Holding Creative Tension

HOLDING CREATIVE TENSION

People often have great difficulty talking about their visions, even when the visions are clear. Why? Because we are acutely aware of the gaps between our vision and reality. “I would like to start my own company,” but “I don’t have the capital.” Or, “I would like to pursue the profession that I really love,” but “I’ve got to make a living.” These gaps can make a vision seem unrealistic or fanciful. They can discourage us or make us feel hopeless. But the gap between vision and current reality is also a source of energy. If there was no gap, there would be no need for any action to move toward the vision. Indeed, the gap is the source of creative energy. We call this gap creative tension.[10]

Imagine a rubber band, stretched between your vision and current reality. When stretched, the rubber band creates tension, representing the tension between vision and current reality. What does tension seek? Resolution or release. There are only two possible ways for the tension to resolve itself: pull reality toward the vision or pull the vision toward reality. Which occurs will depend on whether we hold steady to the vision.

[image: diagram of rubber band representing creative tension]

The principle of creative tension is the central principle of personal mastery, integrating all elements of the discipline. Yet, it is easily misunderstood. For example, the very term “tension” suggests anxiety or stress. But creative tension doesn’t feel any particular way. It is the force that comes into play at the moment when we acknowledge a vision that is at odds with current reality.

Still, creative tension often leads to feelings or emotions associated with anxiety, such as sadness, discouragement, hopelessness, or worry. This happens so often that people easily confuse these emotions with creative tension. People come to think that the creative process is all about being in a state of anxiety. But it is important to realize that these “negative” emotions that may arise when there is creative tension are not creative tension itself. These emotions are what we call emotional tension.

If we fail to distinguish emotional tension from creative tension, we predispose ourselves to lowering our vision. If we feel deeply discouraged about a vision that is not happening, we may have a strong urge to lighten the load of that discouragement. There is one immediate remedy: lower the vision! “Well, it wasn’t really that important to shoot seventy-five. I’m having a great time shooting in the eighties.”

Or, “I don’t really care about being able to play in recital. I’ll have to make money as a music teacher in any case; I’ll just concentrate there.” The dynamics of relieving emotional tension are insidious because they can operate unnoticed. Emotional tension can always be relieved by adjusting the one pole of the creative tension that is completely under our control at all times—the vision. The feelings that we dislike go away because the creative tension that was their source is reduced. Our goals are now much closer to our current reality. Escaping emotional tension is easy—the only price we pay is abandoning what we truly want, our vision.

The dynamics of emotional tension deeply resemble the dynamics of eroding goals that so troubled WonderTech in [Chapter 7]. The interaction of creative tension and emotional tension is a shifting the burden dynamic, similar to that of eroding goals, that can be represented as follows:

[image: diagram of shifting the burden dynamic between creative tension and emotional tension]

When we hold a vision that differs from current reality, a gap exists (the creative tension) which can be resolved in two ways. The lower balancing process represents the “fundamental solution”: taking actions to bring reality into line with the vision. But changing reality takes time. This is what leads to the frustration and emotional tension in the upper balancing process, the “symptomatic solution” of lowering the vision to bring it into line with current reality.

But a onetime reduction in the vision usually isn’t the end of the story. Sooner or later new pressures pulling reality away from the (new, lowered) vision arise, leading to still more pressures to lower the vision. The classic “shifting the burden” dynamic ensues, a subtle reinforcing spiral of failure to meet goals, frustration, lowered vision, temporary relief, and pressure anew to lower the vision still further. Gradually, the “burden” is shifting increasingly to lowering the vision.

At WonderTech, relieving emotional tension took the form of decline in key operating standards for delivery performance that seemed impossible to meet. The decline was especially difficult to see because it was gradual. During each crisis at Wonder Tech delivery standards eroded just a bit relative to where they had settled after the last crisis. So, too, do eroding personal goals go unrecognized, as we gradually surrender our dreams for the relationships we want to have, the work we want to do, and the type of world we want to live in.

In organizations, goals erode because of low tolerance for emotional tension. Nobody wants to be the messenger with bad news. The easiest path is to just pretend there is no bad news, or better yet, declare victory—to redefine the bad news as not so bad by lowering the standard against which it is judged.

