This article is originally published on Forbes on 21 Jan 2025 [Link to original article]
Leaders today are not short on reasons to change. Markets shift, technologies accelerate, workforce expectations evolve and institutional trust remains fragile. What leaders struggle with is not the why of change but the how narrative, which is about how to hold urgency without panic, ambition without exhaustion and alignment without compliance. In many organisations, the moment pressure rises, leaders collapse into firefighting, over-control or performative optimism. The result is familiar: initiatives stall, people disengage and conviction quietly evaporates.
At a recent international leadership roundtable, which I hosted for coaches and leaders, a recurring insight surfaced across sectors: Change does not fail because leaders lack intent or intelligence but because they lack the capability to hold creative tension over time. When tension is mismanaged, it mutates into anxiety, cynicism or fear. When held well, it becomes the engine of learning, innovation and conviction.
Why Creative Tension Is Misunderstood
Creative tension, a concept popularised by Peter Senge and further developed in systems leadership practice by Dr. Daniel Kim, refers to the productive gap between current reality and a compelling future. In theory, leaders know this. In practice, many confuse creative tension with pressure.
Pressure relies on external force: deadlines, targets, consequences. Creative tension relies on clarity: a shared picture of reality, a shared aspiration and the discipline to stay present in the gap between them. Pressure narrows attention; creative tension expands it. Pressure demands compliance; creative tension invites ownership.
The problem is that pressure delivers short-term movement, while creative tension demands patience, emotional steadiness and design discipline. Under scrutiny, leaders often default to pressure because it feels decisive. Over time, however, pressure erodes trust and drains energy, while creative tension, when held skillfully, builds conviction. Conviction is not motivation. It is design.
One of the most persistent myths in change leadership is that conviction is something leaders must inspire through charisma or messaging. In reality, conviction is not manufactured through speeches; it is designed into the system.
Conviction emerges when people experience three things consistently: clarity of direction, coherence of action and credibility of leadership behaviour. When these align, people commit not because they are told to but because the system makes sense to them. It goes beyond belief. It is the bridge between believing and actually translating these beliefs into action through an act of the will. Leaders lose conviction when their systems contradict their words. They announce bold visions while rewarding short-term fixes. They call for innovation while punishing failure.
The ‘How’ Of Holding Creative Tension
Holding creative tension is not a mindset alone; it is a set of observable practices. Leaders who do this well behave differently in four critical ways.
1. Slow down sensemaking before speeding up execution.
In complex environments, acting quickly without shared understanding creates motion, not progress. Effective leaders invest time upfront to clarify what problem they are solving, what assumptions are in play and where constraints truly lie. This is not analysis paralysis; it is disciplined seeing. By naming reality honestly—including uncomfortable trade-offs—leaders prevent false urgency from hijacking the system.
2. Distinguish between performance gaps and capability gaps.
When results fall short, many leaders push harder on targets. Systems leaders ask a different question: “What capability is missing that makes this result hard to sustain?” This reframing shifts the response from pressure to learning. Instead of extracting effort, leaders design opportunities for people to build skill, judgment and confidence. Over time, performance improves because capability compounds.
3. Regulate emotional tone, not just task progress.
Change is emotional before it is technical. Leaders who ignore this pay a hidden price. Cynicism, fear and disengagement are not signs of weak character; they are signals of an overwhelmed system. Leaders who can notice emotional undercurrents—without being consumed by them—create psychological space for learning. This steadiness allows teams to stay in creative tension without tipping into distress.
4. Create visible learning loops.
Conviction grows when people see that effort leads to insight and insight leads to improvement. Leaders who operationalise reflection—through short reviews, after-action conversations and real-time feedback—turn work into learning. This makes progress tangible and reinforces the belief that the organisation is capable of adapting, not just reacting. Change leaders align decisions with declared intent, distribute authority thoughtfully and accept short-term discomfort in service of long-term capability.
When Creative Tension Turns Toxic
Creative tension becomes destructive when leaders lack the skill or support to hold it. Three warning signs are common.
The first is perpetual urgency, where everything is framed as critical. This exhausts attention and erodes judgment. The second is false harmony, where disagreement is avoided to preserve surface calm. This suppresses learning and breeds quiet resistance. The third is heroic leadership, where a few individuals repeatedly step in to save the system, unintentionally weakening everyone else.
In each case, tension is present but unmanaged. The system oscillates between anxiety and relief, never building the muscle required for sustainable change.
The organisations that navigate change well do not eliminate tension; they contain it. They invest in leadership capability at multiple levels, not just at the top. This is where conviction becomes collective. People stop asking, “Will this change last?” and start asking, “How can we make it better?” That shift does not happen through persuasion; it happens through experience.
The Leadership Challenge Ahead
In an era of constant disruption, leaders will be tempted to simplify complexity into slogans or push through resistance with force. Neither approach builds conviction. The harder, more consequential work is learning how to hold creative tension—to stay present in reality without being trapped by it and committed to the future without being detached from the present.
Leaders who master this do not just deliver change; they build systems that can change themselves. In doing so, they replace burnout with belief, compliance with commitment and pressure with progress.
The question for today’s leaders is not whether tension exists. It always does. The real question is whether they know how to hold it long enough and well enough for conviction to take root toward vision.