strategy + business Autumn 2010 issue

So writes in a remarkable new article by Ken Favaro and Saj-nicole Joni in the Autumn 2010 issue of strategy + business

Each of these tensions is archetypal in business. Growth and profitability speaks to the conflict between costs and benefits, and head and heart. The conflict between optimizing between the short-term and long-term is about competing priorities. The need to optimize the whole organization so that it is more than the sum of the parts bumps up against many core dilemmas within the firm–most especially, change versus stability or the tension between the need to integrate versus the need to adapt and grow. For more on dilemma archetypes, see our taxonomy and article on the subject.

The authors recommend that executives maintain a productive tension among the executive team–tense enough to force these key dilemmas to the surface, but trusting enough so that groups can tackle their challenges with openness and honesty. It’s well worth a read.

It’s not surprising then that Facebook has come in for tremendous criticism for its privacy policies. The company is either audacious in its vision or contemptuous of its users, or both. Each month brings news of another way the company has conceived to share your personal data widely with potential marketing partners. Clearly, Facebook management feels that the tradeoffs between security and convenience, which we described in a recent column here will work themselves out in the company’s favor. Customers won’t want to give up the convenience of having photos, birth dates and tools for communicating all in one place. The company may be right. For many users, being off Facebook would feel like exile or ostracism.

I like to think of it in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Facebook feeds the need for love and acceptance. Privacy concerns, for most people, are theoretical at this point, stuck in the realm of morality at the top of Maslow’s pyramid. Unless sharing personal data on social media sites becomes a common threat to physical safety, a more fundamental need, it’s unlikely that it’s popularity will diminish soon. In the meantime, many pundits are finding good reasons to leave Facebook anyway. Here’s Ten Reasons to leave Facebook now.

Why not use 3 x 3’s ? The answer is that they aren’t as helpful as 2 x 2’s for our purposes. As Stephen Covey told us, “Important questions always get reduced to two options.” A matrix with more cells may be useful for mapping the territory or analyzing decision criteria, but is too broad for crystallizing core issues.

What’s your method for analyzing dilemmas? Is there a taxonomy? The answer to that is yes, but it’s lengthy. When we wrote the book The Power of the 2 x 2 Matrix we analyzed nearly 300 2 x 2 models, looking for underlying archetypes and patterns. We’ll explore some of that methodology in a future article.

But “what’s your favorite” is still the champ. And, not surprisingly, we have a favorite, sort of. It’s the Product/Market matrix, a 45-year old workhorse that Igor Ansoff sprang on the world in 1965.

This tool is so effective because it cuts very closely to what we call the archetypal strategy dilemma—the value proposition. As we say in the book, “The visible strategic act of corporate leaders is making choices that advance the goals of the firm in the best possible way.” In the diagram, the archetypal dilemma is between Context and Value. Context is the way you go about the business—the who, where, when, and why. Value is what you produce—the what. How these issues are framed is the job of a leader.

Ansoff’s matrix is a product of the 1960s, when conglomerates were in fashion. Companies such as ITT, Litton, and TRW, owned businesses in a variety of industries. Sticking to the knitting, in Tom Peters memorable phrase, was not yet in vogue among the Fortune 500. Ansoff’s experience with diversification helped him propose a simple taxonomy of strategies. (Later strategic taxonomies, such as those of the BCG Grid, and Michael’s Porter classification of forces and strategies, are equally insightful and useful, and explore dimensions of strategy that Ansoff overlooks, including market share, financing needs and strategic advantage in the supply chain. But it is the simple utility of Ansoff’s matrix with its focus on offerings and customers that make it valuable.)

The matrix explores two key dimensions:
Product: Businesses are defined by their product and services. Modifying them is a key strategic decision.
Market: Companies are know equally by their current customers and the markets in which they are known for competing. Choosing to enter a new market is a fundamental strategic issue.

Upper left: Product Development. The reputation of a brand enables it to sell new products to existing customers. Dannon, for example, grabbed acres of shelf space in grocery stores by continually pushing out new extensions to its yogurt line (fruit on bottom, no-fat, probiotics, etc).

