“Actions are always more complex and nuanced than they seem. We have to be willing to wrestle with paradox in pursuing understanding,” said the British journalist Harold Evans. If you are a business leader or a wanna-be innovator, better get ready to wrestle.

Many people strongly dislike paradoxes. This holds particularly true for managers, who love clear recipes and a structured process for every business situation they can possibly encounter. Unfortunately, the business landscape of the early 21st century as well as the world of innovation is not framed in the simple 1-or-0 binary code of the Information Age. In the Age of Value Creation, we are confronted with a myriad of paradoxes, which are difficult to deal with if one prefers clear yes-or-no answers like most managers do.

A paradox can be defined as a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth (e.g., “Only one thing is certain — that is, nothing is certain”), or as a counterintuitive conclusion or outcome (e.g., “It is an interesting paradox that wherever you are and whatever you do, you think of being somewhere else doing something else”). The second definition is particularly relevant for creativity and innovation, where we find many counterintuitive situations.

Here are eight examples of paradoxes in business creativity and innovation:

1. The paradox of incubation: To get a breakthrough idea for a tough problem, you need to first deeply immerse yourself in the case and then dare to completely let go of the problem. This process increases the chances of activating the process of incubation; when you least expect it, the breakthrough solution suddenly pops up from your subconscious (or from what psychologist Carl Jung called the collective unconscious).

2. The paradox of failure: In order to succeed in an innovation project, you must “plan to fail.” Evolution is based on trial and error and the principle of negative feedback, and so is creation. Find a way to encourage your employees to show initiative and plan to fail while at the same time making sure that they rock but don’t sink the boat.

3. The paradox of knowledge: In an innovation project, it is more important to find out what you do not yet know about your challenge instead of what you know about the situation; too much knowledge often locks you inside a perceptual tunnel (“expert syndrome”) that prevents you from gaining novel insights into your business challenge. So get ready to unlearn what you have learned and re-learn to gain true understanding.

4. The paradox of business success: In order to bring a radical innovation to the market, you need to now invest in its development, which may guarantee your long-term success but reduces your short-term success.

5. The paradox of strategic directions: In a Strategy Innovation project, aim to stretch the boundaries of your market offerings by finding uncontested new market space while at the same time considering the core competencies of your firm.

6. The paradox of culture: Creativity and innovation require employees who break the rules and challenge conventional organizational wisdom while at the same time being expected to respect the company culture (“The way we do things around here”).

7. The paradox of rewarding innovation: An innovative company needs to find a way to reward fairly the crucial contributions of both the team involved in successfully bringing an innovation to market and of the individual idea creator without de-motivating any side.

8. The paradox of efficiency: Many companies that have undergone TQM and Six Sigma initiatives during the past 10 years need to find a way to keep their improved efficiency while at the same time becoming more creative (we spoke about the antagonistic character of organizational efficiency and creativity in an earlier article in this column titled “Solving the Dilemma of Innovation Management”).

Once you have developed an awareness of paradoxes, you notice that the worlds of innovation and business are full of them, and so is life. So better adopt the mindset of Danish physicist Niels Bohr and see the positive side of paradoxes: “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

Appreciate every paradox as a great intellectual challenge in line with the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.” See them as a unique opportunity to differentiate yourself from the herd by doing your own thinking and finding your own way to deal with them. Then move forward and be flexible to make adjustments if your chosen approach to master a paradoxical challenge does not work out as envisaged. In any case, US author Wayne Dyer rightly notes: “You are doomed to make choices. This is life’s greatest paradox.”

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2008. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 19 June 2008.