Connecting Contradictions
Navigating situations where legitimate demands pull in different directions.
Why some of the most difficult intercultural situations cannot be reduced to an either/or decision
There are situations in international business where we understand a great deal and still do not know what to do.
We know that hierarchy matters. We know that relationships shape how business gets done. We recognize that people carry different expectations about communication, about rules, about responsibility, about who decides what. We may even understand quite precisely why the people involved act the way they do.
And still the harder question remains open: what follows from all this understanding?
Part of the difficulty is that culturally complex situations do not always confront us with a gap in our knowledge. More often, they confront us with several requirements that are each perfectly reasonable on their own terms, and that nonetheless pull in different directions. A leader has to give clear direction, and also wants employees who take ownership. A company operates according to a global operation system, and also needs to respond to what a specific market actually demands. A manager has to name a problem directly, and also has to preserve the relationship in which that problem sits. Trust is necessary, but trust does not make control and accountability unnecessary. Rules give people orientation, and some situations require exactly the judgment not to apply a rule mechanically.
We tend to formulate all of this as a choice. Hierarchical or participative. Direct or indirect. Standardized or flexible. Relationship-oriented or task-oriented.
But before we decide how to handle a situation like this, there is a prior question worth asking: what kind of situation are we actually looking at? A contradiction, a dilemma, and a paradox are not the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is where a lot of intercultural advice goes wrong.
Contradiction, dilemma, paradox
In everyday language we don’t distinguish sharply between these three words — they all point to something difficult or complicated. But the distinction matters, because each points to a different structure, and each structure calls for a different way of acting.
In formal logic, a contradiction has a strict meaning: a proposition and its negation cannot both be true at the same time and in the same respect. The door cannot be open and not open simultaneously. But when we talk about contradictions in organizational or intercultural life, we usually mean something looser — different expectations, approaches, or logics of action that pull against each other. Control and autonomy contradict each other in this sense. So do standardization and adaptation, directness and relationship sensitivity, hierarchy and participation.
Contradiction on its own, though, is not yet a paradox.
A dilemma arises when two opposing possibilities present themselves as a choice:
- intervene, or let the employee handle it independently.
- follow the global procedure exactly, or make an exception for the local client.
- address the disagreement now, or wait.
For the purpose of this argument, I use dilemma for a situation in which a choice between competing alternatives can settle the immediate question, even if the choice is difficult or comes at a cost. Choosing one course of action means not pursuing the other in that situation. There is no reason, however, to assume that the alternative we set aside must remain an ongoing requirement.
A paradox works differently. The organizational paradox literature — particularly Marianne Lewis’s 2000 work and the later dynamic equilibrium model (Smith & Lewis, 2011) — points to tensions in which the opposing elements are not merely in conflict. They are also interdependent. We may still have to make a decision, and one side may legitimately take priority at a particular moment. But choosing one does not permanently eliminate the relevance of the other. The underlying tension remains.
That gives us a useful way to separate the three terms. Contradiction describes the opposition itself. A dilemma requires us to choose between competing alternatives. A paradox adds something more specific: the opposing requirements are also interdependent, which means that choosing one does not permanently make the other irrelevant.
A dilemma, in other words, can be decided. A paradox has to be navigated.
This does not mean that navigating a paradox means avoiding decisions. We still have to decide what to do in a concrete situation. The difference is that the decision does not permanently settle the underlying tension. The requirement we set aside may remain relevant precisely because it is connected to the one we chose.
That difference sits at the center of what I mean by Connecting Contradictions.
Why choosing one side does not eliminate the other
Rules and flexibility
You can see the same structure in something as unremarkable as a rule.
Rules reduce uncertainty. They create predictability. They protect against arbitrary decisions, and they let people coordinate without renegotiating expectations every time something happens. There are good reasons organizations and societies build them.