Lower left: Market Penetration: Selling more of the same product to existing customers. A classic orange juice campaign proclaimed “It’s not just for breakfast anymore.” The effort to get existing customers to consume larger quantities, or consume more frequently, is the essence of market penetration.

Lower right: Market development. Selling more of your current product or service is ideal when the offering is well developed and some markets are underserved. Exporting is a common market development strategy. Apple provided a great example when it expanded its iTunes software to Windows, opening its products to a much larger customer base.

Upper right: Diversification. Sometimes mordantly referred to as “the suicide quadrant” by consultants, diversification is the most costly and risky strategy. Going after new customers with a new product means that a firm must establish new relationships and simultaneously perfect a new offering, taxing its skills and resources. Ideally, firms diversify gradually into areas that are somewhat complementary. It would make more sense for a company that makes earthmovers to get into farm implements than it would to open a chain of restaurants.

In the real world firms often combine Product/Market strategies. Dell started with PCs, then expanded into monitors and other equipment (product development). At the same time, the company also began hiring consulting engineers to service top corporate accounts (market development).

Using The Matrix
The ideal time to use the matrix is at the start of a planning cycle. It offers the advantage of being a great brainstorming tool that can easily be used by any team or group of employees. It quickly spurs conversation and engagement. The matrix prioritizes the four basic investment options. Try the method below.

1. Diagnose Define the product/service area for analysis. If you have multiple products or departments, define them separately.

2. Envision Ask the following questions for each of the quadrants, beginning in the lower left. Should our offering stay the same of should it change? Should we focus on current customers or new ones?

3. Discuss Ask questions such as “How would we change the product? What else would our customers like to buy from us? What customer groups are we not reaching today? Assess the attractiveness of the options that arise from the discussion. In most instances, the option that is easiest to obtain is the right priority.

4. Design Build a clear plan of action.

In the diagram the political argument roughly takes place within the oval. The left claims that security efforts imperil privacy; the right claims privacy protections imperil security.
What’s at stake in our privacy battles? Is it a tradeoff between security and privacy, as the US government positioned it during debates of the Patriot Act? Or privacy and convenience, as the banks would have it?
And, how would we synthesize a solution in which we achieve both aims? Schneier wrote in 2006 that security versus privacy is a false choice and “the real choice is liberty versus control.”
Ideally, sensible privacy protection is combined with adequate convenience for commerce.”

No matter what the cause, a society with no privacy is in a state of tyranny. Imagine this scenario: One day you wake up to discover the government has been investigating your background, going back several years, with no cause. They’ve talked to people you know, examined your transactions, and tracked your movements. You’d be justifiably upset. But this is precisely what the Googles, Facebooks, banks and telcos of the world are already doing. We should not make it sound more ominous than it is but also we should be free from oversight by Google or Facebook or anyone else, just as we should be free from government control. The principle is that privacy is important, whether we have something to hide or not.

What do you say? Is the issue Privacy versus security? Privacy versus convenience? And, how might we model this question so that better options become available to us? I’ll explore the implications of this dilemma for public trust, and for corporate strategy, in the next post.

What are the current issues and challenges in your life? Can they be fairly described as dilemmas? Or are they more like what we call a problem—which means there is a a solution? The answer helps reveal options and paths you can follow to navigate your way through challenges.

The archetypal personal dilemma is about tradeoffs between contributions and rewards. In our work environment we experience this as a dilemma between personal effectiveness and personal satisfaction. We all need to receive as well as give, and we have a drive to increase our personal effectiveness at work and achieve satisfaction in our personal lives.

One of our students described this personal dilemma. He was a Chinese-American and had completed graduate school in the US. His plan had been to stay here and start a career. But after graduation his father’s manufacturing business in China suffered setbacks. The son suddenly felt unspoken family pressure to return to Asia and work in the family business. He was torn between the desire to help his father in the short term and his long-term personal goal of a successful business career in the US, which included more graduate school. He used the Personal Dilemmas method to clarify those parts of his conflict which were resolvable and those that were not. He ultimately decided that he could not give up his US life, but that he would take a two-year hiatus and work in North America in his father’s business, building up good experience on his resume while discharging personal and cultural obligations to family.

