Navigate via Tension

Tension often signals challenges and opportunities. When people reflect on the reasons behind their tension, they can uncover potential organizational drivers — situations worth responding to in order to generate value, eliminate waste, or avoid undesirable consequences.

Step 1: Notice Tension

In this context, tension is an inner state of alert: a personal experience that’s triggered when there’s some kind of dissonance between an individual’s perception of a situation and what they expect or would prefer to see.

Step 2: Understand the Situation

Investigate the situation you are perceiving that stimulates tension in you. Sometimes this inquiry can reveal misconceptions, and the tension goes away.

Step 3: Is this an Organizational Driver?

A simple way to determine whether a situation is relevant for the organization to address is by asking the question:

Would responding to this situation help the organization generate value, eliminate waste or avoid undesirable consequences?

• If you think the answer is yes, you’ve likely identified an organizational driver that needs a response.
• If you think the answer is no, you can ignore the situation and focus on relevant things instead.
• If you are unclear, investigate further, which might include reaching out to others who could have a clearer idea.

Step 4: Is it in my/our domain? If not, pass it on

It could be that the driver falls within the scope of a domain you’re responsible for, in which case you’ll want to place it in your list of priorities and respond to it accordingly (see Respond to Organizational Drivers). Even if it falls outside of your area of responsibility, it might still be something that you are best placed to deal with, or that you can at least address without causing impediments or harm. Weigh the effort of finding someone else and explaining it to them against just taking care of it yourself. them against just taking care of it yourself.

On other occasions, however, you’ll come across drivers that are the responsibility of others to address. Therefore, to navigate via tension effectively, there needs to be enough clarity around who is responsible for what in the organization so that people know, or can find out, who to inform about new organizational drivers they discover, so they can pass that information on to them.