But every rule is written before all the future situations it will apply to are known. Imagine a pedestrian at a red light — waiting is entirely reasonable, because the rule coordinates traffic and spares everyone from running a fresh risk assessment every time they cross the street. Now imagine that same light stuck on red all night, with no traffic in sight. The example is simple on purpose, but the underlying question isn’t: at what point does following a rule stop serving the purpose the rule exists for?
The opposite question matters just as much. If everyone gets to decide individually whether a rule applies to them in the moment, flexibility turns into arbitrariness fairly quickly.
So the answer can’t simply be “rules are good,” and it can’t simply be “flexibility is better” either. The real question is harder: what function does this rule actually serve here, what risk does flexibility introduce, and under what circumstances does applying the rule mechanically stop making sense?
That’s already a question of judgment. And it’s why paradox management shouldn’t be mistaken for compromise. We’re not looking for 50 percent rule-following and 50 percent flexibility. Some situations call for strict adherence; others call for real discretion. In a particular situation, one may need to take clear priority.
The skill lies in judging what the situation requires while recognizing that neither rules nor flexibility can become an absolute. Giving one greater weight now does not mean that the function served by the other has ceased to matter.
Mary Parker Follett: Beyond domination and compromise
Long before contemporary paradox theory, Mary Parker Follett was already engaging with a closely related problem. In her 1925 paper “Constructive Conflict,” she distinguished three ways of dealing with conflict: domination, where one side simply wins; compromise, where both sides give something up; and integration, where the interests behind the opposing positions are examined in search of a response that takes both seriously.
Take directness and sensitivity. If we treat them simply as opposite communication styles, compromise might mean being somewhat direct and somewhat sensitive — and it’s worth asking what that actually achieves. Follett’s approach pushes a different question: what is each side actually trying to protect?
Directness protects clarity — the issue has to be understood. Sensitivity protects dignity, relationship, and the other person’s willingness to actually hear the message and act on it.
Once those functions become visible, the question changes. It’s no longer simply “should I be direct or sensitive?” It becomes: how do I communicate with enough clarity while preserving the conditions under which the message can actually land?
That’s not the same as compromise. It may mean being extremely clear about the substance and extremely careful about the setting, the timing, the language, and the relationship through which the message travels.
That’s close to what I mean by connecting.
Contemporary paradox theory adds another dimension to this argument: integration does not necessarily mean that the underlying tension disappears. Sometimes a response can accommodate both requirements remarkably well. In other situations, one requirement may need greater weight for the moment, and the relationship between the two has to be reconsidered as circumstances change.
The point is therefore not that every contradiction can be integrated into a permanent solution. An intelligent response may address the situation without resolving the underlying tension once and for all.
Why this matters especially in intercultural work
This becomes particularly interesting once we move into intercultural situations.
A large part of intercultural learning has been built around dimensions and opposing orientations — individualism and collectivism, high and low power distance, direct and indirect communication, universalism and particularism, monochronic and polychronic time. These distinctions give us language for patterns that would otherwise be hard to describe.
The trouble starts when a position on a dimension turns into a cultural profile, and a cultural profile creates an expectation of consistency. Call a society collectivistic, and we expect its members to favor group decisions. Call it hierarchical, and we expect authority to matter everywhere. Call communication indirect, and we start expecting indirectness in every situation.
We know, however, that people, organizations, and societies don’t actually behave with that kind of consistency. Someone can value real individual autonomy and still attach real importance to hierarchy. A manager can involve the team extensively in normal decisions and expect immediate compliance the moment a crisis hits. An organization can run on highly formal procedures that, in practice, depend on informal personal relationships to function at all. A person can speak directly with colleagues and turn noticeably indirect the moment a senior decision-maker enters the room.
We can treat all of this as deviation from the expected profile: exceptions prove the rule. Or we can question the expectation of consistency itself.
That leads to a different way of using cultural dimensions. Instead of asking only where a culture sits between A and B, we can ask: under what conditions does A become relevant? Under what conditions does B? What function does each serve? And can both become relevant within the same person, the same organization, or even the same situation?
