"What the hell" may have worked for Marilyn Monroe. Sir Richard Branson of Virgin preaches, "screw it, let's do it."^[118] The famous Peters and Waterman describe a "bias for action" as one of the key principles of successful management in In Search of Excellence.^[119] These are all examples of the current Western management culture not really helping in recognizing and dealing with dilemmas. This way of thinking emphasizes the need to make a decision, to make either/or choices. "A decision is better than no decision," "Flip a coin," "Take a deep breath, and choose between the two evils," "Make the tough decisions, make the hard calls," "Be the great decider."

In these cases, problems are usually not fundamentally resolved. The chosen solutions are a reaction to the old situation. Or you make a choice for negative reasons, to simply avoid the consequences of the other option. The pendulum swings. Reorganization follows after reorganization. From centralization to decentralization back to centralization. From product-oriented organizations to process-oriented organizations to customer-focused organizations, and back to products again. These reactions do not happen only in organizations; continuous chain reactions can also be found in complete markets. Economists speak of the pork cycle.^[120] In times when there is a demand for pork meat, farmers will start breeding pigs to cater to that need. It is an attractive market; prices are high. But as all farmers do that, after a while—once the pigs have grown—the shortage quickly turns into an excess supply. As a result, prices drop and the market becomes less attractive. Farmers stop breeding pigs, and after a while the supply drops and prices go up again. The pendulum swings and it never gets solved.

The opposite reaction is to not decide anything at all. The dilemma stares you in the face and you freeze. Actually, not making decisions in time actually causes strategic dilemmas to happen. When economic times are bad, shareholders applaud decisive action. The share price increases when the CEO announces layoffs and the immediate effect on the cost structure and the profits of the organization. But it is not a brave decision at all; it is way too late. As a result, the organization suffers from a brain drain, and as a consequence the chances that the organization can benefit from the upturn are greatly diminished. It would have been much better to create a lean-and-mean organization during good times to avoid massive layoffs. As the saying goes, you need to fix the roof during summer.

Another consequence of freezing when confronted with a dilemma is that decisions are made for you. If a new business model presents itself that is conflicting with your current way of working, not embracing it and sticking to the old ways can be a danger. Think of the media industry that tried to stop distribution of music and movies via Internet channels. Although it is illegal to use peer-to-peer networks to share music, most teenagers and young professionals today do not consider this an unethical practice at all.^[121] Now the media industry is catching up and fighting an uphill battle.

Displaying an anti-cyclical decision-making process helps in addressing the dilemma. Taking the time into account to breed pigs, it is best to start this process when the price of pork is low, and others are giving up on the business. The best moment to consider downsizing and making the organization more lean is in times of high profitability. There is money to do so in a controlled way, time is not of the essence so no shortcuts are needed, and the negative effects can be compensated by counterinvestments. To decide or not to decide is a clear dilemma.^[20]

Another natural reaction is to seek a compromise. In you-versus-me dilemmas, through a process of negotiation each party involved gives up on a few wishes and holds onto a few other wishes. Each side makes concessions. Some requirements are nonnegotiable, others are negotiable, and some wishes are expressed only for the purpose of giving them up in the process. Particularly in politics it works that way. As a result, none of the parties involved really get what they want. The result is being stuck in the middle—hardly the way to reach a state of strategic stretch.

We may have been mistaken at first and the dilemma we seem to have turns out not to be a dilemma at all. We think we have to make a choice, but this is not the case. The need for a choice is often based on the presence of a constraint. A constraint is a certain limit. The constraint could be time, causing the dilemma. If we wait too long making a choice, we lose momentum. And if we decide fast, we run a high risk of making the wrong call. Think of buying a house where the real estate agent gives you only 15 minutes to decide. Or think of introducing a new product quickly to have first-mover advantage. Perhaps time is not a constraint at all. The person putting us in the difficult position, pushing us to choose, may have his own agenda. We may find out there are no other buyers after all, or that there are many other comparable houses for sale. Or we come to the conclusion that there really is no first-mover advantage, and that being a fast follower in the market increases our chances of success in terms of market awareness, customer adoption, and cost of sales.

