“Weren’t these teams merged last year?”

A new hire can ask in week two what everyone else stopped asking years ago. Yes. They were merged. And split the year before that.

Barry Johnson drew a distinction that would spare organizations a lot of wasted motion: some difficulties are problems, and some are polarities. Problems have solutions. Polarities are pairs you need both of over time, like centralized and decentralized, or standardized and flexible. Each pole, held too long, creates a real need for the other. A polarity treated as a problem doesn’t get solved. It gets solved again and again.

Each swing works at first, and that’s what makes it convincing. The new structure relieves exactly what hurt, so it gets credited as the answer. Then its own costs accumulate until someone proposes the obvious fix: the old structure, renamed. A few cycles in, the deeper damage arrives. People learn that initiatives are weather. They comply, wait it out, and keep their real energy in reserve, which starves each new swing sooner and shortens the cycle.

I’m currently in conversations with organizations moving in opposite directions, some centralizing, some undoing it, and both are making the same argument: this will finally fix the friction.

So take the debate your team keeps reopening and give it one page: what each side protects, what each side fears losing. If all four lists are real, stop trying to win. Name the early signals that you’ve overdone the pole you’re on, and decide now what you’ll do when they appear.

Which problem has your organization solved in both directions?