The value of tension in your team
From creativity to failure
I sit in a meeting room with two of my colleagues at SenseTribe, the table full of colourful post-it notes with words and drawings on them — we are in the middle of reinventing our service and product-offering. One of us is facilitating a fun and creative exercise and all of us are jotting down words, enthusiastically sharing ideas, moving post-its… There is a sense of productive flow and inspiration in the room together with the sense that we are getting somewhere.
Suddenly something happens and there is this shift. Thinking back now, it is unclear how it all came together. Was it the fact that someone looked at the watch and realised we had only a few minutes left? Did someone suddenly feel hungry? Did I say something to harsh? Was there a disagreement on the wording my colleague used?
We all had different ideas about the root cause. Still we all could feel this almost unbearable tension in the room. Our flow had vanished and we found ourselves in disagreement about the content, the purpose of the exercise and about how to collaborate. All of us felt stuck and a sense of disappointment. Did we really have to finish off this hyper productive meeting unfinished and with a sense of failure?
The value of tension
We all have meetings in which we feel tension. No matter whether we might think that the conversation we are having is not effective, or whether there is an invisible elephant in the room that nobody dares to speak about.
Non-Violent Communication practitioners may say that tension and emotions usually point to an unmet need. In Sociocracy 3.0 we speak about an observation that points to an organisational need. Most times, we do not take the time to clarify the observation and the need. Instead we quickly jump to conclusions. Many conflicts arise because we try to address different needs.
Interesting enough, most employees have been trained to ignore tension. After all it is the manager’s job to coordinate priorities and assign tasks, so we might as well rely on him/her to sort things out. We might decide to help him/her out by sharing who we think is responsible for the mess and what we think needs to happen, still at the end it is the manager's job to take care of things. Some call this ‘parent-to-child relationship’.
Tension can also be caused by something positive, like an opportunity that arises and if we don’t act now, it might as well be too late.
We need a certain degree of creative tension between different perspectives for something new to emerge (more about this here).
What happens if we don’t react to tension?
The thing about tension is that it needs to come out in some way, and if we don’t do anything about it ourself, it finds its own way to manifest, usually in form of accumulated stress and emotions. Sometimes it comes out when we get back home and our husband or wife gets to deal with the emotional soup we have accumulated. Some of us prefer to eat it up ourselves and get anxious or depressed, we start to develop mental or even physical diseases. In short: It can significantly harm us and those around us. Still, unfortunately in most organisational environments there is no practice in place that helps us to deal with what we physically perceive in a constructive way.
Of course sometimes a person can be tense or emotional because of personal issues, because he or she didn’t get enough sleep or is lacking sports. That’s another important reason why we need to first clarify what has been happening, the impact it may have and what is needed at organisational level before we think about what can be done about it.
Navigating via tension
In Sociocracy 3.0 we have a practice called ‘navigating via tension’, where we translate what we observe and what we think is needed into something called a ‘driver statement’. Many times people observe different things and identify different needs for one single situation, so it is important we align on our motivations first, so we do not encounter disagreements further down the line. Before developing a proposal, we first check with the team whether there is agreement on the driver.
Looking into the mirror
Sociocracy 3.0 practice has been very helpful for me to see the value in tension. However, learning new patterns is not easy, since it requires us to first unlearn what has become natural. It may feel stiff and unnatural at the start to try something new, and we continuously fall back into old behavioural patterns, which can be frustrating at times. Is there less tension in our team because of what we practice? Probably not. We do however have a way to deal with it now.
At SenseTribe, we know each other quite well. Sometimes levels of tension can become quite high, like in the example I described, and we may need a ‘self-care day’, where we stay home and take time to clear our minds, before we are able to give constructive feedback and look at what drivers need to be addressed to improve our collaboration.
There is nothing better and nothing worse than looking into a mirror every once in a while by getting a healthy dose of feedback from your peers. I very much appreciate the peer support I’m getting from my colleagues and from other S3 practitioners.
I may not always enjoy what I see and with every achievement our team seems to put the bar higher on what effective collaboration means.
Who would want to trade self-awareness against ignorance? You do certainly learn and grow and if you ask me, there is no turning back, once you’ve embarked on a journey of self-organisation.
Find out more about Sociocracy 3.0 here. If you want to know more about the book on well-being in organisations that I’m about to publish with SenseTribe, sign up here to our newsletter.
