Going Nowhere with a Crimson Head
You really should make an effort, shouldn’t you? You don’t get your salary for nothing, after all. Yes, your employer has every right to expect something, a little entrepreneurship, some identification and loyalty. „We nedd employers who will go the extra mile!“ Sounds good, wouldn’t you say?
This isn’t all wrong, it’s just a pity if it turns into a recursive fire accelerant: rule number one: you have to go the extra mile. Rule number two: every extra mile is immediately integrated into the area of „we take this for granted“. Then you loop back to rule number one...
There are roughly two possibilities in this situation. One: your performance declines exponentially, you are increasingly paralysed, soon you reach the pace of a mountaineer in the death zone, and you slide steadily into an exhaustion depression. Two: you go off like an air howler, and you end like one, too: with a big bang. The end of the line is the same. This is not an impious allusion to suicide but to cases where people burst into tears in the middle of a meeting and can’t stop crying. Happens more often than you would think.
The bitter part of it: there is a good chance that the major part of the effort was a complete waste. Everybody agreess about what coins the life of a manager today: complexity, pressure on innovation, maintaining one’s own health, VUKA, you name it. All these phenomenons have one thing in common: they cannot be mastered in a mode of effort.
Decision making in teams on the basis of tons of data giving you limited information after all, thinking in a creative mode, maintaining your personal balance, foster your personal integrity: to do so, things like trained intuition and contemplation become important – very strange to many managers –, and they don’t fit with the hamster wheel mode. Nobody ever reached personal maturity with his pulse going at 220.
Too many people try to deal with complexity by just running faster and faster, although the opposite would be much more effective: a skillful use of our intuitive capability to process large amounts of data very quickly. To do so you need methods that are very unfamiliar to many people, like Scharmer’s Theory U, for example, or the use of scientific knowledge that is provided by Kahneman and can help to avoid possible traps of our intuition.
Facing a VUCA world it is of very limited use to constantly throw up with your R.P.M. at red line. This will only leed to a paradox: the effort mode will impair your effort and damage your performance. From this you can deduce a check question – a slightly disgusting one, I admit: How about the big lines in your organisation: are they being thought or chucked up?
Of course you need the will to perform, of course it is not about evacuating the building at four p.m., but in the overdrive mode there will be no creativity, and without creativity there will be no innovation. So you have no other choice than to befriend contraintuitive ideas like idleness during working hours, for example, develop qualities like the capability to recover, as there are no explicitely quiet times anymore, and by doing so open up the space for intelligent productivity.
Finding the right rhythm between adrenaline high and having a break with cake, establishing a healthy rhythm of breathing in your organisation, is not trivial but very worthwhile. Then you will have more of the right type of big lines – those in thinking.