Dilemmas present tradeoffs between powerful conflicting forces in our lives. Urgency versus importance; cost versus benefit; what I want today versus what I need tomorrow. The goal of the personal dilemma assignment is to fairly describe those aspects of your current challenges that are dilemmas.

Here’s a quick method for defining personal dilemmas

Step 1 Write down one, or possibly two major challenges you face in your personal life.
Step 2 Symptoms: Make a list of up to ten symptoms of the challenge. Answer these questions. What are you feeling? What is it like to experience this conflict? How does this challenge impact your life or the lives of significant others?

Step 3 Try to write a trial dilemma using the form, “In my life I experience tension between _________ and __________. You can create as many trial dilemmas as you like. Let yourself be creative and colorful in your choices. (”I experience tension between trusting my kids and imposing the right amount of discipline.” “I experience tension between my ambitions and reality.)
Step 4 Take a look at the trial dilemma statements. Are many of them similar? See if you can combine similar items, Strive to choose two labels for the axes of your matrix that synthesize the most relevant forces at play in your trial dilemma statements.
Step 5 Draw a 2 x 2 matrix and name your quadrants. Giving a name to each quadrant helps us better understand what we’re facing, and take personal responsibility for the situation.

See the articles What Makes Great Problem Solvers Different? and Dilemma Archetypes, for useful information.

Not surprisingly, many of us share the same dilemmas. While it is dangerous (for a man, especially) to generalize in this way, there is a recurring pattern to the dilemmas described by women in our classes. This dilemma is fundamentally about wanting or needing to do too many things in too little time. Some say they feel torn between family and job, between commitments to husband, children and aging parents on the one hand, and career goals and job demands on the other. Other individuals may use different words to describe similar circumstances. And, these conflicts naturally result in feelings of inadequacy at not being able to give enough in or another area of their busy lives.

These client experiences came to mind recently when we read that women literally are becoming less happy. Since 1972 the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Council has tracked demographics and attitudes of Americans. According to their data, and that of some other recent surveys, women have become less happy in recent decades. Men, on the other hand are becoming relatively more joyful, especially as they age. This was reported in newspapers and a recent Time cover story about women.

In her column, Blue Is The New Black New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd explores this phenomenon and looks at possible causes. As it turns out there are plenty of experts in the happiness business, and they’ve got opinions as to what underlies female gloominess. For example:

• Children: One expert points out that children make people less happy, both men and women. However, few survey respondents say they would rather have not had kids.
• Sex role differences: Women are often expected to shoulder the majority of home and child responsibilities. But recent research suggests that men continue to increase the amount of time they devote to household and child chores that were one women’s exclusive domain and in many marriages it approaches parity.
• Emotions: Women also may take success and defeat harder than men. Biologically, they may be emotionally more intense relative to men.
• Mixed cultural messages: Our culture sends women demoralizing messages about beauty and aging that are positively anxiety inducing.
• Choice: Overall women face an unhealthy amount of choices with the expectation that they will excel as workers, wives and moms. As Dowd puts it, ” When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.”

That dilemma might be described as the needs of the self versus the needs of family, home and work. Or the conflict between our wants—to excel as career woman, mother and wife—and what we need to be spiritually and physically healthy. Our students and clients have diagrammed this challenge many times in our workshops . Often it looks like this. The demands of family are on one axis, the demands of work and career on the other.

For all of us the archetypal individual dilemma is to balance the effort we put into meeting the needs of others with the requirement to fulfill our own needs. When we feel like we are giving at home and work, and not getting enough time for ourself, burnout and unhappiness are more likely to follow.

The levels of unhappiness showing up in these surveys are evidence that women in our society may face a special dilemma. Or that the choices they are making in response to the dilemma of overwhelming demands and responsibilities are inadequate.

