I’ve recently found myself becoming sensitive to sentence constructions of the form “this delivers X while also Y”. You might also imagine X and Y being fairly buzzword-laden.
This phrasing is usually an expression of pride in a solution that addresses paradox, and that by itself is commendable, but something about it signals to me an invsible juggling in the background—a sense of diluted purpose, an unhappy compromise or a missed opportunity. I’m probably thinking that because that’s the underneath feeling I may have had when I used it myself in the past.
Anyway, here is a long post from Richard Claydon, that relates experiences of well-managed and poorly-managed ambiguity, conflict and paradox, and how they relate to the visibility of one’s work. The post contains some incisive descriptions of these experiences and their effects, and is worth spending some time with.
A project lead depends on functions they do not control. A country leader must reconcile local realities with global expectations. A department head is accountable for outcomes that depend on cooperation from peers with different incentives. In such systems, a great deal of what gets called leadership is really hidden integration labour: translating priorities, smoothing contradictions, protecting teams from churn, and keeping several partially incompatible agendas moving at once.
I have a feeling these leaders find themselves generating “X while also Y” sentences more than they’d ideally like.
The post goes on to relate how this work becomes illegible by its very nature, and so the leaders that do the most to untangle the confusion become the ones who are hardest to see.
Some leaders generate movement through force of personality, pressure, and ambient threat. Others generate very little structure at all while sounding agreeable, modern, and empowering. One style produces brittle compliance. The other produces unmanaged sprawl. Both, however, can remain more publicly legible than the quieter integrator whose contribution lies in making difficult work more doable. The system sees confidence, movement, and rhetorical fluency more easily than it sees repair, translation, and burden reduction.
The call in Claydon’s post is to bring visibility to entangled work, and thereby reduce its burden.
What to do about the “delivers X while also Y” construction? I don’t know yet—it’s still emerging for me. My superficial response would be to look for the “both/and” of X/Y. For example, rather than:
“This approach delivers alignment with global strategy while also protecting local team autonomy”
try something like:
“This grounds the strategy so that that local teams can act on it without translation.”
The less superficial part is meaning it.
Visit link