Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan

In it he briefly introduced a concept called creative tension. “Imagine a rubber band, stretched between your vision and current reality. When stretched, the rubber band creates tension. . . . What does tension seek? Resolution or release.” In Senge’s view, creative tension must be resolved by either pulling reality toward the vision (change) or pulling your vision toward reality (compromise). If you feel, for example, that your organization has an insufficient parental leave policy, that’s a tension. You can try to change it, or you can accept it. Simply living with tension is unproductive. While we don’t want to get too hung up on our visions for the future (remember, we are operating in complexity), there is something deeply resonant about the idea that we can sense potential in our own systems and that we need to tune into that ability and put it to use.

This is me. I cannot live with the tension being unacknowledged. What I could work on is acknowledgement followed by acceptance.