If you’re leading in a living organization, you are probably sitting in the middle of tensions every day. Deliver now vs. build for later. Standardize vs. let teams shape their own ways of working. Protect people vs. push for performance. After a while, these tensions start to feel like signs that something is wrong. They may seem to indicate issues with you, your team, or your design.
Seen through an AO and systems‑leadership lens, tensions are not a bug. They are how a living system tells you where it is stretching beyond its current design. Your role is less “fixer‑in‑chief” and more “sense‑maker‑in‑chief.” You help the system see itself. You hold competing perspectives without collapsing them too quickly. You translate that into small experiments the organization can learn from. In this issue, I share a story of a leadership team that faced AO‑related tensions. The team was drowning in these tensions. I also provide a simple 30‑minute SENSEMAKING loop you can try if you recognize similar patterns.
From the field: when AO tensions land on the leadership table
A leadership team of a mid‑size service organization reached out after running several AO‑style experiments. They had created swarms around key customer journeys, simplified some hierarchies, and given more autonomy to cross‑functional teams. On paper, things looked promising. In practice, the leadership meetings had become heavier. Every agenda item seemed to end in a tug‑of‑war: central standards vs. local freedom, efficiency vs. responsiveness, accountability vs. psychological safety.
In one session, we mapped what their past few meetings had actually been about. Instead of listing topics (“budget”, “Roadmap”, “reorg”), we noted the underlying tensions. The conversations kept circling around these issues: “We say teams own the customer, but we still sign off every exception.” “We want fewer escalations, but we keep inviting more issues into this table.” “We want to empower, but we also fear losing control.” Once the list was on the wall, there was a long silence. Someone said: “It feels like we are both pushing AO and pulling against it at the same time.”
From an AO perspective, this was not a sign that they had “failed”. It was a sign that the system was doing exactly what living systems do when they change. They explore, push, pull back, and test boundaries. The problem was not the tensions. Nobody was helping the leadership group turn those tensions into a shared picture. They were not facilitating deliberate experiments. Each leader was carrying their own private story about what was happening – and acting from it.
We proposed a very small intervention. It is a regular, 30‑minute “SENSEMAKING loop” inside their existing leadership meeting. This loop focuses on one tension at a time. No new committee, no big offsite. Just a consistent practice of stepping back from the latest incident and looking at the pattern together.
The first time we tried it, they identified a tension that everyone felt. “We say teams own their slice of work. However, big decisions keep bouncing back up here.” In 30 minutes, they:
- collected short snapshots from each person of where they saw this tension show up;
- drew a simple picture of the system dynamics that kept pulling decisions up;
- Agreed on two small experiments to shift one concrete boundary of decision‑making. They also discussed how they would notice whether the system was responding.
What changed was not just those decisions. Over the next few weeks, the tone of leadership meetings shifted. Less “who is right?” and more “what is the pattern we are in, and what experiment could we run next?” One of the executives summed it up later: “I still feel the tensions. They no longer feel like a personal failure. They feel like the work.”
Try this AO move this week – a 30‑minute sensemaking loop
You don’t need a retreat to start leading as a sense‑maker. You can begin by carving out a single, disciplined 30‑minute loop with your team around one live tension.
- Name one real tension, clearly. Pick something you and your team already feel – for example:
- Do a quick me → we → us round (10–15 minutes).
- Agree on 1–2 small experiments (10–15 minutes). Based on that picture, choose 1–2 experiments you can run over the next 2–4 weeks. Ensure these changes slightly alter how the system handles this tension. Aim for minor adjustments, not a giant transformation. Examples:
- Close the loop in your next meeting. In your next leadership or team meeting, spend 10–15 minutes revisiting the tension: Did the experiments change anything? What did you notice about the system? What next adjustment does that suggest? Treat this as ongoing AO practice, not a one‑off.
If you do this regularly, you’ll likely notice two things. First, your conversations move from “who is to blame?” towards “what is the system doing?” Second, your AO experiments stop being isolated projects and start to feel like part of a continuous learning loop.
Menschgeist 
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