By Ken Mammarella
Contributing Writer

Wendy K. Smith, a management professor at the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics and co-founder and faculty director of its Women’s Leadership Initiative, has 10 awards hanging on the walls of her small office in Lerner Hall in Newark.

An 11th, the Breakthrough Idea Award from Thinkers50, is still on her desk, several months after she and Marianne W. Lewis, dean of the University of Cincinnati’s Lindner School of Business, earned it for their research on business and life paradoxes. Their research was also popularized in “Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems,” a lively and approachable 2022 book with an informative companion website, bothandthinking.net.

The award acknowledged “the work we have done both through the book but also more broadly in the academic community,” she said. “There’s something deeply paradoxical about organizations and people in them, and we need to spend more time focused on that.

“When I accepted the award, I was a little bit cheeky. I said I believe this is not a breakthrough idea. The breakthrough here is making sure that we recognize this kind of paradoxical notion within the context of organizations: the idea that there are opposing tensions intertwined, and if we pay attention to that, we change the way we solve problems in our personal lives but also in our global world.  

“We change the way we think about political polarization. We change the way we address issues like climate change. I passionately believe that we need to rethink how we approach the world to be much more interdependent in our opposition to how the engineer and the artist can come together.”

That breakthrough comes from someone whose Judaism espouses multiple viewpoints; who has a photo of her hugging a Buddha on the wall; who sent her kids to Quaker school; who has lived outside the U.S. for four years; who has an interdisciplinary curiosity that led to academic degrees in political science, psychology and organizational behavior; and who by the end of the first chapter of “Both/And” has mentioned Barack Obama, John McCain, retired W.L. Gore CEO Terri Kelly, Carl Jung, Lao Tzu, Ben and Jerry’s founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Heraclitus and Albert Einstein. 

Someone, in short, who does not think in an either/or way.

Elu v’elu and beyond

Here’s an impressive statistic to back up the importance of her work. Every year for the last five years, she has been in the top 1% of academics worldwide in writing papers that have been cited by others, according to the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate. 

The annual honor for being a highly cited researcher, by definition, is rare. And with being on the list for five years straight, Smith is in elite company at UD. Yushan Yan –a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor and director of the Center for Clean Hydrogen – has, like Smith, been in the top 1% for the last five years. Cathy Wu, an engineering and computer science professor, was in the top 1% for seven consecutive years, 2014-20, according to UD.

Smith was a teenager when she first lived abroad (four months in China), and she enhanced that worldliness with two years at a yeshiva in Israel, plus sabbaticals in Cambridge, England, and Sydney, Australia. One principle instilled young is called is elu v’elu, which translates to “these and these.” “The sensibility of elu v’elu pervades Jewish life, ensuring variety, diversity and creativity,” according to the Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah. “Making room for multiple viewpoints improves solutions and fosters better relationships. There is a lot to be said for agreeing to disagree.”

She earned her bachelor’s degrees from Yale and her master’s and doctorate from Harvard, with a dissertation titled “Managing Strategic Contradictions.” She was hired by UD in 2006, after her husband, Michael A. Posner, was hired at Villanova. They; twins Jonah and Yael; son Ari; and cockapoo Gryffin Dog live in Philadelphia.

“Raising twins is the ultimate in paradoxical thinking,” she said, “because you have to learn how to value them as individuals while exploring what their relationship unto itself is like and what that duality looks like for their twin-ness. And it led to decisions like they each needed to be in their own school, starting in sixth grade.”

“Wendy is exceptionally creative, thoughtful and integrative – a true model of both/and thinking,” Lewis said. “I treasure our collaboration, and her ability to tap into her own paradoxes. Wendy is a rigorous and renowned theorist, yet humble and curious in exploring real life issues. Our best ideas emerge through conversation. Volleying ideas back and forth we generate new insight into organizations, as well as novel approaches to our own personal and leadership challenges.”

Thinking outside the pizza box

The first graphic for “Both/And” is Kelly Blair’s cover design, which appears to be just two green and orange dots and two enigmatic squiggles. Smith challenged this writer to delve deeper, and he proffered a few lame ideas. It could be a deconstructed yin and yang, she said, and it could be a W (for Wendy) entwined with an M (for Marianne). And it could also be what you want it to be.