Money, like other resources such as people, facilities, and materials, could be another constraint. Given the budget we have, we cannot run all the campaigns we would want to, and we have to choose which ones. But there might be a discretionary budget that you could apply for, based on your analysis, which shows a very high probability of a positive return on investment of your marketing campaigns. Or you can barter services and piggyback on the campaigns of a partner, while offering the partner the chance to participate in one of your campaigns. Simply having a campaign strategy might make a difference. If campaigns are related, each campaign benefits from the previous one and requires less investment than a single campaign.

Constraints may also merely reside in the mind. Perhaps we feel we must choose but in reality this is not the case. The stewardess asks whether we want chicken or beef, but if we ask politely, perhaps she can give us both. Different product managers may argue over which product to position for the customer in order to get the deal, but perhaps everyone's chances improve by showing the competitive differentiation of the combination of both. Perhaps we think of either putting our money in a savings account or buying shares, but why not put part of it in the bank and speculate with the rest? Laziness or lack of effort can be another mental constraint. We say we can do only one thing today, but if we work a little harder or a little longer we can actually achieve more tasks from the overall list. Or the constraint might be a sense of complexity. The dilemma could consist of whether you should do project A first and then B, or B first and then A, when really the two projects interrelate. Why not do both projects at the same time, each with a smaller team, and simply make sure you assign a project manager who can handle the extra complexity (or give a more junior project manager the chance to rise to the occasion)?

It is important to ask yourself if you really have to choose. There may be many ways to do both if the constraints turn out not to be real.

Sometimes one of the choices can be proven wrong on objective, subjective, or ethical grounds. Upon a better understanding of the options, there simply might be a better option. There might be a lesser evil of the two, one that you can deal with in a better way. Better to overspend the budget and lose 10% of your bonus, than underachieve on your target and lose 100% of your bonus. Better to choose chicken, because that is always done the way you prefer, than to choose beef, where it may not be prepared to your liking. Better to lose an initial experimental investment in a new technology trend than to completely miss the boat on a new and promising opportunity.

Trying to keep things objective is easiest in this-versus-that dilemmas, where a clean and comparable choice has to be made. The moment the dilemma is of the now-versus-later type, psychologists will tell you, people have a natural bias for the present and a tendency to see future consequences as the lesser evil. These consequences are then rationalized: "We'll cross that bridge when we get there," "I will be in another job by then," "I am sure there will be a good solution found by then," and so on. The same is the case with you-versus-me dilemmas; people tend to choose for themselves and rationalize the consequences for others. "It really is better for him or her," or "It really is his or her own responsibility," and "Hey, it's a dog-eat-dog world out there."^[21]

An assessment of which is the better option may also be subjective in nature. It should not always be about numbers, cost, profit, or other measurable things. If two locations to put a new factory in a different country have the same tax advantages, the same cost structure, and a comparable distance to the airport, perhaps the best choice is the one where the weather conditions are better. If two people for a certain job have the same qualifications, it is perfectly normal to have a bias toward the person you feel more chemistry with. Even more, you would probably hire that person even if the other candidate has somewhat better qualifications. There is no problem in weighing in the personal commitment and enthusiasm of people for specific projects when putting together an innovation portfolio, as these can be important predictive indicators for success.

Finally, moral and ethical aspects play an important role in favoring or discarding choices in a dilemma. If any option in a dilemma is objectively realistic but compromises your personal integrity or the integrity of the organization, you should not do it. Sometimes all options have impact on integrity. Can you murder someone to save the life of others? Or more in a business sense, can you fire someone as a scapegoat to protect the interests of others in more influential positions? I remember a case very early in my own career where a consultant with a background in computer hacking was fired, because the background check by a potential customer (who was looking for a security auditor) raised questions. It was solved, or at least addressed, when the consultant indicated he was willing to quit if the employer would pay for an additional university education he was interested in pursuing. Moral or ethical dilemmas are the hardest ones of all.

