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Art and Science
Forget Balance, Embrace the Tension
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the balance of ‘art’ and ‘science,’ the blend of opposites, and how it might be a key ingredient in our work.
There are several dichotomies we hear a lot in strategy and design:
- structured time vs. unstructured time
- planned vs. unplanned
- controllable vs. uncontrollable
- execution vs. exploration
- efficient vs. inefficient*
- forcing things vs. letting things happen
Many design frameworks utilize this tension as an essential part of their tool.
For example, in the design thinking double diamond, we ‘flare’ and explore broadly and then we ‘focus’ to narrow to a clear opportunity or problem to solve. Then we flare again to consider possible solutions to our problem and focus again to today’s best solution. (Depending on how you look at things, there is also a third diamond around execution. You can read more about that here.) Having this push and pull as part of the process gives us guardrails; we let go, but only to a certain point, and then we pull things back together again.
We also see it in futures forecasting, where we use trends and inflection points to explore probable, possible, and…
