The Creative Power of Both for Leaders
I found this image and when I first shared it I declared I needn’t say a word about it.
A friend replied with this image…
and had this to say:
I agree with the point your image makes. But there is another image that is also a compelling model to consider. The Ben-Hur model. That is where a leader builds a fantastic team, lets them be out front to lead, and he/she steers, guides, and supports, but lets them primarily drive the race because they know best how to run it.
My response was yes, yes, yes, and a great leader is good at both, and knows how and when to move from one to the other.
It’s a great example of the Power of Both.
It was the morning I saved two baby snapping turtles that the Power of Both was imprinted deeply in my creative mind and entrepreneurial soul.
It was a Sunday morning, I was driving home down a quiet country road, low swampy woods on both sides. Up ahead, crossing the road, it was hard to tell at first, but yes, it was two shapes, very small critters of some sort, in a jerky locomotion and not making much progress fast, so I pulled my truck off the road and discovered they were two baby snapping turtles, likely hatched in the previous 48 hours.
When I picked up these perfect miniatures of the 40 pound adults they become in about 10 years–they can live most of a century, and some specimens get as big as 80 pounds–one of them disappeared into its shell and the other stuck its neck out as far as it would go, and opened its mouth to threaten me.
To give them a better chance to reach 40 pounds I decided to take them with me and drive the mile or so to the path I knew that would lead deep into the woods to a creek, and I would release them there.
So I did, and I placed the two baby snapping turtles in the creek water, and in the blink of an eye, they were gone; they had each vanished in an instant, but by following very different strategies–one disappeared into the soft mud creek bottom, and the other darted into the deepest water.
And so whatever predator was after them, one of them would have survived.
I found myself on my knees, humbled by nature’s balance and grace.
I was walking back through the woods when the creative leadership lesson came to me. I saw that opposites can be reconciled when the right question is asked. In this case it wasn’t a question about how a baby snapping turtle should behave when threatened; it was a question about how a sufficient number from the clutch of baby snapping turtles survives over time for that reproductive cycle to have been successful.
And I thought about how often I have been challenged, when doing creative work, to bring together disparate thoughts or ideas or actions and felt like I had to choose one over the other, or compromise the two which usually results in something less than the outcome I was working towards.
I now saw that when faced with interesting or attractive opposite ideas or solutions, I should step back and reconsider the question I am trying to answer, or the strategy I am trying to develop, and see if I can reformulate it, restate it, so that both can be true.
It was years later that someone helped me understand the immediate effect watching these snapping turtles had on me—I felt I was present to something sacred—when he defined transcendence as the reconciliation of two opposites.
You transcend previous limitations and something new is created.
And that’s what leaders are trying to do so often in the creative process; trying to find that relationship between two things previously unrelated.
We are attempting a transcendence.
It comes from asking better questions.