But that is our interpretation. What matters is that you consider and wrestle with your own dilemmas. And, that you describe them in your own language. For some, the family versus career example above neatly synthesizes what they are feeling. For others, that is too simplistic, or simply wide of the mark.

Let us suggest some homework. Try to define a personal dilemma for yourself. You’ll find instructions in the next post here.

More than a decade after open source software began acquiring market traction, it still poses difficult questions and dilemmas for IT firms. Initially, it was scoffed at by the software industry, and companies like Sun tried to discredit Linux as unsafe and incomplete, hoping to deter further adoption and defection from their own proprietary offerings. Microsoft was equally disdainful. Bill Gates was quoted in a 1998 PC Week article as saying, “Like a lot of products that are free, you get a loyal following even though it’s small. I’ve never had a customer mention Linux to me.” Within a few years, though, Microsoft heard from loads of customers about the open source threat, and was forced to open some of Windows source code to outside partners.

The early, sometimes fearful responses to Linux took an understandable but narrow and one-dimensional view of the situation, regarding it as a worrisome problem which needed to be removed. “Linux is a threat to our pricing. How can we compete with free?” or, “Linux is giving away knowledge of high economic value that industry has invested heavily in creating. This is not right or fair.”

Time proved that open source was here to stay, and arguably for the right reasons: it made superior use of networked intelligence for creating and realizing value. Companies throughout the computer industry and even some beyond it would have been better off to regard the emergence of Open Source software as a dilemma to understand and exploit rather than a problem in need of a solution. Some did. Start-ups like Red Hat prospered by creating new offerings or supplying services needed by Linux users. Resourceful software firms capitalized by building new products directly on the Linux OS. But the transition proved much more difficult for the large, established incumbents who tried desperately to hold on to or grow existing revenues, while adapting to a new model which gives away much of the product, in order to increase innovation and widen the market.

In that class of corporate titans, there were a few who adjusted their approach fast and prospered. Notable among the beneficiaries was IBM, which understood early on that the dramatically lower cost of Linux and open source applications increased demand for commodity server hardware, installation and services. The company saw Linux as an opportunity to establish new leadership and perhaps weaken competitors dependent on proprietary solutions. Sun, of course, later embraced open source, opening its OS and leading the Java community of developers, but never adequately addressed Linux’s impact on its proprietary hardware and OS business.

(For a quick economic analysis of open source as a complementary good that increased demand for IBM’s services read Joel On Software.)

IBM’s ability to adjust quickly and well to open source lies in how they framed the situation. Open source was not an annoying problem to solve or eliminate; as a legitimate challenge to the way the industry operated, it represented a dilemma that redefined roles, relationships, value creation processes and business models. By understanding the opposing forces at play and their implications, they could see the competitive landscape more clearly, and make better choices. The 2 x 2 matrix below is one plausible and constructive way to render the open source dilemma:

Mapping Profitability versus Customer Autonomy – Building a better mousetrap usually costs money and involves risk. While some innovators are motivated to share their ideas freely, businesses have a legitimate interest in protecting their ownership rights and making a profit. The tension between achieving profit and enabling the autonomy that customers want is on the surface only increased by a movement whose goal is to create openly and provide access to all. (Consider the tremendous loss of value by copyright holders in the music industry. Even today 90 percent of all downloads are illegal.)

By becoming leaders in the Open Source movement, companies like IBM and Red Hat found ways to collaborate with autonomous customers and strategic partners while still making a profit (upper right in our diagram). Their strategies and business models differ, but each has grown its business by giving customers greater direct access to the information and software they need to improve their businesses or lower costs.

On the other hand, customers are increasingly skeptical of proprietary products that lock them into technology directions that are determined by a single vendor (upper left). Proprietary software vendors have been forced by customers to make their products interoperate with open source offerings. Even Apple, a stellar example of a proprietary shop, has found its greatest success since adopting industry-standard Intel processors for its computers, and making hardware/software products such as iPods, iPhones and iTunes, which interoperate across computer platforms.

