“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.”  — Joel Arthur Barker Ratcliffe

When meeting, the team found itself in endless discussions. The leader complained about feeling stuck. One of the team members was vocal about leadership issues. The other team members were searching for ways to support the leader and dissolve existing tensions.

With a focus on the existing tensions, the team’s conversation aimed at establishing trust and reducing tensions. They were putting the relational aspects of the team ahead of the task they had come together to address. In doing so, the team was finding a way to avoid discussing its plan of action.

All of the team members gave importance to a human approach in their organization, which contributed to their anxiety to accept the presence of tensions. However, the team had come together as volunteers and none of the usual organizational structures were helping them contain the team.

What kept the team together was the will to address the task and the idea that together they could change the world.

What the team was struggling with was its ability to hold both the vision and the actions in mind. Setting up a shared plan of action would have required determining which of the actions they were looking into would contribute to the vision and how. Reviewing their past activities would have required them to see how the work they had done had allowed them to move toward the shared vision.

The work the team needed help with was to make their vision more tangible and see it mirrored in their actions. What they feared was to discover how different their respective visions were. Their hope to get rid of the tension hinted at the sense the team had that their respective visions might divide them. To address the situation, the team needed to become aware of how their experience was a manifestation of their respective anxieties.

It is a challenge many teams encounter. They find it hard to see their respective interactions as part of the system they represent as a team. A result is that tensions within the team can only be seen as interpersonal. It is hard for team members to acknowledge their contribution to a situation and see themselves as part of a system. Doing so requires the ability to let go of the sense that one is in control of one’s contributions and to accept that within a system the dynamics are there to make the unconsciously chosen system sustainable.