Let’s turn first to the inputs, beginning with the role of discipline. An overarching theme across our research findings is the role of discipline in separating the great from the mediocre. True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations. The only legitimate form of discipline is self-discipline, having the inner will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you create a powerful mixture that drives great performance.

To build an enduring great organization—whether in business or the social sectors—you need disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and take disciplined action. Then you need the discipline to sustain momentum over a long period of time. This forms the backbone of the framework, laid out in four basic stages:

Stage 1: Disciplined People

Stage 2: Disciplined Thought

Stage 3: Disciplined Action

Stage 4: Building to Last

Charles Simeon, the nineteenth-century cleric and fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, put it well when he said of mercy and justice: “Truth is not in the middle and not in one extreme; it is in both extremes.” G. K. Chesterton, the English essayist, expressed a similar idea when he defined paradox as “two opposite cords of truth [that have] become entangled in an inextricable knot.

Very well then, I contradict myself

F. Scott Fitzgerald expressed a similar thought: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold to opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’ The oblique decision maker, the fox, is not hung up on inconsistency and frequently holds contradictory ideas simultaneously.

What this means is that when you have to think about connections between parts, rather than just counting the individual parts of a system, the number of possibilities grows very rapidly; the potential combinations multiply, rather than just adding up. Very quickly, they multiply up to astronomically huge numbers, spelling absolute death to any hope of knowing the entire state of the system.

In fact, knowing only a few of the feedback circuits can be actively misleading, if you rely too greatly on your partial information. It is a sobering thought, for example, that despite employing some of the best and brightest* analysts in the world, the advice given by the US State Department over the last fifty years could comfortably have been outperformed by a parrot that had been trained to repeat the phrase, ‘Don’t start a war.’ The repeated failures of the State Department are not the consequence of ignorance; they are the consequence of having very good and deep — but not total — knowledge of an extremely complicated situation, in which facts outside of that information set turned out to be crucial. Knowing a great deal of detail about a subset of a system has a habit of increasing your confidence in your opinions disproportionately from their reliability.

*The phrase ‘the best and brightest’ is often used by people who don’t know that its original context was ironic. It entered the language as the title of David Halberstam’s book about the policy mistakes of the Vietnam War.

Here’s the second safeguard against binary thinking:

Safeguard: Come up with Both-And options. Try to find ways of combining the binary. Think not in terms of choosing either X or Y, but rather having both X and Y.

Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, refers to this technique as integrative thinking. Rather than grappling with seemingly opposed binary options, combine them.