The Universal Law of Polarity suggests that we think in pairs. To explain what I mean I share my own story.
I trusted the HR Department to recruit a senior engineer. The HR manager came with a short list of three candidates listed in decreasing priority.
Upon reviewing their CVs, I felt that the recommended one was the least fit. Therefore, I asked the manager a few questions in pairs. I asked him whether he and the team preferred candidates with high degree qualifications versus how many practical years of experience they had. He said that experience topped slightly the certification.
A few minutes later, I asked him, which was more important, the certificate or the age of the candidate. He replied that the certificate was greatly more important.
I listed his answers in their importance order (experience- qualification- age).
I then asked the HR manager, which was more important, the qualification or age. He said that the job needed an agile engineer and so the age was more important. This contradicted his earlier answers. It turned out that the recommended candidate was a relative of the HR manager.
What I concluded that pairing helped me find the hidden reason for choosing the wrong candidate for the job.
Paring thinking reveals hidden relationships.
I shared recently a story about hanging an apple low so that a child would reach it and get a bite from it. Mixing fun with eating encouraged the child to eat.
We do pairing thinking and even not realizing it sometimes. When we study the stress-performance relationship, we are pairing the two.
Dynamic pairing that studies the relationship between the two pairs is of vital importance. It helps see how going to extremes would produce unexpected results. More, it can reveal the complexity of what seems a simple relationship.
One example of this is the logistic equation studying the relationship between preys and predators in a confined land. The study revealed how this relationship bifurcates in directions that no one expected.
I conclude that it is important to study behaviors in pairs and not any one of them alone. This pairing thinking may lead to important findings.
