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Why Everything’s Urgent Now

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The approach of September always seems to bring with it a quickening pace. But while people seem a little more focused, will they get more done? Business guru and author John Kotter believes there's still a lot of 'busyness' masquerading as true urgency -- not a state of affairs that can go on much longer.

“In a fast-moving and changing world, a sleepy or steadfast contentment with the status quo can create disaster -- literally disaster”, he writes in his latest book, "A Sense of Urgency".

The pace of change is accelerating all the time, he argues, and it’s the people who grasp the nettle that will thrive. People in business must develop a sense of urgency -- a relentless and daily drive forward that is awake to new developments which may alter the direction the business is moving in, or add momentum to strategic changes already underway.

It's not a natural state, as Kotter acknowledges, so that sense of urgency has to be recreated every day. It's also easy to 'fake' -- people may look focused, seem busy but not yield much by way of results. It's not usually a deliberate ploy to fob off work, but a genuine struggle to identify and stick to only priority tasks every day.

It can get worse as extreme busy-ness clouds priorities and a general sense of anxiety takes over -- this makes us slower to respond, and less productive, according to a New York University psychologist's study quoted in the Observer.

It may even result in "chronic procrastination", a state of severe indecision that afflicts up to 20 per cent of people, according to a study by Professor Joseph Ferrari of Chicago's De Paul University. Putting things off may be a more natural response for most people, argues fellow academic and recovering procrastinator Professor Piers Steel of Calgary University in Alberta. Steel even created an equation to explain our tendency to delay work for no good reason.

"Very, very smart people can be astonishingly complacent in the face of needed change," writes Kotter. Whether a result of inherent characteristics, too many distractions or an inability to prioritise, busy-ness needs to be replaced by urgency -- and fast.

Leadership Now picks up on four tactics for increasing a sense of urgency in the workplace:

Bring the outside in. Success can kill urgency -- it can lead to a "we know best" culture. If you don't see opportunities and hazards, complacency results. Get an outsider's perspective. Ideas to get this going include listening to customer-facing employees, filming customer views, redecorating the office, sending people out to gather intelligence and "importing" consultants, new hires or key partners who may have interesting insight into the business.
Behave with urgency every day -- if you're the boss, all the time. Enemies of urgency are clutter and fatigue. Delegate relentlessly, move with speed, speak with passion and walk the talk.
Find the opportunity in a crisis. A crisis can be a "burning platform" to create true urgency, but handle with care -- you need to gain co-operation from throughout the organisation.
Deal with NoNos, the "highly skilled urgency killers". Three ways of dealing with NoNos are to distract them, push them out of the organisation or allow social pressure to take its toll on their behaviour.

Do you have a question for John Kotter? BNET UK interviews him in a couple of weeks. Let us know what you'd like to ask. (Photo: mscaprikell, CC2.0)

posted by Joanna Higgins
August 28, 2008 @ 2:59 am

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