Dilemmas are a part of life. We all encounter them at some point. The question is how you approach them. Do you freeze, do you avoid them by making a quick evasive decision, do you flip a coin, or do you face them? There are different techniques you can apply to deal with them. The most important thing is to embrace the dilemma. Ignoring it does not make it go away. On the contrary, embracing a dilemma is an opportunity to move forward. In the 1980s, Coca Cola had a dilemma when facing the competition with Pepsi. Pepsi was winning the "cola tests" it held in the field. Visitors in malls and other public places were asked to blind-test two colas, Pepsi and Coca Cola. As the taste of Pepsi is somewhat sweeter, it triggers the taste buds a bit faster at the first sip, which is all the testers got. Threatened by the competition, Coca Cola faced a dilemma: Respond by changing the recipe, or not? The company decided to change the flavor. After introducing New Coke in 1985, there was a large consumer outcry. People were very upset that Coke was not Coke anymore. Coca Cola was forced to reintroduce its original product, labeled Classic Coke. As painful as the whole exercise was, market share actually improved because of the reintroduction, and Coca Cola learned a very important lesson about the brand value of the product. Blind testing obviously does not address the full experience.

A dilemma forces you to think, to take a position. There is a well-known psychological phenomenon that appears when framing decisions^[122] from different angles. Consider the following (famous) experiment. Let a group of people choose between two vaccination programs. Program A will surely save 200 of the 600 impacted people. Program B has a 33% chance all 600 people will be saved and a 66% chance no people survive. Most people will choose program A, avoiding the large risk of failure. Then let another group of people choose between the following options. In using program C, 400 people of the impacted 600 will die. With program D, however, there is a 33% probability no one will die, and a 66% chance 600 people will die. Most people now will choose program C; the certain death of 400 people outweighs the chance that all will die. Objectively, the two groups were offered exactly the same choice; they were just formulated differently. The way a question, problem, or dilemma is framed obviously has an impact on the bias people will have in their decision making. Changing the perspective or offering more perspectives uncovers that subjectivity and bias.

The four perspectives of the balanced scorecard and the six dilemmas derived from those four perspectives help in considering multiple perspectives. If your decision enables growth and learning, improves processes, satisfies customer needs, and contributes positively to the bottom line, you can trust the way forward. Conversely, if you ignore a vital perspective in your decision making, chances are this perspective will continue to haunt you after making the decision.

For instance, if you are a retailer and the cost of sales staff is out of control, you can fire a number of salespeople. In the short term, finances improve. At the same time, sales potential suffers and consequently the mid- and long-term financial results as well. It would be better to see if you can turn a number of processes into self-service. For instance, supermarkets are experimenting with self-service cash registers, and in a wide variety of industries, customers place orders via the Web. It is a scalable model that allows you to learn a lot about customer behavior, it makes business processes more efficient, it adds to a positive customer experience, and it improves the bottom line. Each of the six strategic dilemmas provides useful examples. Taking different perspectives helps to turn either/or into and/and.

People are normally unaware of their bias, as it represents their mindset and paradigm of the world. It takes a specific way of thinking to free yourself from a fixed mindset. One level up, considering complete organizations, it works the same. The organization, as a collection of people and as a living organism itself, tends to have a certain strategic bias, and needs to overcome its own paradigms as well. In his book, Five Minds for the Future, renowned psychologist Howard Gardner describes what it takes to have a mindset that is ready to take on dilemmas:

All five minds are needed to successfully deal with dilemmas and to turn strategic bias, or being strategically stuck, into strategic stretch. Discipline is needed to recognize dilemmas. It is much easier to jump to conclusions and make a quick decision. Others will applaud your action orientation and there is often time pressure. It requires discipline to keep your cool when confronted with dilemmas. Dilemmas often trigger strong emotional responses such as stress, anxiety, and anger.