A new challenge for proprietary operating systems may be brewing in Acer’s announcement that it will install Google’s Android, a software platform originally designed for phones, on its small netbook computers. If netbooks, which sell for around $300, become increasingly popular, it will be difficult for software firms to charge customers hundreds of dollars more for operating systems and applications. By going with an open, free OS, Acer hopes to build market share quickly, at the expense of software profits.

The tension between ownership of value and customer control is not limited to the software industry. The combination of free information, transparent source code, and a global network of voluntary contributors is upending fields from media to biotech, and lessons need to be found and shared for the interests of all parties. We’ll look for those answers in future columns.

The basic idea was hard to argue with—systems of all kinds work better with current, accurate information—i.e. feedback. As you improve on the two ideals of faster speed and error-elimination, organizations become leaner, more adaptive and ultimately fitter.

Any process or service could be magically improved by simply placing these two hyphenated words in front of the thing you were selling or defending: real-time computing, decision-making, supply-chain operations, energy management, you name it. We checked Amazon for books searchable using the term “real-time”, and they list more than 174,000. Discount half of these as misfits and you’re still facing an overwhelming number of applications of the concept to everything (literally) from strategy to parenting to rendering animation.

After a decade and a half of tuning, tightening and retrofitting our world to be more real-time, we’re learning that as with all highly leveraged interventions, there are often nasty unintended consequences to deal with. The very methods and tools we use to achieve our ends turn around and start shaping us in surprising and often limiting ways (think of Orwell, mood-altering drugs, Shelley’s Frankenstein and greedy King Midas). Three looming impacts of the real-time revolution we’re most concerned about are the loss of redundancies, erosion of personal time and space, and diminished learning capacity.

1. Loss Of Redundancies
Redundancy gets a bad rap. It’s considered extra, unnecessary and duplicative. It’s what you get rid of. But in systems terms, redundancies are a necessary source of flexibility, ensuring there is back-up capacity should vital parts become compromised or fail. Nature is full of redundancies, starting with the outpouring of sperm that never make it to their procreative destination. Imagine if we could streamline that operation and only release the one sperm cell that is needed—efficient, but at what cost to diversification and evolution? How many friends is enough—two, six, one? On the traditional, low-tech farm, workers have always developed overlapping competencies, building in back-up support along the way. Should someone become injured or ill, others could carry on. The related concept of multi-skilling became popular in the mid-1900s as part of high-performance and socio-technical-systems work designs for the same reason. Gains were considerable, not radical, but they were sustainable. We saw this first-hand in our work at Shell Canada in the early 1990s, realizing performance improvements up to 50 percent in plants that deployed self-managing teams.

The drift to real-time performance systems challenges the need for redundancy by removing uncertainty and replacing it with information. If we knew exactly what we needed at each moment, we wouldn’t have to maintain any slack. Redundancy costs money. Eliminate extra inventory, space, advertising and people, and you’re a winner. Enter the lean, hyper-efficient 21st Century outsourcing business organization model. A great short-term competitor, but a lousy long-term bet. A lot of the hollowing out of US industry over the past quarter century can be attributed to this kind of thinking. Reduce inventory and risk being caught out when faced with unanticipated surges, as has happened literally in the case of power outages. Businesses are similarly bottlenecked when they under-stock needed items, and their customers are inconvenienced when their dependence on a single supplier leaves them with no alternatives. A recent google-search collapse is a case in point; with the majority of web searches moving on their networks, this leaves no viable options when there is a breakdown. Cut space through hoteling, telework and other virtualization methods and you risk killing corporate culture and identity - who is left to care about the organization? Narrowcast your advertising and risk capping important new growth, not to mention eliminating serendipitous learning and new partnering opportunities; and let all non-essential staff go and you’re now dependent on less committed temps and often faceless suppliers to respond to emergencies and opportunities. A fully-tapped out workforce has no time for anything beyond their core assignment, eroding essential processes like socialization, error detection and prevention outside of the scope of primary responsibilities, opportunity-seeking and learning.

