Dilemma thinking

International organizations in all cultures need to deal with the competing demands of different stakeholders (including clients/customers, shareholders, employees, business processes and society/environment at large). They need stability and growth, long-term and short-term decisions, tradition and innovation, planning and laissez-faire.

The challenge is to integrate these opposites, not to select one at the expense of the other. And this generates a a number of frequently recurring dilemmas.

You have to inspire as well as listen, to make decisions yourself but also delegate and you need to centralize your organization around local responsibilities.

What is a dilemma? And what does it mean to reconcile it? Its not either/or/and ...

The word “Dilemma” in Greek is defined as “two propositions in conflict”. We talk about a dilemma when we seem to come across a difficult choice which has to be made between two opposing options, both having interesting advantages. Our extensive research conducted globally has found that it is possible to deal with seemingly opposing options successfully. The key is reconciliation, the art of combining opposites.

The dilemma reconciliation process

What is it?

We have developed a framework, the Dilemma Reconciliation Process, that applies to all cultures, as managers have to deal increasingly with multi-cultural situations and a multi-cultural workforce. It reconciles the differences rather than simply identifying them, going beyond the “and… and” and embracing the “through… through” mindset. We have accumulated a significant body of evidence showing that reconciling values makes business more effective.

How does it work?

1

Identify the dilemma

Gather information from multiple sources to get a deeper understanding, by recognizing the dilemmas.

2

Chart the dilemma

Make the dilemma specific (what is it about and who is the holder?) and crack the line to invite people to combine the opposite.

3

Stretch the dilemma

Stretch the dilemma by making it bigger and bolder.

4

Make epithets

Emphasize the negatives of the extremes to invite people not to be there.

5

Reconcile the dilemma

How can value X help you get more of value Y?

6

Action planning

Define action points to make it real.

THE 10 GOLDEN DILEMMAS

Very often organizations are struggling with several dilemmas, but don’t know which ones are the most important. And here is where the 10 Golden Dilemmas Model comes to place. It is supported based on 30 years of research out of our database of 45.000 dilemmas created between the top 5 stakeholders of an organizations.