A couple years ago, I was advising an organization that was transitioning to employee ownership.
In that process of their senior leadership asking me questions, I shared this excerpt — which draws on my own organizational leadership experience and the deep resonance I’ve felt with Pope Francis’ concept of “overflow” — which has now (in my view) become an anchor concept in the Synod on Synodality through the focus on “conversations of the Spirit“.
I’m including a longer excerpt from Let Us Dream below that does a more detailed explanation.
But I’ll start with my more personal reflection and application from this letter I wrote a couple years ago:
Humility is important.
Recognize we all have only a partial picture. Even those of us that are the most senior in the organization / the most access to the most information — we can only see part of the picture at any one time. We need each other to be able to see more of the whole.
- to resolve conflicts (or get to “overflow” described below) — it might be 2-4 people might need to ask each other how high conviction they are about certain things… there may need to be a “weaver” somebody that weaves together / helps people see the wisdom on tough questions. / other people’s perspective.
- wisdom re: holding differing views together: Pope Francis talks about this in his book “Let Us Dream” — as “contrapositions”. This was a new concept for me recently, but it helps me reflect on many differing perspectives I had with my former CFO who now is the co-Executive Director at CPA. Often we would have different views — and often we would not resolve them right away — but allow the conflict to be generative over time — through what Pope Francis describes as overflow — through the dialogue — through the discussion and learning to hold the differing view points in tension.
- at CPA — we learned to hold more tensions. This was something that senior leaders CEOs, COOs, CFOs always have to hold — but in the expanded employee ownerhsip / steward context — more people will be exposed to more tensions / differing viewpoints than they may have been fully aware of before.
- Some colleagues will feel an injustice to them isn’t being remedied fast enough; another set of colleagues will feel an investment in a new business development / sales / marketing position isn’t justified. Some will see the investment in fundraising (and lack of early results) as not a smart investment. These tensions and different perspectives will all be held together with many many others; while each day we put our heads down and focus on building the enterprise we most believe in while focusing on our individual and organizational most important work.
- Let’s turn now to this “contrapositions” concept from the book “Let Us Dream”
Pope Francis on “differing views” and “contrapositions” leading to Overflow
The following excerpt is taken from the book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, pages 79-80. The book was published by Pope Francis, in collaboration with his biographer, in December 2020.
One of the effects of conflict is to see as contradictions what are in fact contrapositions, as I like to call them. A contraposition involves two poles in tension, pulling away from each other: horizon/limit, local/global, whole/part, and so on. These are contrapositions because they are opposites that nonetheless interact in a fruitful, creative tension. As Guardini taught me, creation is full of these living polarities, or Gegensätze; they are what make us alive and dynamic. Contradictions (Widersprüche) on the other hand demand that we choose, between right and wrong. (Good and evil can never be a contraposition, because it is not the counterpart of good but its negation.)
To see contrapositions as contradictions is the result of mediocre thinking that takes us away from reality. The bad spirit—the spirit of conflict, which undermines dialogue and fraternity—turns contrapositions into contradictions, demanding we choose, and reducing reality to simple binaries. This is what ideologies and unscrupulous politicians do. So when we run up against a contradiction that does not allow us to advance to a real solution, we know we are faced with a reductive, partial mental scheme that we must try to move beyond.
But the bad spirit can also deny the tension between two poles in a contraposition, opting instead for a kind of static coexistence. This is the danger of relativism or false irenicism, an attitude of “peace at any price” in which the goal is to avoid conflict altogether. In this case, there can be no solution, because the tension has been denied, and abandoned. This is the refusal to accept reality.
So we have two temptations: on the one hand, to wrap ourselves in the banner of one side or the other, exacerbating the conflict; on the other, to avoid engaging in conflict altogether, denying the tension involved and washing our hands of it.
The task of the reconciler is instead to “endure” the conflict, facing it head-on, and by discerning see beyond the surface reasons for disagreement, opening those involved to the possibility of a new synthesis, one that does not destroy either pole, but preserves what is good and valid in both in a new perspective.
This breakthrough comes about as a gift in dialogue, when people trust each other and humbly seek the good together, and are willing to learn from each other in a mutual exchange of gifts. At such moments, the solution to an intractable problem comes in ways that are unexpected and unforeseen, the result of a new and greater creativity released, as it were, from the outside. This is what I mean by “overflow” because it breaks the banks that confined our thinking, and causes to pour forth, as if from an overflowing fountain, the answers that formerly the contraposition didn’t let us see. We recognize this process as a gift from God because it is the same action of the Spirit described in Scripture and evident in history.