Trish's Blog

It is natural to want your conversations to feel smooth, easy, polished and predictable. No friction. No awkward pauses. No sense that things might tip into discomfort.

You get good at this. Most leaders do. You learn how to keep things moving. How to bring people together quickly. How to steer away from the edges where things could get messy. It can feel like progress. It can also come at a cost.

When you smooth over difference too quickly, something important goes with it. Insight. Depth. The kind of thinking that only shows up when perspectives are allowed to sit alongside each other, not be rushed into alignment.

Tension often gets a bad reputation. You might see it as something to manage, reduce, or move past as quickly as possible. But not all tension is the same.

There is a kind that signals something is off. And there is a kind that signals something worth paying attention to. The second kind is easy to miss. It does not feel comfortable. It asks more of you. It slows the conversation down just enough for something new to surface.

That is where your work gets interesting. When you stay with different perspectives, instead of stepping around them, your conversations begin to shift. They go deeper. Ideas stretch. Assumptions get tested rather than carried forward.

Better solutions do not appear instantly. You shape them through that process.

This is the space Weird Wisdom® at Work invites you into. Not more conflict. Not unnecessary challenge. Just a willingness to stay present when difference shows up, rather than smoothing it away.

It takes restraint. It takes curiosity. It takes a level of trust that the conversation will hold, even when it feels uncertain. And it takes noticing your own instinct to rush back to agreement. Because agreement can feel productive. Exploration often feels slower.

But creativity rarely comes from everyone thinking the same way.
It comes from you being willing to explore what sits between those differences, long enough for something new to emerge.