I noticed in my relationship with my wife twenty years ago that we would often start arguments with each other, not when things were going poorly, but when things were going well—because we didn’t know how to let ourselves feel good and creative for long lengths of time without messing that up. We came to call this the “upper limits problem” in our relationship. And I think companies experience the upper limits problem, too—they get to a certain level of functioning well together, and then that brings up everyone’s fear of their ability to really stay in that creative space for very long, and then they do something to bring themselves back down again.
