Tension in the company? Good
A company should be constantly humming with tension, like the sails of a brigantine or a transformer box. A lack of tension is just as damaging as a full-blown conflict. Well, except for psychopaths, nobody usually likes conflicts. But many people dream of working in peace, though it’s an illusion, a fantasy, a myth.
Peace is useful for rare moments of self-reflection, idea generation or meditation. The rest of the time, decisions have to be evaluated, made and implemented. And if a company has ambitious goals, uncertainty is very high at every stage of this process. This means that no amount of IQ or experience will protect against disaster.
But you can raise your chances of success by clashing different ideas. Note that we are talking about a clash of ideas, not of people, which is rare. To paraphrase the mathematician and philosopher Whitehead, the goal is to let your ideas die instead of you. But in an external market, such experience comes at a high cost, so you have to organise a Darwinian self-selection of ideas internally.
So tension in the company is not only inevitable, it is desirable. Harmony is about consciously creating tension, not avoiding it. For this to happen, a company must have a healthy culture. This means that the value is the inclination to truth, that is, the desire to understand reality as it is.
Yours sincerely,
