Build #75 - Tension is the work: leading without easy answers

In leadership conversations with founders, there’s a moment I’ve come to expect.

It often arrives after a burst of clarity or action, a restructure, a funding round, a product launch. Things look good. But there’s a pause. Then comes a sentence that sounds something like: “I thought this would make things feel clearer. But somehow, it’s messier.”

What they’re describing isn’t failure. It’s tension. And my invitation, though not always welcome, is this: What if the tension isn’t something to resolve, but something to work with?

Most founders are conditioned, by investors, advisors, or the startup ecosystem itself, to move fast and fix things. Decisions are often framed as binaries: scale or stabilise, pivot or persist, centralise or decentralise.

The belief is that with enough strategic clarity, decisive leadership, hussle and a decent playbook, these tensions can be eliminated. Even though elimination may mean selection of the best worst option, trade-offs, without any guarantee of it being the right choice.

But growth doesn’t remove tension. It amplifies it. Rapid decisions may not provide the panacea to some of the more complex and nuanced, some might say “wicked” challenges, which can torment the leaders of early-stage scale ups.

In fact, the most resilient companies I’ve worked with aren’t the ones who solve their tensions quickly, they’re the ones who learn how to hold them. To stay in relationship with competing needs long enough for something new to emerge.

This is the work.

Psychodynamic theory offers us a useful lens here. It recognises that organisations, like individuals, have inner lives. Emotions, defences, desires, projections. When under pressure (and scale always brings pressure), systems will often try to displace or split off their anxiety. It becomes someone else’s fault. Or something we need to decide now. Or a problem to outsource.

The founder, by virtue of their role and symbolic power, often becomes the container for all of it. They hold the paradoxes others cannot bear. They are both visionary and operator, leader and team-mate, insider and outsider.

This is not dysfunction. It’s the necessary complexity of growth. And learning to stand in it, rather than collapse into one pole or flee to certainty, is what separates sustainable leadership from performative management.

Roger Martin’s work The Opposable Mind gives this shape. He challenges the notion that difficult choices must be reduced to trade-offs. Instead, he invites leaders to cultivate the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension, not to defer the decision indefinitely, but to suspend the rush to closure.

In doing so, something new becomes possible. Not compromise. But integration.

Martin introduces the idea of “stance”: a leader’s underlying beliefs about how the world works. Founders who believe tension is pathological will try to eliminate it. Those who view it as creative energy will learn to work with it, using what he calls the tension model to get past their innate biases, fall in love with each pole and explore their benefits. Staying with the discomfort and the mess long enough for a third way to emerge. An idea central to another influential text by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden called A Beautiful Constraint.

This, of course, requires courage. Patience. And the willingness to tolerate ambiguity, both in the system and in oneself. And the resilience to shield oneself from the slings and arrows of those who demand immediate resolution.

In one recent engagement, I worked with a founder team grappling with a structural evolution and the tension between centralised control and distributed autonomy. Each leadership meeting seemed to swing from one to the other, first mandating structure, then encouraging decentralised ownership, only to retreat again when chaos emerged.

What helped wasn’t a new org chart. It was the decision to name the tension, to make it explicit, rather than let it operate in shadow.

Once surfaced, the team could begin to explore it: What are we afraid will happen if we let go? What gets lost when we take control? What’s the story we’re each telling ourselves about what ‘good’ looks like?

Tension, made conscious, became data. And data became dialogue.

From that space, a new structure emerged, not perfect, but not a convenient fudge, one more alive to the needs and fears that had previously gone unspoken. Also incidentally aligned to the flow of the work (see Build #64).

This is the invitation I’d offer to any founder who feels pulled in multiple directions right now.

What if the discomfort is not a signal you’re doing it wrong, but that you’re at a stretch point, a necessary, generative place between one version of your business and the next?

To lead well in this space is not to collapse the tension prematurely, but to stay with it. To notice when you're seeking resolution for the sake of relief. And to ask: What might emerge if I stayed a little longer?

Because in that staying, not frozen, but reflective, lies the potential for a deeper integration. One that doesn’t choose between opposites, but honours both. One that isn’t afraid to say: “This is hard. And that’s OK.”

Tension is not a sign of failure.

Tension is the work.