Turning Conflict into Creative Tension

Conflict can be creative. There is no creativity without tension. Constraints matter. Yes, there’s risk. But if your team looks to you for facilitating their collective creativity, the sooner you can learn to appreciate conflict, the better.

When I say to be “good with conflict,” I don’t mean being aggressive or initiating conflict.

I mean that when it arises, and we know it inevitably does, we can meet it with calm, curiosity, and a gentle detachment from our own stance, and from that of others.

I choose to assume there is more to learn about each other.

Yet for many of us, fear of conflict isn’t “just” fear. It’s embodied.

I was stunned when a colleague suggested we bring in a mediator. To me, we weren’t anywhere near “conflict.” That initial shock was useful, as it made me curious.

Two things clicked. First, upon a brief pause I remembered that my colleague had emigrated from a country that recently lived through active war, with that history echoing back generations. Second, I knew that I needed every ounce of my trauma-informed practice.

I reached out quickly. Calm tone. Plain words. I affirmed our shared ground, and shared goals that we both equally cared about. I said that even if this felt like conflict, we could move through it together.

She exhaled and admitted she’s “not good” with conflict. Because I’m more practiced with it, we moved forward, and our relationship actually strengthened.

Fear arrives as a full-body response. In this case I was the leader, and it helped enormously that I’ve done serious inner work, raised my awareness of individual and collective trauma and kept going with my own healing.

In practice, that inner work has led me to be fascinated with holding creative tension, and holding opposites, what many call a paradox mindset.

If fear floods you in hard conversations and you hold a leadership role, please tend to that. Heal the part that doesn’t feel safe. Not because conflict will disappear, but because your relationship to it will change.

David Emerald extends the classic drama triangle with TED (The Empowerment Dynamic)*: as the helpless Victim chooses empowerment, they become a Creator.

It takes inner work and determination, but it’s possible. Emerald’s AIR approach: Attention, Intention, Results, gives a simple rhythm:

• Attention: Where am I placing my focus? On threat, or on what I want to create?

• Intention: What do I commit to bring, curiosity, steadiness, respect?

• Results: What outcomes do we want, and what next action moves us there?

Here’s a tiny illustration.

You notice your partner has been scheduling lots of solo time: long walks, a weekend with friends. Your chest tightens; the old script says, something is wrong: cling or confront.

Attention: You shift focus from “they’re pulling away” to “we both want a relationship that feels alive, connected and breathable.”

Intention (with curiosity): You choose a both/and stance: “I want closeness with you and I want us both to have real space. Can we design this together?”

Results: You co-create a simple rhythm for the next month: two protected connection nights (phones away) and two pre-planned solo blocks for each of you. You check in on how it felt at month’s end. The tension becomes design material, not a fault or right vs. wrong line.

Why is Inner Work necessary?

Inner work changes how we meet conflict. It teaches us to hold two truths at once, to look for what each side is noticing that the other misses, and to keep our certainty light. With that stance, the systems we build, teams, products, policies, stop defaulting to brittle binaries. They become flexible, creative, and able to turn tension into progress instead of stalemate.

Think of paradox mindset as the ability to hear value in competing demands. Add dialectical attention, listening for the thread that connects differences, and humility, the willingness to be corrected. Then tension stops being noise and becomes music that moves work forward.

Relational dialectics names the everyday opposites we all negotiate:

predictability / novelty

closeness  / spacious freedom

transparency / appropriate privacy and confidentiality

These are not problems to solve once; they’re living pairs, both true and real, and needed to be tended to over time.

As Mary Parker Follett wrote,

“All polishing is done by friction.”

A few moves that help:

• Name the pair. “We need both speed and safety”

• Ask the linking question. “What would make speed increase safety?”

• Right-size the risk. Use reversible tests for bold ideas; slow down for one-way doors

• Keep humility visible. Before debating, write down what could change your mind

• Track your gut. Log your intuition, confidence level, and outcome; review monthly

Underneath all of this is epistemic humility. Put simply, it’s meta-cognition: thinking about your own thinking, and knowing its limits. In philosophy of science, it’s the stance that knowledge is always filtered by the observer, so our claims must carry that recognition.

As the poet Rumi reminds us,

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field.”

Leaders who cultivate inner safety can meet others there, able to hold contradiction without collapsing into certainty or avoidance.

That field is where creative tension becomes shared work.

So What is Creativity And Why It Matters?

Here’s my working definition: creativity is making way to something that did not exist before. There are other definitions in the creative universe; this one guides my leadership, coaching and living practice.

Creative tension is the energy that clears and widens that “way.”

“Both/And”

In a great book: Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems , Wendy K. Smith and Marianne W. Lewis’s guide us in navigating paradox by embracing tension.

Their work challenges our default to binaries, comforting, yes, but often rigid and unhelpful. Instead, they show how to actively hold competing demands to generate more creative, resilient, and sustainable solutions.

Drawing on 20+ years of research and cases (IBM, LEGO, Unilever; plus startups and nonprofits), they demonstrate that paradoxes are everywhere, innovation and efficiency, stability and change, autonomy and teamwork, and that rising leaders thrive by engaging these tensions rather than “solving” them away.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time…” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rather than “resolving” paradoxes by favoring one pole, Both/And Thinking teaches us to recognize paradoxes, adopt guardrails, reframe problems, and surface higher purposes that can hold the opposites together.

It reframes chronic either/or fights (control vs. creativity, caring for self vs. others) as interdependent polarities to work with, not battles to win.

From Inner Work to Outer Change - Turning Conflict into Creative Tension

Here’s where the inner work becomes outer change: cultivate a paradox mindset (hearing value in competing demands), train dialectical habits of attention (listening for the thread that connects differences), and practice epistemic humility (metacognition about what you know, and don’t).

In daily life, we steward living pairs: predictability - novelty, closeness - spacious freedom, transparency - confidentiality, remembering, with Follett, that “all polishing is done by friction.”

Creative leaders don’t erase friction; they notice it, walk towards it and refine it.

If you’re ready to learn more about turning conflict into creative tension, I can partner with you through 1:1 executive coaching.

To explore fit, send me a direct message or reach out to book a brief call; let’s build the capacity that moves your teams, products, and policies from brittle binaries to living, generative tensions.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!