Can Intentionally Creating Tension Actually Be Good For Innovation?

Change is inevitable, but stagnation is death.

Deep down, every employee, manager, and executive knows this, but with change comes tension, so change is often resisted, causing even MORE tension, and your productivity (and profitability) suffer.

A healthy organization fosters change on a nearly daily basis, embracing the inevitable discomfort instead of resisting or ignoring it.

My freshman year of college, I dated a girl I wanted to spend every waking moment around. The only problem: she had a life, so our plans would change unexpectedly, and being a hormonal 19 year-old mess, I’d be left seething.

Rather than leaning into the changes, I resisted, which built even more tension, and our relationship snapped.

Tension comes naturally with change, but how that tension is dealt with determines outcomes.

How does YOUR organization handle the tension that comes with unexpected change?

Turns out, having a sense of humor about it helps break tension quicker than wishing there wasn’t tension.

AND it helps you get ahead of burnout and builds mental well-being.

Humor is an internal process that disrupts thinking patterns to connect unlike thoughts or ideas — it can also connect similar ideas in new and unexpected ways — so developing the skill of using humor can cut the tension that comes with evolving your organization, rather than allowing that tension to cut relationships like mine.

Embracing and using tension as a tool can lead to so much growth, but it takes continuous practice to deal with continuous change.

There are a number of training exercises teams can do together that can make these skills part of your culture, but every culture, cast of characters, and the problems you’re dealing with are different.

Here is a link to set up a quick brainstorming conversation where we’ll hop on a collaborative call to create a training exercise for using humor to deal with change, specifically tailored to your team and challenges, for no charge.

Why would I offer this?

I don’t want you to be a Freshman David.