The net effect of all of this over-pruning and specialization is the loss of agility and resourcefulness. As market needs shift and the competitive field gets bumpy, narrowly focused supply chains can’t easily switch over to new tasks.

2. Erosion Of Personal Time And Space
We start our classes and lectures these days with the request that people turn off their phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants). We know this is a futile effort, but at least it slows down the amount and length of interruptions to come.

PDA’s are real-time devices, provisioning information to the user immediately. If it stopped there, we’d be grateful and celebrate, but of course it doesn’t. For the device trains us faster than we teach ourselves to use it, and we quickly become addicted to every beck, call and vibration of the damnable machine. We become endlessly curious—who or what is trying to contact me? We have to know. Maybe it’s important; maybe it’s urgent! No accident that people often call the RIM Blackberry the “crackberry” referring to it’s addictive properties.

Not so long ago, when you left the office or your place of work, you were on your own time. PDA’s are changing this. The new expectation is that email and text messages are accessed 24/7 and will be responded to within hours or even minutes. The reasoning goes something like, “if he knows about something important (or just current) now, and could address it immediately, then he should do it”. There is no place anymore to hide. You’re never off the grid, out of reach.

The crazy thing about this, is that we participate in this hijacking willingly, even enthusiastically. Real-time communications, gaming and a slew of information-based services accessed through PDA-like devices (entertainment, search, location-based, and so forth) are compelling and unfathomably distracting, turning us into A-D-D-like multi-taskers increasingly incapable of simply being in the moment.

3. Diminished Learning Capacity
Before paper, we had a limited capacity to store and access knowledge. The printing press invented in 1440 went a long way to preserving and sharing information beyond what was in the heads of local wise folks. Powerful as these innovations undoubtedly were, they were static, linear and asynchronous. To benefit from them the user still had to do a lot of basic thinking and problem solving.

Enter real-time information access and smart systems and watch out. Can’t remember a fact, find a street or who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? Don’t fret. In fact, don’t even try to remember; just google it and presto, problem solved. How this may affect learning and memory is as yet an unanswered question. Our brains work efficiently using the most direct routes, where there is the least amount of resistance and effort required. The new skill we are learning is how to use search engines and smart devices, quite possibly in place of critical thinking and the establishment of important neural connections that lock in memories.

A second learning implication of real-time is the elimination or automatic correction of errors by smart devices. They are popping up everywhere: driving a car, spelling and grammar, vocal pitch adjustment and more. The trouble is, so much of how we learn comes as a result of making mistakes, feeling the pain, frustration or even disapproval that results, and making necessary corrections—i.e. learning. Lose that direct contact with the results of our effort, and nothing is learned until the artificial support is absent and we fail big time.

And one more learning casualty of real-time may be moral development in young children. Research at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity institute suggests that constant exposure to fast paced, constantly adjusting images involving pain and violence conditions children to accept others’ pain without feeling concern or compassion. There is simply not enough time for the brain to process complex emotional responses. This is particularly true regarding forms of social or psychological pain and suffering, where it takes between six and eight seconds for our brain to respond. When these kids later witness similar acts in the real world, they may be desensitized and slow to respond with compassion. According to Manuel Castells, perhaps the most prominent sociologist writing about networked society, “Lasting compassion in relationship to psychological suffering requires a level of persistent, emotional attention.”

Progress is always a double-edged sword, and the closer we fly to this particular sun, the more over-heated and vulnerable our wings become (excuse the crass mixing of metaphors). Real-time face-recognition security systems and integrated health records management are two related examples of constructive change and improvement. Perpetual personal availability through PDAs is just plain destructive and spiraling out of control. We humans are no better suited to real-time-all-the-time than we are to flying around with make-shift wings. Make a list of the three things you value most, cherished life moments or memories, and we’ll wager they seriously lack in real-time qualities. Real-time is a convenient means to an end, not a way of being. Real life takes time, often lots of it, to sense, share experiences, learn through trial and error, to cry and to laugh. This is true for organizations and societies as well as for individuals, especially children. Now that we’ve figured out how to deploy real-time, it’s time to learn how to set healthy limits and when it is important not to use it.

