I was first introduced to creative tension in Senge’s work in ‘The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization,’ and later was able to have a podcast with Robert Fritz who Senge had attributed the work. However, Fritz called it structural tension and explained it in detail in the book, Path of Least Resistance: Learning to Become the Creative Force in Your Own Life. It was part of my discussion before and during the interview with this week’s podcast, John Latham.
John Latham: The tension thing, I actually learned about it from Richard Beckhard which is an OD guy. But Richard Beckhard’s change formula had tension built into it. So, that was my first introduction. Then I saw Senge’s stuff, and I see it keep coming up. It came up in the CEO research I did on Baldrige Transformations. So, what I’m doing now is so much of the DNA. If you’re a Baldrige person, you look at it, and you go, yeah this makes complete sense with Baldrige. But, I’m also not wedded to Baldrige, if that makes sense. I take ideas from anywhere. I have a very low dogma.
Joe: I’m a Lean guy basically, but I was introduced to Lean through Systems Thinking back in the 80’s. Then, I went into the Theory of Constraints with Goldratt, reading ‘The Goal,’ and taking a deeper dive for a few years. Then I kind of went into Six Sigma because of the GE influence and a few other things, and eventually into Lean. Lean attached itself to me as I worked in service and sales and marketing. And of course as Kata has surfaced the rubber band thing of tension, that’s how Fritz explains it, is very Kata like.
John: That actually without prodding came out of almost every CEO interview I did where they talked about, we set these goals and then we started improving. We had to keep moving the goal post, otherwise entropy would take over, and we’d slow down. Which is that rubber band, right? You just keep moving it and it’s a great visual, that rubber band analogy, because that really is what’s going on in an organization is you move it, and you get some tension, and you get some movement, you move it again, and that’s what they had to do to keep it going and actually, almost every organization that has achieved pretty high performance that has consequently and subsequently declined, almost every one of them forgot to do that. They forgot to keep raising the bar.
Later on in the interview, I asked John this question:
Joe: I’m going to jump into something that I was going to wait until the end, but this is a nice segue into it. We talk about this description of creative tension in your book. And here we are talking about not taking our eye off the ball. How do we continue with excellence, and I think creative tension has some merit to that whole thought process? You start out, though you wait until the end of the book to put it in there, but it’s really at the beginning of your book somewhat. Let’s explain what creative tension is.
John: Actually Joe, it’s in both places. It’s actually the bookends because Step 1, the forces for change, are what is pushing us. So, whether we call it creative tension or structural tension, as some of your listeners may be familiar with, regardless, it’s tension that causes us to change. We need tension to overcome inertia, right? The inertia of status quo will stop up us from changing anything unless we have enough force to overcome it. So, part of the force that overcomes it are these dissatisfactions with the status quo or the things pushing us to change. A lot of the change leadership books talk about it as the burning platform, from I think John Kotter’s. That was the term he used. That’s an essential piece, but a burning platform alone, like a poor customer, bad financials, a regulation that’s coming down, and things that are making us unsettled, they often tell us that we’re not happy, but they don’t tell us which way to go to fix it.
The other side of tension is the pulling side, which is the vision. Where do we want to go? What is the desired reality, versus the current reality? That’s a pulling tension. The combination between the pulling forces of the new place that we want to get to, the new reality and the pushing force is our dissatisfaction with where we currently are, have to be greater than the inertia that’s keeping us from moving it all. Again, Richard Beckhard came up with a formula and popularized it, and the origins of that formula are actually sketchy, but he basically said that those two things have to be greater than the resistance to change, which is the status quo. Not only do you have to have that, in the beginning, to get going. If that Step 1 is to understand the forces of change and if you don’t have enough forces for change, you need to create some dissatisfaction and or a better, more compelling vision, so that you do have the forces for change, otherwise you’re not going to anywhere.
Once you get going, and you’re doing all these things, you start improving. The dissatisfaction goes down because now, we’re doing better as we start improving the pieces and parts, and putting all these together and making it work as a system. Once we start improving, the tension decreases. When the tension decreases, we now no longer have enough to overcome inertia sometimes. So at the end of the book, which is where I talk about maintaining the tension, is critical to keeping the organization moving, because as soon as they’re satisfied with where they are, all progress stops pretty much. Unfortunately, the world continues changing. If we’re happy with where we are, we’re going to be left behind and start declining in performance. It’s a great point, and it’s really the bookends because, without it, everything is all better off. All other points are moot.
About: John Latham combines experience and research to create flexible frameworks that facilitate the process of reimagining, redesigning, and transforming organizations. Some of the frameworks such as the Design Framework for Organization Architects™ emerged from practice and later tested and refined. Others emerged from research and further developed in practice such as the CEO research that led to the Leadership Framework for Organization Architects™. These two award-winning, peer-reviewed frameworks form the foundation of the Organization Design Studio™ was founded to provide a virtual space for organization architects to learn how to (re)create the organization they really want!™