Resist the urge for action | Working Principles

I recently entered a long thin room at a conference where a few chairs were set out in rows across the narrow part of the room. There were 30 or 40 chairs, and they were already spreading down the room.

Several people were already in the room when the organiser arrived. He looked at the room and said something like “We are expecting more than this, it’s going to work much better if we set the room up the other way around. If you are able, could you help, please.”

With those words everyone already in the room and those arriving sprung into action moving chairs. I happily joined in by taking some chairs to the far end of the room to start some new rows, other people stood up and made other new row where they were, some did little more than turn their chair, and one or two around them through, 90 degrees so they were facing a different wall.

All this time the organiser of the meeting was trying to get people to work together to build longer rows across the full length of the room, with little effect.

Some stewards were bringing in extra chairs which was taking a while because they needed to navigate through from one end of the room, which was now full of randomly placed chairs, to the other, where there were far fewer chairs. It didn’t help that some of the chairs they brought in were broken and needed to be taken out through the same maze of randomly placed seats.

Everyone was expending effort, actively participating in the mele, contributing towards the goal. I’m sure everyone felt great about their involvement in the experience, there’s something very uplifting about being helpful.

The result was a hodgepodge of rows with significantly more seats on the side of the room where they had been initially and only a few around where the speakers where in the middle of the length of the room.

I suspect that two or three people who knew what they were doing could have sorted the whole thing in about half the time and with a significantly more elegant outcome.

This need for action is seen in businesses across the globe every day. Enacting something is better than doing nothing, isn’t it? In my experience quite often, the answer is “no.” I regularly find myself in situations where a bit of thought, a moment of planning, a conversation or two would have significantly reduced the time to complete and improved the outcome.

Yet, the need for action is a strong one and I’ve learnt to accept that sometimes you just need to let people do something, anything. I’m sure that there are times when people schedule a meeting just to be able to log some action. Another method I’ve used has been to create a harmless task for the masses to do just to keep them busy while reviewing a situation for the best approach. Asking people to fill in a tracking spreadshet is perfect for this. This is, of course, wasted effort. It would be much better to resist the urge to action, take a breath, think, and then act.

There’s a quote that is often ascribed to Victor Frankl, almost certainly inaccurately as it can’t be found in his writings, but I like it all he same:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

We need to learn to resist the urge to fill the gap with action and instead take the power and use the space to think through the next steps. Utilising the gap might feel uncomfortable, but it will lead to a better, speedier, answer.

Header Image: This is the view from the top of High Cup Nick having walked up the middle of High Cup Gill to get here. This walk has been on my list for a long time, and it didn’t disappoint.