The dynamics of emotional tension exist at all levels of human activity. They are the dynamics of compromise, the path of mediocrity. As Somerset Maugham said, “Only mediocre people are always at their best.”

We allow our goals to erode when we are unwilling to live with emotional tension. On the other hand, when we understand creative tension and allow it to operate by not lowering our vision, vision becomes an active force. Robert Fritz says, “It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.” Truly creative people use the gap between vision and current reality to generate energy for change.

For example, Alan Kay, who directed the research at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) which in many ways gave birth to the personal computer, actually had a vision for a different machine, which he called the “dynabook.” This would be a book that was interactive. A child could test out his or her understanding, play games, and creatively rearrange the static presentation of ideas offered by the traditional book. Kay failed, in a sense, because the “dynabook” never became a reality. But the vision reshaped the computer industry. The prototype machines developed at PARC achieved the functionality—windows, pull-down menus, mouse control, iconic displays (images rather than words)—that was introduced commercially almost ten years later in the Macintosh.

Bill Russell, the legendary center for the Boston Celtics basketball team during its historic run of eleven professional championships in thirteen years, used to keep his own personal scorecard. He graded himself after every game on scale from one to one hundred. In his career he never achieved more than sixty-five. Now, given the way most of us are taught to think about goals, we would regard Russell as an abject failure. The poor soul played in over twelve hundred basketball games and never achieved his standard! Yet, it was the striving for that standard that made him arguably the best basketball player ever.[11]

It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.

Mastery of creative tension transforms the way one views “failure.” Failure is, simply, a shortfall, evidence of the gap between vision and current reality. Failure is an opportunity for learning—about inaccurate pictures of current reality, about strategies that didn’t work as expected, about the clarity of the vision. Failures are not about our unworthiness or powerlessness. Ed Land, founder and president of Polaroid for decades and inventor of instant photography, had one plaque on his wall. It read:

A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.

Mastery of creative tension brings out a capacity for perseverance and patience. A Japanese executive in one of our seminars once told me how, in his view, Japanese and Americans have quite different attitudes toward time. He said that, “U.S. businessmen in Japan to negotiate business deals often find the Japanese evasive and reticent to ‘get down to business.’ The American arrives in Japan on a tight, carefully planned five-day schedule and immediately wants to get to work. Instead, the Japanese greet them with a polite, formal tea ceremony instead, never getting down to nuts and bolts. As the days go by, the Japanese keep their slow pace, while the Americans become antsier and antsier. For the American,” the executive said, “time is the enemy. For the Japanese, time is an ally.”

More broadly, current reality itself is, for many of us, the enemy. We fight against what is. We are not so much drawn to what we want to create as we are repelled by what we have, from our current reality. By this logic, the deeper the fear, the more we abhor what is, the more “motivated” we are to change. “Things must get bad enough, or people will not change in any fundamental way.”

This leads to the mistaken belief that fundamental change requires a threat to survival, a “burning platform” in the words of some. This crisis theory of change is remarkably widespread. Yet, it is also a dangerous oversimplification. Often in workshops or presentations, I will ask, “How many of you believe people and organizations only change, fundamentally, when there is a crisis?” Reliably, 75 to 90 percent of the hands go up. Then I ask people to consider a life where everything is exactly the way they would like—there are absolutely no problems of any sort in work, personally, professionally, in their relationships, or their community. Then I ask, “What is the first thing you would seek if you had a life of absolutely no problems?” The answer, overwhelmingly, is “change—to create something new.” So human beings are more complex than we often assume. We both fear and seek change. Or, as one seasoned organization change consultant once put it, “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”

Mastery of creative tension leads to a fundamental shift in our whole posture toward reality. Current reality becomes the ally not the enemy. An accurate, insightful view of current reality is as important as a clear vision. Unfortunately, most of us are in the habit of imposing biases on our perceptions of current reality. “We learn to rely on our concepts of reality more than on our observations,” writes Robert Fritz. “It is more convenient to assume that reality is similar to our preconceived ideas than to freshly observe what we have before our eyes.”[12] If the first choice in pursuing personal mastery is to be true to your own vision, the second fundamental choice in support of personal mastery is commitment to the truth.

The two are equally vital to generating creative tension. Or, as Fritz puts it, “The truly creative person knows that all creating is achieved through working with constraints. Without constraints there is no creating.”