Only discipline takes you to the second mind, trying to find synthesis, finding a way to relate different, even opposing things. How can we make sense of all the different signals that reach us that are ambiguous, incomplete, and not well understood? We excel in this capability as children. Children in their early years do nothing but forming, testing, discarding, and fine tuning theories of how the world works,^[22] understanding the rules and exceptions in the language, and figuring out how to get attention from the people around them and manipulate them in the right way. But as we grow older, we "complete" our theory of the world (and as an organization the theory of the business), and lose that capability. It needs to be retrained.

Based on all the information we have put together, the creative mind needs to enter the game. The insights we have created need to be turned into action. We may find ways that no one has tried before to create strategic differentiation. This requires lateral and associative thinking instead of a linear train of thought, in other words, an out-of-the-box approach. In The Mind of the Strategist, Japanese management guru Kenichi Ohmae argues that strategy formulation in the Western world is too analytical.^[124] There are countless books and consultants preaching "12 steps to success," "7 imperatives to do tomorrow," and "the sure path to becoming rich." Ohmae makes a plea for a more creative approach, allowing more intuition and creating more intellectual flexibility, bringing in elements of Japanese culture in which vagueness, ambiguity, and tentative decisions are much more accepted and favored.

Finally, dilemmas can be solved in a sustainable way only in a respectful and ethical way. This means that we need to let go of our own preconceptions and see the good in other approaches and other people. We can respect a lazy person because he or she may come in with a very creative solution on how to eliminate work. We could respect frustration because it is a great source of innovation. We need to respect the perspective of a negative thinker, because it is better to test a plan within your organization first, than to be confronted by customers or others with its flaws after implementation. Stereotypes and preconceptions do not lead to original thinking.

Adopting these five minds does not mean you have to do all the thinking yourself. In fact, involving various people with different backgrounds, each with his or her own frame of mind, helps greatly. First, this approach is more likely to uncover multiple angles and perspectives. Further, having to formulate thoughts to share them with others often sharpens those thoughts. Finally, two (or more) know more than one.

Strategic dilemmas are mostly not unique to a single organization. In fact, the six dilemmas I derived from the balanced scorecard are almost universal in nature. They can be found in probably every organization across industries and countries. Other, comparable organizations may have come up with solutions that would work in your organization, too.^[23] Even better, a completely different industry may have already gone through a comparable cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The specifics of the other industry then suggest a different perspective on your dilemma, while you at the same time can apply the lessons learned where there are similarities.

For instance, consider the split between the infrastructural side and the delivery business of utility companies in water, electricity, and gas that is taking place in a number of countries around the world. There are all kinds of you-versus-me and now-versus-later effects in place. Customer and process are separated, investment and exploitation are partly split up, and so on. Many formerly state-owned telecoms and railways went through that same phase of privatization and separation years ago. It is worthwhile to explore how these companies dealt with that. Or think of the struggle between integration and interoperability in IT architectures. The deeper the integration, the more specific the components become, and the more efficiently they can be built. At the same time, the higher the integration, the less these components are usable for different purposes, negatively impacting the efficiency of reusing components. This is a variation on the theme of the you-versus-me dilemma. Other industries that deal with the same dilemma are the automotive industry and the engineering industry.

