Politics is unresolved tension

Corporate politics rarely starts with ill-intent. It starts as a comment a peer makes in private that never gets addressed directly. A grudge from a decision made without agreement. A commitment that was never truly made. Small, mundane things.

These things accumulate into problems no one can pinpoint. Eventually the narrative becomes vague and dramatic — "trust eroded over time", "X doesn't like working with Y", "orgs A and B can't agree on anything" — and it manifests in ways you'd never trace back to the origin.

There is a healthy version of politics: debating priorities, allocating resources, exercising influence to keep an organisation in productive tension. That's the job of any leader. The unhealthy version — the invisible "4D chess game" — is almost always just unresolved tension that was left to fester.

So how does tension go unresolved in an organisation full of smart, well-intentioned people?

The most common way is compromise. Two people disagree, they split the difference, and move on. It feels like resolution — there was a disagreement, and now there isn't. But neither side got what they actually needed. Both walk away having given something up without fully understanding why. That feeling doesn't surface as a complaint. It surfaces months later as reluctance to collaborate or resentment.

The second way is attrition. Two people disagree, neither budges, and whoever runs out of energy first gives in. The decision gets made, but the person who gave in remembers. That memory becomes a narrative — "they always get their way", "there's no point pushing back" — and that narrative spreads. Suddenly you have an organisational story that nobody started on purpose but everyone believes.

In both cases, it feels like the disagreement was resolved. That's what makes them dangerous. People moved on — but the tension was just displaced, and displaced tension grows in ways that are almost impossible to diagnose later.

The harder but better path is understanding what the other side actually values — not just what they're asking for — and finding outcomes that neither side walked in with. It's slower, but it's the only approach that doesn't leave residue.

Not all tension goes unresolved out of convenience. Some people never learned to surface it — either they never learned to question authority, or never felt safe enough to. That instinct follows you into every meeting where you disagree but say nothing — and it's surprisingly common among senior leaders too, not just early-career folks.

By the time people call something "political," the underlying tensions have been building for months. Nobody created the politics on purpose. They just avoided a few uncomfortable conversations, chose a few convenient compromises, and let a few disagreements resolve themselves through exhaustion. That's all it takes.

The uncomfortable truth is that politics isn't something bad actors create. It's the default. It's what happens when normal people in normal organisations choose comfort over resolution. The only way out is deciding, over and over, that the short-term discomfort of honest disagreement is better than the long-term cost of tension that never gets named.