Beyond Dualism: Stability and Change As a Duality

To survive and prosper, organizations must reconcile stability, reliability, and exploitation with change, innovation, and exploration. These imperatives and the mechanisms that support them are generally seen as incompatible and mutually exclusive. I present an alternative: a duality view in which stability and change are fundamentally interdependent—contradictory but also mutually enabling. This view revisits several enduring ideas about stability and change and offers theoretical and pragmatic opportunities to dissolve and transcend their paradoxical relationship.