This episode is brought to you by Belay and they're offering to business accelerator listeners a free resource called 25 things you can delegate to an assistant to get that simply text ba to 55123.

That's ba to the number 55123.

And the core idea in this book is that tensions aren't the problem it's not if we experience tensions it's how that's when you smith.

She's a professor of management at the University of Delaware's learner college of business and economics.

She's also the co author of a book entitled both and thinking embracing creative tensions to solve your toughest problems.

Tensions aren't the problem and in fact tensions can enable not just these detrimental challenging conflicts they can also enable us to be creative and generative and enabling.

And so the active side of that is what we see great leaders do is actually go out and ask for explore surface these tensions even if they're not passively bubbling up on their own.

If we're honest most business leaders don't have that much trouble finding challenges and tensions in their organizations. Why?

Because they work with other people and if there's one thing other people have in common it's that they have different opinions about pretty much everything under the sun.

And those differing opinions it's worth saying are an asset.

I want to quote you something from Astro Teller and I don't think his mom actually gave him that name when he was born but this is worth saying.

If you want to explore things you haven't explored having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.

Scholar Scott Page would call that the diversity bonus the idea being that people have different cognitive styles different approaches to problems different life backgrounds that might allow them to have different assumptions than you and those different assumptions might unlock the answers that you need.

Still those tensions are real and they can be difficult to manage so what's a business leader supposed to do.

Hi, I'm Joel Miller, Chief Product Officer at Full Focus and today on the Business Accelerator Podcast we're going to answer that very question.

First we're going to have a conversation with our founder and chairman Michael Hyatt along with our CEO Megan Hyatt Miller about a powerful tool for incorporating different opinions in your organization to get optimal outcomes.

This is something that we teach our clients in the Business Accelerator Program. It's something we do ourselves at Full Focus.

It's a tool with the power to take all those voices and all the tensions that they create to come up with productive solutions.

Then we'll jump to a conversation with Wendy Smith and we'll talk about her book both and thinking.

In most settings when we're presented with a paradox or a contradiction or some other kind of dilemma we try to resolve it through either or thinking.

We try to say well this must be right therefore that must be wrong.

But if we want to validate the opinions of our teammates and selfishly speaking we hired them so it behooves us to listen.

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