Harness Productive Tension to Fuel Marketing Innovation

Kevin Briody

08 Nov 2025 — 4 min read

What exactly is “productive tension” and why is it so key to ensuring your organization is capable of thriving in the face of disruption? In my previous post on the idea of creating disruption-fluent marketing organizations, I mentioned this concept as key to “fuel strategic thinking, creativity, and innovation” and it’s worth exploring in more depth both what it is, and how you can both foster and harness it as a core part of your organizational culture.

Productive tension is the energy generated by the simultaneous presence of opposing ideas, perspectives, or priorities, which can lead to growth, creativity, and better outcomes.

We’ve all been there. You have a big campaign or brand ask on the team’s plate, and you’ve pulled who you feel are the right people into the room to brainstorm out the next big idea. You goal is a free flow of ideas, a back and forth that inspired creative thinking and helps the team really push beyond a regurgitation of the same old cookie-cutter stuff. This is the kind of meeting that you got into marketing to do in the first place after all. In a perfect world, it can feel like magic: wild ideas are flying, well-intentioned challenges thrown around, rough concepts see a productive tug-and-push that turns them into gems of great ideas. You walk out with a list of potentially compelling ideas, and everyone feels refreshed, energized, and valued. That is productive tension when you hit the sweet spot.

However all too often that’s not what happens. The brainstorm rapidly spins out of control - the envisioned back-and-forth ideation escalates into an antagonistic confrontation, where ideas are attacked and everything becomes personal. Dominant voices take over, team members clam up, emotions run high. Or the opposite happens - the conversation stays rigid and safe, sticking to accepted doctrine, deferring to those with the biggest job titles. Either way, the brainstorm is hard to judge as anything other than a demoralizing failure.

Or for an example that many marketing leaders are wrestling with today: How fast to move on marketing AI? Some team members may want to move fast and break things. Others may want to proceed cautiously so as not to risk poor-quality output or misuse the tools. Still others may push-back against the idea entirely out of concern for implications on their own job. How do you facilitate that conversation and the inherent tensions of conflicting perspectives in a way that gets you to a positive outcome?

As a leader we tend to instinctively want to smooth over tension, in the spirit of team harmony. Yet tension, when harnessed right and when employed in an open, respectful, and psychologically safe culture, is essential to creativity and innovation. There is obviously a fine line between destructive conflict and productive tension, but that tension - that dynamic interplay of ideas and perspectives - is where the magic happens.

It’s important to note that productive tension is not conflict for conflict’s sake. It is about creating cognitive dissonance that forces a deeper level of thinking, without blowing up your team in the process.

Productive tension is:

Grounded in shared goals and mutual respect among team members
Founded on psychological safety as a core cultural attribute
About inviting, encouraging, and even challenging diverse viewpoints, not just about disagreement
Leading the team to true synthesis, not just finding compromise in order to avoid conflict or simply move on to the next ask

It is NOT:

About intentionally creating drama or discomfort
The same as “healthy debate” - which can stay theoretical
About avoiding difficult conversations
Where we push a preferred solution or idea unchallenged to the forefront

Why is it important to marketing leaders?

Rapid change and disruption requires us to challenge assumptions, and Marketing is often at the epicenter of responding to that disruption
Marketing should be the “idea factory” (weird term, but work with me) in most organizations, where the bold, innovative, creative thinking originates
Marketing itself is built on the tension of oftentimes conflicting inputs or priorities: the intersection of “art and science”; the conflict between building brand or driving performances/ROI; the need for long-term vision and strategy vs execution on short-term needs and asks

What can you do to foster productive tension in your marketing teams?

Create the Structural Conditions

Design decision-making processes that encourage multiple perspectives: Campaign review frameworks that mandate creative + analytics + customer insight; Pre-mortems and prospective hindsight exercises; “Red team" reviews for major initiatives.
Build teams with intentional cognitive diversity: Don't just hire for "culture fit”: Mix specialists with generalists: Combine different industry backgrounds.
Establish psychological safety first: Make it clear: challenge ideas, not people; Model vulnerability and uncertainty; Reward thoughtful dissent.

Facilitate Productive Collisions

Structure meetings to surface tension: “Strong opinions, loosely held" ground rules; Assign devil's advocate roles explicitly; Use "Yes, and..." followed by "However..." frameworks.
Create forums for healthy debate: Regular "strategy challenge" sessions; Lightning round idea critiques; Cross-team peer reviews.
Ask questions that generate useful friction: “What would have to be true for the opposite approach to work?" "Who would disagree with this and why?" "What assumptions are we making that could be wrong?"

Navigate the Tension Productively

Distinguish between values and tactics: Align on non-negotiables (brand principles, customer focus); Encourage tension around execution and approach.
Time-box the tension: Set clear decision points; Avoid endless debate loops; Know when to test rather than discuss.
Harvest the insights: Document what was learned from the tension; Identify where synthesis occurred; Note assumptions that were challenged.

Protect and Sustain It

Watch for warning signs: Meetings where everyone agrees too quickly; Lack of questions or pushback; Same voices dominating; Personal attacks vs. idea challenges.
Reinforce through recognition: Celebrate when someone changed their mind based on new evidence; Recognize thoughtful challenges that improved outcomes; Share stories of productive tension leading to breakthrough.

Putting it into Action

It’s important to remember that as a leader, your role isn’t to eliminate tension, but actually to foster it while channeling it towards useful creativity and innovation. Find the sources, set the conditions, champion the conversation, and relentless curate it to ensure it doesn’t go off the rails.

For a marketing leader, your role shifts from conflict avoider to “tension curator”; from consensus builder to synthesis facilitator; from answer provider to question asker (thought provider?). In the world we inhabit where marketing teams are beset by constant disruption from all sources, it’s vital to recognize that the marketing teams that thrive won’t be the most unified and harmonious, they will be the ones that most effectively foster and harness tension to fuel their creativity and innovation.

Learn more