The first graphic inside the book is the age-old yin and yang symbols. “The core idea that I study is this notion of paradox, this notion that there are things that are opposition to one another, but they’re also interdependent and the way that they are persistent,” she said. “They’re sort of yin and yang, black and white, right and wrong. But it’s not black and white, and it’s not a mushy gray. It’s a dynamic, interdependent relationship between opposites.”

“We in the social and organizational world are kind of late to the paradox party,” she told UDaily, when it reported that the Academy of Management Review gave its Decade Award to Smith and Lewis’ 2011 paper, “Toward a Theory of Paradox: A Dynamic Equilibrium Model of Organizing.” The award honors the AMR paper with the greatest impact on research over the previous 10 years.

When considering divvying up finite resources, like a pie, it’s a management cliché to consider the inherent limits of the scenario. She, Lewis and Michael L. Tushman offer another view in the Harvard Business Review: “Rather than seeking to slice the pie thinner, people with [a] value-creating mindset pursue strategies to grow the pie, such as exploring collaborations with new partners, using alternative technologies or adopting more-flexible time frames for shifting resources for better use.”

And in “Both/And,” Lewis Smith and Lewis think further outside the pizza box. What if the split involved a vegan carbaholic and someone who loved only the sauce, cheese and toppings? When they split the pie, they each believe they are getting the whole thing. “In this approach, we move from thinking about resources as unidimensional (i.e., the slice of pizza) to consider other dimensions (i.e., our preferences for the different aspects of the pie.”

When asked near the end of the interview what she wanted readers to know, Smith made two points.

First, Lerner has a “robust” tradition of research. Second, as for her own research, mentorships, keynotes, consultations, conferences, workshops and outreach, she has a simple goal and a simple question: “The goal is to shift people’s mindsets and to shift the way people and our world navigate problems.” The question: “How do we teach the next generation to be in conversation with one another across very different points of view?”

Both/and is part of family dynamics

Thoughts from Yael Smith Posner, one of Wendy K. Smith’s children, on both/and thinking.

Both/and thinking is anywhere that decisions are being made in my family – and very much ingrained within my own thinking. Before the book had its title, I remember my mom calling this “find option C.” When given an either/or choice that feels really trapping, what else can you do? My mom was always my go-to-friend-group-dynamic-problem-solver. I would say “Mom, I think I either need to break up with this friend or deal with all their problems and I don’t want to do either.” My mom would say something like “If this friendship is important to, you can both keep your friendship and set boundaries to avoid being pulled into all their problems.” That was the option C approach that now we call both/and thinking.

It seems almost crazy to me to approach a problem and think “Well it’s this or that, I win or I lose.” For example, if I win a game of Settlers of Catan (which I rarely do) my excitement cannot negate my good sportsmanship and definitely doesn’t excuse me from helping clean up afterwards. That is a way that both/and thinking plays a small role in my life. But it affects much more than my winning or losing.

It affects how I think too, not just around my mom but in my own life. 

This summer, I was a counselor at a sleep-away camp. Both/nd thinking came up all the time. How do we both provide the campers with a fun summer and keep them safe and healthy? How do we talk to camp directors about their policies that accommodate both the community comfort and individual freedom? It is because of my mom that I can lean into really challenging conversations and tackle issues both compromising on a productive outcome and staying true to my values. 

As another example, this thinking has guided recent conversations as I prepare to apply for college. My parents ask me how they can both support me when I want and need, and offer me independence and autonomy in this big life decision. The language of both/and thinking has helped me in school too. In my essay for philosophy class, I looked at how we can both honor the thinking of old white male philosophers and make space for minority voices.

My mom is a badass (if I’m allowed to say that). While most people know her as a professional, poised, thoughtful and widely cited and accomplished speaker, writer and storyteller, I get the privilege of knowing her as mom. I am so grateful for the ways she has shaped the way that I think and approach decisions from conflicts as light as winning or losing a game of Catan to how I engage in challenging conversations and decisions.