Paradoxical Thinking: Why the Best Leaders Learn to Hold Contradiction

By Rachel Johnson

The best leaders aren’t the ones who resolve every tension fastest, they’re the ones who can hold two opposing truths at once and keep thinking.

Should leaders resolve tensions quickly, or learn to hold them? Rachel Johnson, CEO of the school leadership network PiXL and author of Box Clever, argues for the second. The best leaders, she suggests, don’t rush to pick a side; they hold seemingly opposing truths, such as care and accountability. Using four zones of pressure and mindset, and the thinking traps that push us into either/or decisions, she shows how both/and thinking leads to better solutions.

Scroll through social media and you’ll see it everywhere: people forced into one camp or the other, applauded for certainty and punished for nuance. But real leadership rarely works that way. The most capable leaders I’ve met can hold two seemingly opposing ideas at once rather than think either/or: ambitious for their team and patient with the pace, decisive under pressure and genuinely open to being wrong.

Why Either/Or Thinking Falls Short

We live in a culture that rewards either/or positions. Social media rewards the loudest, most polarised voice; the people who sit somewhere in the middle tend to stay silent, and taking a hard position can become a personal brand. I see it in board meetings and staffrooms alike: the person who states a definitive answer is praised, while the person who says “it depends” gets labelled as ‘indecisive’. But choosing an either/or side doesn’t make you a better thinker or a better leader. It doesn’t make you more open to what you might be missing, and it certainly doesn’t help you hear people who see things differently.

Here’s the truth: two seemingly opposing things can be true at the same time. We can feel exhausted and energised by our work in the same week. We can be genuinely delighted for a colleague’s promotion while quietly grieving that it wasn’t ours. We can feel both relief and sadness when a difficult relationship ends. None of this makes us contradictory or confused, it just makes us human. The moment we insist we must be one thing or the other, we diminish what it actually means to think, feel and lead well.

The work is not always to pick a side but to get comfortable holding two sides at once because the better answers lie in the heart of the paradox.

Paradoxes 

Paradoxes are the persistent, interlinked contradictions sitting underneath our dilemmas: wanting change because it energises us, while also wanting stability because it makes us feel secure. In practice, a leader might feel torn over whether to hold a struggling team member accountable or protect their wellbeing, that’s the dilemma. The paradox underneath is that genuine care and honest accountability aren’t actually in competition; they need each other. But what happens when we are not able to live in the heart of the paradox?

Which Zone Are You In?

When we experience high pressure sometimes we resort to either/or thinking but sometimes we need to have both/and thinking. There are 4 zones that we can find ourselves in when we are making decisions and under different type of pressure, sometimes we gravitate towards our favourite position, which may not be the best for the business or for our leadership. Knowing the zones, and knowing which dilemma needs us to be in which zone is one of the hardest calls to make.

In the Firefight Zone, pressure is high and we want a decision fast. This is useful for speed, but tensions resolved too quickly tend to resurface later; we’ve only kicked the can down the road. Here we can end up thinking we have a choice of this OR that. Either person A is wrong and person B is right, and we choose one over the other without asking whether there is a new solution involving them both. Of course, we have to make quick decisions but asking if it is the right one or the quickest most obvious one, is an important question to ask.

In the Comfort Zone, pressure is low and our mindset is still either/or: we treat dilemmas as problems to eliminate rather than opportunities to explore, which over time can erode innovation and satisfaction. Moving people out of the Comfort Zone often means deliberately building in time for messy, inconclusive discussion; holding meetings with no decision required, just space to think. When the tension is low, it is often easier to build in the time but sometimes the lack of urgency means we don’t.

The Radar Zone is where pressure is low but we’re open to both/and thinking. This is useful ground for spotting conflicts that are coming on to our radar before they escalate, and for deliberately seeking out contradictions because they generate new ideas. Putting deliberate time in the diary for this can make all the difference to making better, more nuanced and more innovative solutions.

And then there’s the Thrive Zone: high pressure, held with a both/and mindset. Here, leaders accept that paradoxes can never be fully resolved, but they can see a way through where they can bring seemingly contradictory thoughts together and find a better solution. People who operate from this zone know that new solutions come from exploring how both/and can work. How can we make dramatic staffing restructures AND still keep the psychologically safe culture? How can we be confident and also be humble? How can I take this colleague through a disciplinary process and still be kind?

None of these positions are permanent. Where you sit shifts with pressure, fatigue and how safe a room feels but being in the Thrive Zone is better for us and our work.

The Thinking Traps That Keep Us Stuck

Getting to the Thrive Zone means noticing the habits that pull us the other way, out of pressure, panic, fear or insecurity. In 1976 the psychologist Aaron Beck described cognitive distortions, later popularised by David Burns as “thinking traps”; these are patterns that ramp up tension and push us towards black-and-white positions. Sometimes these ‘traps’ get us stuck in a zone that limits our thinking.

A few of these thinking traps show up constantly in leadership: mind-reading, where we assume we know what a colleague is thinking and react to our own assumption rather than anything they’ve said. Fortune-telling, where we decide something will end badly before it’s even begun. Catastrophising, where a single setback becomes proof that everything is falling apart. Labelling when we are deciding someone “is” difficult, or “is” resistant and we close down our curiosity. And polarised either/or thinking itself, where we lose the nuance, the compassion and the curiosity that a both/and leadership approach depends on.

None of these traps are character flaws. They’re patterns and that means they can be noticed, interrupted and changed. Watch for them in your own inner monologue as much as in meetings, because when they arrive, nuanced thinking can quickly depart.

Moving Into the Thriving Zone

Shifting mindset starts with better questions. I’ve found it useful to ask teams to write down ten paradoxes that they are already navigating: wanting people to feel loyal and belong, while also wanting them to grow so they can leave. I ask what a competitor organisation, built from scratch, might do differently. I ask what multiple truths might be sitting inside a single dilemma, rather than searching for the one correct answer.

None of this is comfortable. Sitting with unresolved tension rarely is. But it’s where the better, more creative thinking actually happens and it’s the difference between leaders who make fast decisions and leaders who make good ones.

Conclusion

The leaders who thrive aren’t always the ones with the fastest answers, they’re the ones willing to sit with the discomfort of not choosing yet, by exploring the both/and possibilities. When we can’t change our circumstances, changing how we think about them can open up a solution we hadn’t seen. Paradoxical thinking asks exactly that of us, not to resolve every tension, but to hold it, explore it and to keep at bay the traps that force us into polarised decisions that may not be good for us or our business. That is the work of leadership.

About the Author

Rachel Johnson has been the CEO of school leadership network PIXL for 7 years. She is a podcaster, speaker, leadership thinker and coach and author of 4 books, including, ‘Box Clever: Quadrants To Change the Way we Live and Lead’ which won Highly Commended in the Business Book of the Year 2026.