On the cultural level, adopting the five minds means we learn from other approaches and other cultures. People tend to display ethnocentricity, judging other people's behavior through their own lens of what is right and wrong. They apply their cultural system to others, believing—probably even unconsciously—that their culture and view of the world is superior. We can train ourselves in dealing with other cultures by composing not only multidisciplinary teams, but also multicultural teams. This allows us to learn from each other's approaches. Perhaps, in dealing with dilemmas, we can fuse the Eastern and Western ways of thinking. Using the respectful mind, we can embrace the Eastern appreciation of ambiguity and judging facts and events not by themselves but by their context.^[24] Eastern managers have more tolerance for ambiguous information, and tend to structure their decision-making process in a more collaborative and inclusive way. But in the same way, Eastern managers can also learn from the West, particularly when it comes to managing discontinuity. Easterners can learn from the more aggressive Hegelian approach to seeking synthesis to solve dilemmas and move forward. In the Eastern approach, influenced by Taoism and Confucianism, dilemmas and ambiguity are seen as something to simply live with.

Strategic dilemmas can be predicted and there are ways to deal with them, good and bad. In any case, they should be embraced to be solved, using Gardner's five minds. In the following chapters, I will discuss the techniques that fit with each type of dilemma that I have identified, to make sure you can attack your dilemmas with confidence.

When you encounter a dilemma, first establish whether it is a false dilemma. If it is, it is easy to identify the constraint and to lift it. There may be no time pressure at all, alternative sources of money or other resources may be available, or maybe the constraint exists only in the mind. Perhaps it is possible to disprove choices, based on objective, subjective, or ethical grounds, so that the number of choices is further limited, or only one option remains.

The next question is whether the dilemma really requires a choice. The idea of having to make a choice may exist only in the mind, or maybe you are not aware of the correct way to make a trade-off between the options. There may be cases in which no choice is needed. You can simply split the money, time, or other resources you have and do a little of both. There could be an optimal mix of all options. There is a complete field of mathematics that deals mostly with business optimization issues, called operations research. Other this-or-that dilemmas can be turned into this and that by decomposing the different choices. They may each look like one big decision, but in reality consist of smaller elements. Through careful analysis these smaller elements can then be recomposed into a single strategy moving forward.

You-or-me dilemmas can be tackled using three elements:

Now or later is the third special type of dilemma. There is always strategic uncertainty (we do not know if we are doing the right thing), and a bias toward the now. Making use of techniques such as scenario planning and real options, I will discuss how to deal with those dilemmas. Table 5.1 shows an overview of these techniques.

Table 5.1 should not be seen as a prescriptive list or a recipe for success. You will be much more successful in dealing with dilemmas if you find ways to frame the dilemma differently. In some cases, the dilemma will simply disappear. You-and-me dilemmas and now-and-later dilemmas are not mutually exclusive. In fact—and bear with me—you should see them in a meta-physical way, as a space-time continuum. You-and-me dilemmas take place in space, where space is defined as, for instance, the market space, or a network of stakeholders, or simply the people you work with. Now-and-later dilemmas take place in time. Bill Fitzsimmons, chief accounting officer of Cox Communications, labeled dilemmas as multidimensional problems. Taking a creative approach, reframing dilemmas, entails playing with the space and time dimensions of the dilemma.

Consider a you-and-me dilemma that cannot be reconciled between people. By introducing the time dimension, where for the time being you agree to disagree, a synthesis may appear at some point because circumstances change. Something more important may come up, one person may change his or her mind, a constraint may be lifted, rules may change, and so forth. We shifted dimension and have created the option of reconciling the dilemma later. In the interviews I conducted, several executives mentioned that the best time to make a decision is not when they know the right answer, but the moment they have ensured buy-in of all stakeholders.

It also works the other way around, shifting from time to space. Now-and-later dilemmas often have the element of uncertainty, as the future cannot be predicted. Making a heavy investment now, gaining first-mover advantage, also introduces serious strategic risk. By introducing the space dimension, you may involve other stakeholders first. For instance, sharing the risk by creating a joint initiative with partners to dip a toe in the water brings first-mover advantage while lowering the strategic risk to an acceptable level. In other words, we have synthesized the now-and-later dilemma.

By creatively exploring the space–time continuum, creating options and searching for synthesis become tools not only for specific dilemmas, but for strategic decision making in general.