I recently shared the idea of obstacles being a necessary part of life. If you solve a problem, your true reward is a new a problem to solve.
As I chewed more on that idea, it reminded me of a stance we often take at GreenMellen: “Is that an issue or a tension?”
Issues can be solved. Tensions can only be eased.
We do a pretty good job of tracking issues that pop-up at GreenMellen (largely via weekly meetings), but we had often been frustrated by small issues that just wouldn’t go away. We’d work on them, improve the process, and continually ease them, but they’d never quite get resolved. These often focused on ways to handle client feedback or communication more effectively.
After a while, we realized that these weren’t issues to be completely resolved, but rather tensions that should be continually refined. As with many things, that simple change in perspective made a huge difference. Rather than being frustrated with an unsolvable issue, we’re now energized to continue to refine the tension to help it improve for everyone.
This is one of those things that feels obvious in hindsight, but took us a long time to discover. I give Ali full credit for making the discovery and helping us reshape our view on many of these issues tensions that always pop up.
We still work to solve as many issues as we can, but we now understand that some tensions are a part of life and that perspective has helped immensely.
