Dealing with tension: 9 short thoughts on making things better.

1?? Tension is good.

We associate tension with "bad", but tension can be a glorious thing if you strip it of its negative emotions.

In its purest form, tension is just the signal that you notice some distance between the perceived situation and a better one, and that reducing that distance is important to you.

2?? Turn tension into action.

If you want to make things better, look for where you feel tension. Then try to figure out ways to reduce that tension by turning it into forward motion.

3?? Experiment. It's a great form of forward motion.

An experiment has a clear hypothesis and scope. Clearly define your hypothesis and when the experiment will be done. An experiment that never ends or has no hypothesis is the same as just doing random shit.

Experiments do not fail when the hypothesis turns out to be wrong; experiments fail when they fail to capture useable data.

4?? Take risks.

If you do what you did, you might get what you got. It's not so terrible to take risks.

5?? Manage risks.

Do not take risks that will be hard to recover from.

Design your experiments so they are 'safe enough to try'. Is a wrong hypothesis likely to cause irreparable harm, or could you simply adjust next time if this doesn't work?

Don't blow yourself up; live to learn another day.

6?? Safety reduces risk. In more ways than you think.

'Safe enough to try' applies to the physical world as well as to the psychological. People largely prefer a certain lack of downside over an uncertain chance of upside. Most people don't like running the risk that an experiment might blow them up. And most people don't like the risk of something blowing up in their face either.

If testing a false hypothesis gets punished, people won't want to do it. If not knowing something gets punished, people won't want to show it. And if sharing tensions gets punished... well, you get the picture.

7?? Three ways to serve others in making things better:

• Help others discover and articulate tensions.
• Help others design experiments to address those tensions.
• Create a safer environment for others to experiment. Psychological safety included.

8?? Two things to avoid if you wish to serve others in making things better:

• Do not?try to make others feel comfortable. Comfort is the enemy of tension. If learning is what you seek to enable, steer clear of comfort. Comfort is not the same as safety.
• Do not seek to educate. Education and learning are not the same thing. They move in different directions. Education is done by the educator; learning is done by the learner. Too many people have had an education and learned very little.

9?? Via Negativa.

Doing less is also doing something. Sometimes, the best experiments involve omission rather than addition.

I'm learning as I go here too. Do I know all the answers? Hell no. But publishing this seemed safe enough to try ??.

Have any tensions with something I've written here? I'd love to hear from you.

I'm Roshan de Jong. I help organisations build systems that scale their impact. Working on something cool? Say 'hi!'