has then moved from the body to the mind.
Emotions provoked by a situation cannot be dealt with by the body except physiologically and through explosive release: which is unlikely to resolve the situation. By contrast, the mind can deal with emotions in a different fashion: looking coolly for causes, options and personal wishes in the situation, as well as activating states like patience or forgiveness.
Note that there is no replacement of emotion by thought. Rather, the capacity to have emotions and the capability to reflect on them are both required as evidence of maturity at . (Absence of emotions generates its own problems and relates to a different unfolding duality in the same framework.)
Originally posted: August 2009; Last updated 2-Feb-2014.