When Tensions become Culture.

Many organizations believe they are dealing with different challenges when, in reality, they are responding to the same underlying tensions over and over again.

Teams change.

Priorities change.

Business cycles change.

And yet, certain tensions reappear with a consistency that is hard to ignore.

Control or trust.

Efficiency or innovation.

Short-term or long-term.

Autonomy or coordination.

These are not new dilemmas. They are structural polarities inherent to organizations operating in complex environments.

The question is not whether they exist but how we observe them.

Too often, these tensions are treated as problems to solve. Organizations attempt to choose one side, find a balance between both, or shift priorities depending on circumstances.

Each of these responses has its own logic. Yet there is an interesting pattern: tensions rarely disappear.

What usually happens is something else, the system oscillates.

For a period of time, one pole dominates. Later, the organization reacts by moving toward the opposite pole. Over time, this oscillation ceases to be perceived as a temporary tension and becomes an established way of making decisions. This is where culture begins to take shape.

In leadership contexts, a recurring pattern often emerges.

There is a polarity that the organization explicitly advocates. And there is another that operates implicitly.

One belongs to the official narrative.

The other emerges under pressure.

For example:

Innovation is championed, yet control intensifies when uncertainty increases.

Autonomy is encouraged, yet centralization emerges as complexity grows.

Collaboration is promoted, yet silos become stronger when priorities collide.

This is not necessarily a matter of inconsistency.

More often, it reflects something deeper: a system that is not fully seeing the polarity that governs it.

This is why one of the most relevant leadership questions is not what we should choose, but what we are failing to observe.

Which pole are we defending so intensely?

And which pole is operating silently beneath it?

Organizations have become increasingly capable of working with seemingly opposing forces.

We have learned that complexity is not managed by eliminating tensions, but by developing the capacity to live with them.

Yet managing the balance between opposing poles does not necessarily mean understanding why certain tensions keep resurfacing.

And this is where an important distinction emerges.

Managing a tension allows us to operate within the system.

Understanding a tension allows us to observe the system that produces it.

As long as a polarity remains only partially visible, it tends to reappear.

Under different names.

At different moments.

Through different problems.

Once the polarity is seen as a whole, it no longer functions solely as a source of conflict. It becomes information about the system itself.

The tension does not disappear, but its function changes.

From this perspective, the objective is not to choose between poles or to find a permanent equilibrium.

The objective is to develop a deeper capacity to read the dynamics that generate those poles.

Because tensions do not merely influence decisions, they also shape culture.

Every time an organization repeatedly responds to a tension in the same way, it reinforces patterns of behaviour.

And those patterns eventually define how leadership is exercised, how power is distributed, how risk is interpreted and how decisions are made under pressure.

Culture does not emerge solely from declared values. It emerges, above all, from repeated responses to recurring tensions.

A more mature way of dealing with organizational complexity, therefore, is not to eliminate contradictions but to recognize them before they become unintended culture.

This has direct implications for governance.

For how decisions are interpreted under pressure.

For how strategic priorities are established.

For how unavoidable contradictions are sustained without becoming permanent oscillations.

And for how cultures are built with greater awareness of the patterns shaping them.

Perhaps this is why some of the most valuable questions for leadership teams are deceptively simple:

Which pole are we defending so intensely?

Which pole is operating silently beneath it?

What decision-making pattern are we reinforcing without fully realizing it?

The quality of leadership depends not only on the decisions that are made. It also depends on the system’s ability to understand the tensions from which those decisions are generated.

Because, ultimately, the tensions we fail to observe are often the ones that shape our culture.

By Miriam Ponce

Director Corporate Culture & Governance