This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

We talk about tension as if it’s a bad thing. But the only way to launch a rubber band across the room is to pull it backwards, creating tension. Tension permits the water spider to walk across a puddle without drowning. And tension keeps us focused on the world around us. When we arrive with the change we seek to make, we are causing tension. There’s always tension associated with change—the people we serve wonder, “Will it work, can I ignore it, what are other people doing, will this make me look stupid, am I qualified, will I be left out, what is everyone else doing, what will it cost me, can I leave the other choices behind?” The strategy we adopt has tension at its center. We’re not here to “do our job.” We’re here to make a change happen. A good idea isn’t based on what you would do if you could start over. A good idea is a series of leverage points and disruptions that would permit a change agent to create tension and opportunity that might bend a system in the right direction.