A cultural dimension hasn’t disappeared or become obsolete. What changes is its function. It no longer serves as an automatic prediction of behaviour. Instead, it helps us name possible logics of action whose relevance still has to be examined in the concrete situation.
Barry Johnson and polarity management
This argument has a close parallel in Barry Johnson’s Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems (1992). Johnson separates problems that can be solved from polarities that have to be managed because their two poles depend on each other — individual and team, stability and change, centralization and decentralization.
This distinction matters because it stops us from treating every tension as a decision to be made once and closed. Polarity Management provides a structured way of recognizing and working with interdependent poles rather than trying to eliminate one in favor of the other.
The connection to Connecting Contradictions is therefore substantial. The difference lies less in whether polarities have to be identified — good polarity work obviously requires that — and more in where our analysis begins.
That matters in intercultural work because we often begin without knowing which cultural dimensions, organizational demands, personal expectations, or possible polarities are actually at play.
We don’t walk into a difficult client meeting holding a clearly labeled axis called “global consistency versus local adaptation.” We walk into a situation. Headquarters expects a procedure to be followed. The regional team believes following it exactly will create real problems with an important stakeholder. The local manager has commitments to the client. The organization has compliance obligations. Personal relationships are tangled up in it somewhere. Hierarchy shapes who’s even allowed to question the procedure. Time pressure rules out options that would otherwise be reasonable.
It’s only by examining the actual situation that we discover which logics are really in play, how they relate to one another, and whether some of them are genuinely interdependent. There may be two. There may be more than two. And some apparent contradictions may turn out not to be paradoxes at all.
Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner: reconciling cultural dilemmas
No discussion of this topic in the intercultural field can skip past Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaars. In Building Cross-Cultural Competence: How to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values (2000), they take on cultural dilemmas directly and argue that opposing cultural orientations shouldn’t simply be polarized — that competent managers can find ways to integrate them. They worked through dilemma theory, reconciliation exercises, and a systematic treatment of conflicting orientations.
So Connecting Contradictions doesn’t start from the claim that no one has thought about bringing cultural opposites together before. That would clearly be wrong.
What interests me is a somewhat different starting point. The contradiction doesn’t necessarily sit between Culture A and Culture B. It can emerge within a single culture, within an organization, within a person, or from the demands of the situation itself.
A multinational company can genuinely require adherence to its global operating system while recognizing that day-to-day business requires local adaptation. Global standards create coordination, consistency, and accountability across markets; local adaptation makes those standards workable under different regulatory, commercial, and relational conditions. Remove the global framework and local practices can fragment into incompatible ways of working. Suppress local adaptation and the global framework may become increasingly difficult to apply in the markets it is supposed to coordinate. The organization may therefore depend on both.
And a multinational company can genuinely require adherence to its global operating system while recognizing that day-to-day business requires local adaptation. Global standards create coordination across markets; local adaptation makes those standards workable under different regulatory, commercial, and relational conditions. Giving up either can undermine something the organization needs.
None of these combinations necessarily signals inconsistency. They may instead reveal different logics responding to different but connected requirements.
So the question isn’t always, “How do we reconcile two cultures?” It may be: Which different logics have become relevant here? What function does each serve? How are they connected? And what does their coexistence require from us in this particular situation?
That’s a different starting point.
Directness, face, and relationship
Communication offers a clean example of the same problem. Brown and Levinson, in Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (1987), showed that communicative acts carry social consequences beyond their literal content, and built an influential account of politeness and face-threatening acts around that idea. Stella Ting-Toomey developed Face-Negotiation Theory in 1988 and, with Atsuko Kurogi, extended it further in 1998 — pointing to how cultural, individual, and situational factors together shape how people manage face in conflict.
These frameworks help explain why directness can’t be judged purely by how accurately a message captures its literal content. But they don’t suggest that indirectness is somehow the more culturally intelligent default either.
