What's Tension?
Everything about Tension.
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Everything about Tension.
Last updated
Was this helpful?
A tension is a sensed gap between the current situation and the ideal situation, could be a new opportunity to explore or a challenge to tackle. It is an essential tool to drive collaboration between different roles in a self-managed context. Any role can raise a tension to another role based on clearly defined accountabilities to collaborate and get things done faster.
Some examples of a tension,
New opportunity: A sales role identified a new feature requested by many users. He/she created a tension for the Product Owner role to suggest implementing this feature in order to get happier customers and open up new business possibility.
A challenge to tackle: A marketing role noticed that some product description on the website is out of date which is misleading. He/she created a tension for the Web master role to update the content.
Instead of having someone create a todo/project and assign it to another person like how most collaboration in a team or organization. Tension enables a new way of collaboration that cherishes autonomy.
On /me, you can quickly initiate a tension for another role and easily track the status of it until it is resolved. The biggest advantage is that discussions always focus on a specific topic with the right role(s) involved which reduces information overload on irrelevant subjects and unnecessary noises.
A Tension lifecycle contains of 4 statuses:
When a tension is created, it will have a status called "tension raised". The tension receiver will get a notification regarding this tension.
The tension receiver will review this tension and decide whether to accept or decline the tension. Once it is accepted (usually followed by creating a todo or project), tension status will change to "Tension accepted" . Tension raiser will get a notification regarding this status update.
Once the tension is considered as resolved by the Tension receiver, for instance, created todo or project from this tension is completed, Tension status will be updated to "Tension resolved". Tension raiser will be notified and suggested to review and verify if this tension is actually resolved.
Once the tension resolution is confirmed by the Tension raiser, Tension raiser can close this tension and change its status to Tension Closed.
You can easily create a tension by clicking on the Orange Plus button on the bottom.
Make sure to select one of your roles that have this tension and choose a tension receiver role or person who is inside the same workspace.
Once a tension is received, Tension receiver can decide whether to accept by clicking on "Take this tension" or decline it. A tension might be declined due to various reasons, the most obvious reason is that the tension is raised to role that doesn't have the accountability to resolve it. In this case, tension receiver can decline and inform the tension raiser. This helps tension receiver focus on tasks that are expected of him/her based on clear role description.
