Sunday, May 17, 2009

What is Creative Tension anyway?

It never occurred to me [until now] that I should bother to say why I named my blog Creative Tension. So here we go...

I read about Creative Tension in Peter Senge's phenomenal work, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. I must say that this is as much a book for individuals, as it is for organizations. You can learn more from Senge, than you can from any "self-help" guide.

Typically, there is a distance between where we are today and where we envision ourselves being, in due course. This is why we journey and this is that which makes the journey worthwhile. Senge says that the disparity between where we are today [reality] and where we envision ourselves being [vision], gives rise to a "tension" between the two. This tension is "creative" because it energizes us to get a better sense of reality and to work toward the vision.

In business, politics and in personal spaces, we see people in pursuit of generating and sustaining creative tension. In this blog, I intend to share my observations of such pursuits.

2 comments:

mullai said...

if you can make the distinction between the vision and reality it is tension, otherwise it is an illusion!

Kannan said...

am thinking aloud.
When there is a difference between reality [what is]and vision [what i want to be ],is it the difference which creates the tension or the understanding of reality [what is]?