Consider a manager addressing a serious performance problem. If the manager protects the employee’s face to the point that the problem itself remains unclear, the conversation fails in one direction. If the manager communicates the problem with complete clarity but does so in a way that humiliates the employee or damages the working relationship, it may fail in another.
The two requirements serve different functions. The performance issue has to become clear enough to be addressed. At the same time, the relationship through which future cooperation and performance have to occur needs to remain workable. In this situation, clarity and relationship sensitivity are not merely competing communication preferences. The effectiveness of one partly depends on preserving the conditions provided by the other.
Again, the useful question isn’t simply “direct or indirect?” It’s: what needs to be achieved on both fronts, and how do these requirements need to be connected in this particular situation?
Not every contradiction is a paradox
There’s a real danger once you start noticing paradoxes: you start seeing them everywhere. That weakens the concept rather than strengthening it.
Not every contradiction is a paradox. Two stakeholders can want opposite things and the matter can still get settled by a decision. A manager can face two legitimate options and simply have to pick one. A law can permit one course of action and prohibit another. A safety requirement can leave almost no room for flexibility. A company can knowingly accept relational costs because a compliance obligation outweighs them.
None of these should be forced into a both/and frame just because it sounds more sophisticated.
The line matters. If one requirement clearly takes priority and the alternative does not need to remain relevant, we are dealing with a decision. If competing alternatives require a difficult choice that can settle the immediate question, we are dealing with a dilemma. If the requirements remain interdependent, and giving one priority does not permanently eliminate the relevance of the other, we are closer to a paradox.
Both/and thinking can’t become a universal rule any more than either/or thinking can. The claim was never that either/or is simplistic and both/and is sophisticated. Sometimes a clean either/or decision is exactly what good judgment calls for.
The harder skill is figuring out which structure you’re actually dealing with.
Why I call it Connecting Contradictions
Which brings me to the name itself.
I could have called this paradox management. That would have been accurate enough, but it would have missed the part that actually interests me. I use Connecting Contradictions because it describes what becomes necessary once we recognize that apparently opposing requirements are not only in conflict but also connected.
This does not mean that both sides are always equally legitimate or should receive equal weight. Nor does it turn both/and thinking into a superior alternative to either/or thinking. The first task is to understand what kind of relationship exists between the opposing requirements and what function each serves in the concrete situation.
The question, therefore, is not automatically how to accommodate both sides. It is whether we are dealing with alternatives that can be decided between, or with requirements whose relevance remains connected even after a decision has been made.
What “connecting” can mean in practice
Once we recognize that contradictory requirements remain connected, a different question arises: What do we do with that relationship?
There is no single answer. Sometimes the requirements can genuinely be integrated. Sometimes they need to be sequenced. Sometimes their relative weight changes as circumstances change. And sometimes one side has to take clear priority for the moment.
Connecting, therefore, does not mean harmonizing everything or turning every conflict into an elegant synthesis. It means developing a response that takes the relationship between the requirements seriously, including the consequences of giving one greater weight than the other.
A decision still has to be made. Connecting Contradictions does not replace decision-making. It changes what we assume the decision has accomplished: we may have decided what to do now without having permanently resolved the underlying tension.
Connecting Contradictions and Cultural Judgment
This is also why I place Connecting Contradictions inside the broader idea of Cultural Judgment.
Cultural Judgment starts from a simple observation: cultural knowledge doesn’t determine appropriate action on its own. A concrete situation still has to be understood — what’s actually happening, what interpretations are possible, which factors matter here, how much weight culture, person, relationship, organization, and situation should each carry, what action fits, and what the consequences of that action then teach us.
Sometimes this process sharpens the answer. Sometimes it does the opposite. The more carefully we understand a situation, the more clearly we see that what matters doesn’t point in only one direction.
Clarity matters. Relationship matters. Consistency matters. Adaptation matters. Hierarchy matters. Participation matters. Rules matter. Flexibility matters.
