Staying in the Tension
What Quantum Physics, Depth Psychology, and Deconstruction Reveal About Leadership
There’s a particular kind of moment leaders know well. The situation is complex. Two priorities are pulling in opposite directions. Your team is looking to you for clarity. And the pressure to decide – to resolve the tension, to give a clean answer, to move toward certainty – becomes palpable.
Most leaders respond in one of two ways. They either double down on control: more analysis, more frameworks, more optimization, in the belief that with enough rigor the right answer will emerge – or they do the opposite: trust the process, get out of the way, and surrender to what wants to happen. Both responses feel like wisdom. But in actuality, they are both evasions.
Let me explain.
Three thinkers from radically different fields—physicist Niels Bohr, psychologist Carl Jung, and philosopher Jacques Derrida—converged on the same insight from different directions. And that insight has profound implications for how we lead in complex times.
Three Vocabularies, One Truth
Bohr discovered that at the quantum level, reality requires descriptions that might seem to contradict each other. Light is both a wave and a particle – and which reality shows up depends on how you engage with it. He called this complementarity, and he believed it pointed to something fundamental about how reality is structured.
Jung, working in the depths of the psyche, found something parallel. The work of becoming a whole person – what he called individuation – isn’t about resolving our internal contradictions. It’s about learning to hold them: conscious and unconscious, light and shadow, the parts of us we claim and the parts we disown. The Self emerges not when the opposites are reconciled but when they’re held in living tension long enough to generate a deeper insight.
Derrida, examining language and meaning, arrived in the same neighborhood. Every meaning depends on what it excludes; every decision carries the trace of what it left out. He called this undecidability – not as an excuse to avoid deciding, but as recognition that genuine decisions are made into the tension, not out of it.
Three vocabularies. One truth: reality is not a puzzle with a hidden solution. It’s a generative structure of irreducible tensions, and how we engage with those tensions shapes what becomes real.
Why This Matters for Leadership
If reality is structured this way, then the leader who tries to engineer their way out of paradox is doing something philosophically incoherent. They’re treating a generative tension as if it were a problem with a missing variable. And the leader who flows past the tension is making the opposite mistake: abandoning the rigor that the situation actually requires.
The harder truth is that complex situations are asking something more demanding of us. They’re asking us to hold tensions long enough for the situation to reveal what it actually is, and then to decide into the undecidability – knowing the opposite pole still has its claim, knowing we’ll have to hold it again tomorrow.
This is why leaders who can’t tolerate internal ambiguity tend to create organizational risk. The leader who needs to resolve their own discomfort quickly will collapse tensions prematurely. The leader who can’t sit with their own contradictions will demand a false coherence from their team. Recent research found that 63% of senior leaders fear that asking for input signals weakness. This points to a capacity problem; an inability to stay in not-knowing long enough for something true to emerge.
Complex times don’t punish leaders for lacking answers. They punish leaders for premature closure: deciding before the situation has revealed its full truth, and engineering certainty that the moment cannot provide.
How to Practice
So what does this look like Monday morning? Here are five practices that build the capacity to stay:
1. Name the paradox out loud. When you feel the pull to resolve a tension quickly, pause and articulate both poles. “We need to move fast and we need to get this right.” “I need to support my team and I need to hold them accountable.” Naming it explicitly keeps both poles alive rather than letting one quietly win.
2. Extend your decision horizon by one beat. Most premature closure happens because the discomfort of not-knowing is intolerable. Practice waiting one beat longer than feels comfortable before deciding. Not forever – just long enough for the situation to show you something you couldn’t see while you were rushing to resolve it.
3. Notice which pole you habitually flee. Every leader has a default. Some always choose action over reflection; others always choose analysis over decisive movement. The pole you avoid is usually where your growth edge lives. Pay attention to which side of a tension makes you most uncomfortable – that’s the one carrying information for you.
4. Ask for input as a discipline, not a weakness. If you find yourself resisting asking for perspectives, that resistance is diagnostic. It usually means you’re protecting a position you haven’t fully examined. Build a regular practice of asking “what am I missing?” before you’ve decided, not after.
5. Develop a personal practice for sitting with ambiguity. This is the foundational work – whether it’s meditation, journaling, walking, therapy, or honest conversation with someone who won’t let you off the hook. You need somewhere to develop the muscle of being with what’s unresolved. Leaders who can’t be with their own internal tensions cannot hold them for their organizations. (Click here for a free reflection exercise from Turas Leadership: Sitting With Ambiguity).
The leaders who will navigate the next decade well aren’t the ones with the best frameworks or the most decisive instincts. They’re the ones who have done the inner work of becoming capable of staying in the question, staying in the tension, staying in relationship with what cannot yet be resolved. That capacity is a developmental achievement. And it can be built.