Paradoxical inertia is an organization condition that has received far less attention than organizational change. We investigate, ethnographically, an Australian Intellectual Property service firm, whose Board members proved to be unable to respond strategically to a rapidly changing environment that threatened their organization's survival. In the face of discontinuous change, this failure to address the management of paradoxes threatening embedded routines reinforced a paralysing inertia. Extant research has emphasized how managers handle paradox; we discuss how they fail to do so. The inertia is derived from the finessing of tensions as non-issues. Constituted as non-issues there were non-decisions about these tensions that maintained internal stability and harmony; they did so, however, in world of change increasingly disrespectful of internal concerns for ongoing professional stability and harmony. The inability to become collectively and critically aware of the specific forms of inertia undermined recursive learning and thus the transformation of the sensemaking practices of the Board. MAD statement Paradox theory invites managers to approach the complexities of the world with an integrate both-and type of approach. In this perspective, paradox may offer new solutions to problems by recentering attention from dualistic frames to sophisticated dualities. This reasoning sounds appealing but dualities may be difficult to manage and to sustain. Not much is known yet about the obstacles to a paradoxical mindset. In this article we explore how paradoxical leadership may be easier said than done and highlight reasons, including inertia, that may impede managers from making paradoxes salient and therefore manageable. This helps explain the hardship of paradox management in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]