Let's embrace paradoxes
This issue of SHE Communicates celebrates our achievements from 2021. There is a lot to celebrate. All around the world, people within the SHE Community have studied health professions education, published papers, educated, changed, improved and collaborated. It is wonderful to see how much has happened in a year. I hope you enjoy reliving 2021’s highlights!
At the same time, 2021 has again been a challenging year for many, personally and professionally. A challenge that connects us all is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare, social, psychological and economic impacts of COVID-19 are felt in every corner of the world. We all have had to adapt, also in 2021, despite hopes that this year might be the start of a return to a less volatile life.
For me, a key to enjoy my work is to recognize and embrace paradoxes. There are many competing demands, perspectives and ambitions in our work life. These can lead to tensions, for instance, between spending time on practical educational or healthcare work and finding space for creative research activities or between having a global impact and dealing with local educational needs. Some tensions might best be addressed by choosing one option or the other. In an effort to “solve the problem”, or “be consistent” making an “either/or” decision can be appealing. However, in my experience, in many instances it is better to embrace the paradox and think about “and” instead of “either/or”. Recently, I was surprised to see the importance of embracing paradoxes at a place I didn’t expect to read about it. It was in the basement of the LEGO House in Billund, Denmark, where they have a LEGO museum. Next to the LEGO of my childhood, I also saw the 11 “Paradoxes of Management” that LEGO shared with its managers since the 1980’s. Two examples from this list are:
“To plan your workday carefully, - and to be flexible to your planning”
“To be visionary, - and to keep both feet firmly on the ground”
In research, there is a growing interest in dealing with tensions too. For instance, Marjan Govaerts, Cees van der Vleuten and Eric Holmboe used the Polarity ThinkingTM model to discuss tensions in assessment in a paper in Medical Education in 2019. As they explained, the “premise of Polarity ThinkingTM is the view that tensions must be accepted in order to achieve long-term success and sustained transformation because they are inherent to human behaviours in complex, dynamic and ambiguous systems.” In other domains, a similar notion, rooted in paradox theory, guides studies ranging from music (Jazz musicians report that to improvise creatively, they must “try not to try”) to management studies.
To be able to see tensions and embrace paradoxes requires an open and flexible mindset. It calls for dialogue to understand different positions, viewpoints, plusses and minuses of different options. Conversations can help open up new ways of seeing, new interpretations of situations, and room for creative alternatives. Such an approach is necessary for our research, education, healthcare work and in dealing with the paradoxes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic too.