At that point, another question becomes necessary: Are these requirements simply competing, or are they interdependent?
If they are simply competing, Cultural Judgment may lead us to make a decision, accept the trade-off, and act accordingly. But if the requirements remain connected — if giving one priority does not permanently eliminate the relevance of the other — we are dealing with a different structure.
That’s where Connecting Contradictions enters Cultural Judgment.
It asks which apparently contradictory logics are actually operating, what function each serves, how they depend on or affect one another, and what may happen if one is ignored or allowed to dominate.
The response will not always be the same. The requirements may be integrated, sequenced, or weighted differently. One may need to take clear priority for the moment. What matters is that the response follows from an understanding of the relationship between the requirements rather than from an automatic preference for either/or or both/and.
And if the underlying tension remains, the decision is not treated as its permanent resolution. We act, observe what follows, and reassess as the situation evolves.
Connecting Contradictions is the ability to recognize apparently contradictory but interdependent logics of action that remain relevant simultaneously in a concrete situation, to understand the function and consequences of each, and to develop an appropriate response without prematurely reducing the situation to an either/or choice or assuming that the underlying tension can be permanently resolved.
This isn’t the same as simply advocating both/and thinking. Both sides aren’t always equally legitimate. They don’t always deserve equal weight, and they can’t always be reconciled. Sometimes one requirement has to take clear priority. The more modest — and, in practice, more demanding — claim is that we should understand the structure of the contradiction before deciding what to do with it.
Theoretical References
Connecting Contradictions draws on several traditions that have examined conflict, paradox, competing demands, cultural differences, and the role of context in human interaction. The following works are particularly relevant to the argument developed here.
- Follett, Mary Parker (1925). “Constructive Conflict.” In Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, later published in edited collections of her work.
Follett’s distinction between domination, compromise, and integration provides an early foundation for thinking beyond simple either/or responses to conflicting demands. - Lewis, Marianne W. (2000). “Exploring Paradox: Toward a More Comprehensive Guide.” Academy of Management Review, 25(4), 760–776.
A foundational contribution to contemporary organizational paradox theory and the understanding of contradictory yet interrelated demands. - Smith, Wendy K. & Lewis, Marianne W. (2011). “Toward a Theory of Paradox: A Dynamic Equilibrium Model of Organizing.” Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 381–403.
Develops the idea that persistent organizational tensions require dynamic responses rather than permanent resolution. - Johnson, Barry (1992). Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems. HRD Press.
Distinguishes problems that can be solved from interdependent polarities that have to be managed over time. - Trompenaars, Fons & Hampden-Turner, Charles (2000). Building Cross-Cultural Competence: How to Create Wealth from Conflicting Values. Yale University Press.
Develops the idea of reconciling apparently conflicting cultural orientations rather than simply choosing between them. - Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Stephen C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press.
Provides an influential account of face, politeness, and the social consequences of communicative acts. - Ting-Toomey, Stella (1988). “Intercultural Conflict Styles: A Face-Negotiation Theory.” In Y. Y. Kim & W. B. Gudykunst (eds.), Theories in Intercultural Communication. Sage.
Introduces Face-Negotiation Theory as an explanation of how culture and face concerns shape conflict communication. - Ting-Toomey, Stella & Kurogi, Atsuko (1998). “Facework Competence in Intercultural Conflict: An Updated Face-Negotiation Theory.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 22(2), 187–225.
Extends the theory by bringing cultural, individual, relational, and situational factors more explicitly into the analysis.
Connecting Contradictions in Practice
Connecting Contradictions is not intended as an abstract model detached from business practice. The tensions described on this page appear in leadership, collaboration, communication, market adaptation, and international assignments whenever different requirements remain relevant at the same time.
Our work helps leaders and teams examine these situations in context, understand what the competing demands are actually trying to achieve, and develop responses that are appropriate to the situation rather than mechanically choosing one side.
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