Breaking bread—or, more accurately, tofu—with my friend Jeff in Atlanta recently, our conversation wandered into a deceptively difficult question: Can two seemingly opposing things both be true? The more we talked, the more Abraham Lincoln emerged as an unlikely guide to understanding complexity. Lincoln was both a transformational leader and a man deeply shaped by the limitations of his time. He could hold contradictions that we often insist on resolving. And perhaps that is the deeper lesson: in a complex world, truth is rarely singular. Two things can be true at once—and some truths can be more true than others.
One of the great traps in human thinking is the assumption that if two people disagree, one of them must be wrong.
Sometimes that is true.
But often it is not.
Sometimes two people are looking at different dimensions of the same reality. Each sees something real, but neither sees the whole. The problem is not necessarily that one perspective is false. The problem is that we too easily mistake our perspective for the whole truth.
This may be one of the most important capacities we need in a complex world: the ability to hold two seemingly opposing truths at the same time.
Not because everything is equally true. It isn’t.
But because truth can be partial without being false.
TWO TRUTHS
Consider Abraham Lincoln.
I have no difficulty holding two seemingly contradictory ideas about Lincoln at the same time.
Lincoln was a transformational figure in American history.
And Lincoln held racial views that were deeply troubling and reflected important limitations of his historical period.
Those statements can both be true.
Lincoln was a person of his time.
And he was also, in important ways, a person who helped move his time beyond itself.
We don’t need to turn Lincoln into a saint to recognize his extraordinary historical importance. Nor do we need to diminish his historical importance because he held views that we rightly reject today.
This is not moral relativism. It is complexity.
There is a difference between saying “both perspectives contain something true” and saying “both perspectives are equally true.”
They are not the same.
A policy can solve one problem while creating another. A leader can accomplish extraordinary things and have serious limitations. A political movement can correctly identify an injustice while proposing an inadequate remedy.
The question, then, is not simply:
Who is right?
A better question may be:
What is each of us seeing that the other may not be seeing?
That question does not require us to surrender our values or our judgment. It requires us to become more curious about reality.
WE ARE ALL HOLONS
Ken Wilber’s concept of the holon (borrowed from Arthur Koestler) offers another useful way to understand this.
A holon is simultaneously a whole and a part.
A cell is a whole, but it is part of an organ. An organ is a whole, but part of a body. A person is a whole, but also part of a family. A family is part of a neighborhood, a community, a city, a nation, and a culture.
We are simultaneously selves and parts.
This is more than an interesting philosophical idea. It changes how we understand problems.
We often treat a part as though it were the whole.
Consider the direct-care workforce that include home health aides and nursing assistants. We might say:
We need better wages.
Absolutely.
But wages alone will not solve the problem.
We also need training capacity, career pathways, childcare, transportation, employer practices, credentialing reform, career navigation, better data, and public reimbursement policy.
And perhaps something deeper: a cultural recognition that caring for other human beings is some of the most important work a society does.
Each of those statements can be true.
None is the answer.
The workforce challenge is a system because the people within it are themselves parts of larger systems.
The same is true of nearly every difficult problem we face.
We are all holons.
And because we are all both whole and part, we are never dealing with just one thing.
FROM EITHER/OR TO BOTH/AND
This is where complexity changes leadership.
We have inherited a way of thinking that often asks us to choose:
Either individual responsibility or systemic responsibility.
Either economic growth or environmental sustainability.
Either public safety or social justice.
Either tradition or change.
Either certainty or action.
But complex systems rarely give us such clean choices.
The challenge is not to pretend the tensions don’t exist. It is to hold them long enough to discover what each side might teach us.
That does not mean abandoning discernment.
Some things are more true than others.
Evidence matters. Consequences matter. Values matter. Power matters. History matters.
Both/and is not the same as anything goes.
It is the recognition that a larger truth may contain truths that initially appear to contradict one another.
And sometimes the most important insight lies not in choosing between the two, but in asking what becomes visible when we hold both.
THE EMERGENCE OF SOMETHING NEW
This is ultimately what draws me to the idea of Emergent Action.
We live in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The systems around us are changing faster than many of our institutions can adapt.
In such a world, we cannot always know exactly where we are going before we begin.
Traditional strategic planning assumes that we can understand the environment, establish a destination, develop a plan, and execute.
That still has value.
But complex systems don’t always cooperate with our plans.
They adapt. They respond. They resist. They learn. They evolve.
Sometimes an intervention produces consequences we could not have predicted when we designed it.
So perhaps strategy needs another question alongside:
What is our plan?
We also need to ask:
What is emerging?
What are we seeing that wasn’t visible six months ago?
What assumptions are changing?
Where are new possibilities appearing?
What is resistance teaching us?
What are people doing that our institutions did not anticipate?
What is happening at the edges of the system?
This is the heart of Emergent Action.
It does not mean abandoning strategy.
It means recognizing that strategy itself must become capable of learning.
ACTION WITHOUT CERTAINTY
Perhaps the greatest challenge of complexity is that we want certainty before we act.
But certainty often comes too late.
If we wait until we completely understand a complex system, the system will have changed by the time we are ready.
Emergent Action therefore requires a different rhythm:
Listen.
Learn.
Act.
Observe.
Adapt.
Act again.
The action becomes part of the learning.
We don’t abandon evidence or analysis. We use them differently.
We don’t abandon vision. We use vision as a compass rather than a blueprint.
We don’t pretend to know the future.
We develop the capacity to meet the future as it unfolds.
And perhaps that is where hope comes in.
Hope is not the belief that everything will work out.
Hope is the belief that the future is not completely predetermined.
That human beings can learn.
That systems can change.
That new possibilities can emerge from circumstances that initially appear overwhelming.
And that our choices matter.
THE WORK OF EMERGENT ACTION
I increasingly believe that the work ahead is not about finding the answer.
It is about developing the capacity to discover better answers as reality changes.
It is about recognizing that two truths can coexist without becoming the same truth.
It is about understanding that we are each both a whole and a part.
It is about replacing certainty with curiosity without abandoning discernment.
It is about moving from either/or toward both/and—and then asking what lies beyond both.
And ultimately, it is about action.
Because complexity is not a reason to stand still.
It is a reason to learn how to move differently.
The future is emerging whether we are ready or not.
The question is whether we have the capacity to see it, the humility to learn from it, and the courage to participate in creating it.
That is Emergent Action…and thank you Jeff for starting the conversation!