Responding on behalf of Facebook, Barry Schnitt explains, “Just being offensive or objectionable doesn’t get it taken off Facebook. We want it [the site] to be a place where people can discuss all kinds of ideas, including controversial ones.”

Attorney Brian Cuban, brother of Dallas Maverick’s owner, Mark Cuban, sees it quite differently, and has written an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging the groups’ removal from the site. “Allowing these groups to flourish on Facebook under the guise of “open discussion” does nothing more than spread their message of hate.”

How then do you deal with this, as Facebook must, knowing full well that this will not be the last time such a controversy is going to arise. Do you settle it arbitrarily and establish your own standards and criteria (ala Cuban, who points out that there is no First Amendment right to free speech in the private realm)? Do you open the debate to the community, or invite experts to comment and advise? Or, do you treat every instance as a unique case and deal with them one at a time on their merits?

Viewing this as a dilemma, what are the two core dueling values that are in conflict? Getting this right in our experience is crucial, bringing either clarity and greater consensus, or adding confusion and distortion that takes you further away from being able to deal effectively with the issue. The core dilemma could be cast as any of the following:
- morally correct versus legally permissible (as experienced in early labour and anti-discrimination organizing efforts)
- Fair and just versus expedient (what will it take to make the issue go away?)
- freedom of expression versus offensiveness to others (a basic tension in an open, civil society)

We could get creative and generate more possible dilemmas, but the third one, freedom of expression versus offensiveness/hurtful to others, strikes us as a fair and accurate way to describe what’s happening and what is making it difficult to resolve.

With high freedom and low offensiveness (upper left), we have the ideal situation - go for it!
When freedom is low and offensiveness is also low, you can be sure there is a flatness and some form of repression happening, be it imposed by some external force like an institution or state, or by oneself.
High offensiveness and low freedom fits coercive situations like propaganda.
Where both freedom and offensiveness are high, it can go either way - morally unacceptable (as in forms of hate or violence), or legitimate opinion or self-expression that others just happen to find offensive.

The Holocaust Deniers on Facebook seem to fall into this last quadrant. Now the question is which of the two categories fits them best? We concur with the prevailing view that this is indeed a dilemma that cannot be settled one way, once and for all. Facebook’s position on the issue needs to be circumstantial and measured. Hopefully, they will make the correct call in this instance, reserving the right to be reflective and considered in resolving future dilemmas. Yes, they need to be prepared to take a stand in accordance with their values and principles, and they need to have the courage and retain the flexibility to alter their decision should new facts or consequences contradict their original position.

In the face of such vociferous, predictable condemnation from abroad as well as within his own country, what would lead Karzai to pick Fahim? The reporting in the AP article we read doesn’t ask this question, but arguably it should and so should we all in making sense of the decision.

We all know that ruling in a country like Afganistan at a time like the present is fraught with risks and that scant rewards are available. The question the leader needs to ask is what is the core dilemma I need to address to make a difference in the situation; where do I focus my and my country’s available resources?

One dilemma that captures the moment and explains the “curious” political decision is the need to promote well-being, peace and improvements on the one hand, while on the other, growing and maintaining credibility and influence. As the matrix above depicts, inherent tensions make this a dangerous and challenging pursuit. Lean too far in one direction and you are seen as unsuitable for the mission at hand. Lean the other way and you will be mistrusted by your own people or the other countries who care about the direction of local events.

This tension between pursuing progressive change versus establishing trust and credibility is of course endemic to volatile transitional situations like we are witnessing in Afghanistan. Others that come to mind are Palestine (Abbas versus Hammas) and Sierra Leone (post- civil war “blood diamonds”).

Identifying the core dilemma does not “fix” anything, but it makes it possible to work on the right issues in the most helpful way. It brings honesty and integrity into the process. It creates a shared understanding and vocabulary for parties to dialogue and be understood.