Extremes!

The terms extremes, conflicts have been running in my mind in the past few months! Life has been showing me different sides of the same thing all thru. But this year, I felt it very strong! Especially last quarter of the year has been like an eye opener that took me to the next level of this understanding - rather quest!! In fact I started feeling that the extremes need not be just two sides same thing and they can very well cover more angles! Only in 2D, extremes have two points to oppose each other. With just 3D, the number of extreme points grows enormously.  But life is just not 2D or 3D! So the number of opposing points / views becomes almost infinite!! It is this phenomenon that makes life beautiful as well as difficult!

Maturity of a person is determined by how they handle the extremes or opposing views. Holding opposing views concurrently needs highest form of intelligence. It is very difficult to consider opposing views without getting annoyed or agitated. But with the help of structured brainstorming techniques, system's thinking, problem solving frameworks, analysis tools like Pugh matrix etc. , that can be addressed to a large extent. These techniques can help considering different options / views objectively and thereby reducing the anxiety.

The next level of complexity is when some of the concepts we learn or try to implement are at conflict or appear to be at conflict. You can easily notice such things if you are trying to apply self-development techniques and you are also responsible for organizational change management. The former category will talk about how do you improve your behaviours in spite of your environment and will suggest not to expect any change in the organization for you to change your behaviour. Whereas, the latter will talk about how to change the organization so that it becomes easy for people change without even realising that they are changing and will suggest that it is not possible to change individuals unless the system changes! This is also understandable and manageable to a reasonable extent because the scope is different and we will understand the scope difference at some point in time.

One level up is principle level conflicts like when our principles and responsibilities of the roles we are playing are opposing each other. This can be resolved in many different ways. It is difficult but not impossible to manage. But when our own principles are in conflict with each other, the difficulty level rises up exponentially. How do we know which principle applies when? How do we know if we should evaluate "one principle or the other" or strive for "one principle and the other"? My Pugh matrix does not know what are the weightages and what are the parameters when it comes to principles! I am searching for an answer! As always, I am not looking for a dose of philosophical gyan but I am looking for techniques that will help me do this!