Creative Tension and Commitment to the Truth

CREATIVE TENSION AND COMMITMENT TO THE TRUTH

Senge discusses personal vision in Chapter 8: vision alone does not release the energy of the creative process. The key is “creative tension,” the tension between vision and reality. The most effective people are those who can “hold” their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly.

This principle is no less true for organizations. The hallmark of a learning organization is not lovely visions floating in space, but a relentless willingness to examine “what is” in light of our vision.

IBM in the early 1960s, for example, carried out an extraordinary series of experiments in pursuit of a daring vision, a single family of computers that would make virtually all its previous machines obsolete. In the words of a Fortune writer, IBM staked “its treasure, its reputation, and its position of leadership in the computer field” on a radical new concept: a series of compatible machines serving the broadest possible range of applications, from the most sophisticated scientific applications to the relatively small business needs.11 Jay Forrester once remarked that the hallmark of a great organization is “how quickly bad news travels upward.” IBM’s capacity to recognize and learn from its mistakes proved pivotal during this period. One of the most discouraging was an early attempt at a high-end machine called “Stretch,” introduced in 1960. IBM CEO Tom Watson, Jr., effectively killed the project in May 1961, after only a few had been sold. (Watson cut Stretch’s hefty $13.5 million price tag almost in half, thereby making it uneconomical to produce.) To him, there was little choice: the machine did not satisfy its customers, never achieving more than 70 percent of its promised specifications. A few days later, Watson spoke candidly to an industry group. “Our greatest mistake in Stretch,” he said, “is that we walked up to the plate and pointed at the center field stands. When we swung, it was not a homer but a hard line drive to the outfield. We’re going to be a good deal more careful about what we promise in the future.”

Indeed they were. Under the direction of many of the same men who had learned from Stretch, IBM introduced the System 360 three years later, which proved to be the platform for its extraordinary growth over the next ten years.