A Malaise, “I Don’t Care…..”

This is one of those more reflective posts. I don’t know that I have solutions or ideas about what we might do. I’m not even sure if I understand the issue or the problem. I’ve written a little bit about it before, “Something’s Happening Here…” But I find more people talking to me about this issue, with the same confusion.

Over the past few years, there’s been a “malaise” I’ve been seeing in business. Sometimes it seems to be burnout, sometimes it’s overload or overwhelm, sometimes it’s genuine confusion. We are experiencing a confluence of things, most of us have never experienced. Economic uncertainty, global/societal disruptions at higher levels than we have experienced before, technology disruption, Covid hangover, and more.

Michael Watkins, professor of leadership at IMD says, “The leaders I teach and coach are diverse in many ways, but they share one thing in common: pressure. Each is grappling with unprecedented economic, technological, political, and organizational change and thus struggling to keep themselves, their teams, and their organizations energized and focused. Many feel close to overwhelm or exhaustion.”

Howard Dover and I were talking about it, he characterized it as “I don’t care….” In explaining it, it wasn’t the malicious or negative intent of the phrase. Rather, it was more of a “settling,” or there is only so much I can do. And when we get to a certain point of “I don’t care.., ” we move on to something else. Or our caring becomes very narrowly focused on our own goals. “I’m OK here, as long as I can achieve my goals, but when I can’t, I’ll move on.” But even that is limiting in terms of personal and organizational growth.

Some of it seems to be a limitation of experience or thinking differently, “I have my playbook, I’ll stay as long as it works, then I’ll move on….” But increasingly our playbooks aren’t working and we struggle to figure out what works. And as that struggle increases, it amplifies the “I don’t care…”

Some of this seems to be an unconscious and collective “closing of our mindsets.”

None of this is new, but the scale seems to be new and our collective inability to put our fingers on it seems to be new.

There are some that long for the “good old days,” though each of our perspectives of the “good old days” is different. It could be the hey-day of 5-10 years ago, in technology markets where money was cheap/”free” and investment were skyrocketing. Or it could be the mass acceptance of the internet, or rapid globalization. (When I talk to some people, they say, “Dave, tell me about the good old days when the wheel was invented…..” I tend to ignore them, though they are not inaccurate.)

But the reality is, regardless of how much we may wish, those days are behind us. There are lessons we have learned, hopefully, and can apply to the future. But we have to figure out what our individual, organizational, market, and collective futures are. What can we decide, influence, innovate? What is beyond our control? How do we address uncertainty and learn to treat it as a gift?*

Now I don’t want to over state or dramatize this issue. In every sector I look at, there are exciting changes and innovations. There are new ideas, models, opportunities. In our own lives, we are creating new experiences and finding joy. And, of course there will be failures, but with those failures are always opportunities to learn and grow.

Some things I am learning are:

• We are not alone in this. While it may seem that it’s only happening to us, individually, or our organizations, it’s pervasive.
• And we will not move forward by acting individually, but through finding new ways of learning and collaborating.
• Our past “models” limit us and our thinking. And we become prisoners of our own experiences. To move forward, we have to move from closed mindsets to open ones. Doubling down on what we’ve always done is a certain route to failure.
• We should become much more diverse in how we explore and learn things, both individually and organizationally. For example, exploring very different business models, hanging out with different people, talking to people with very different ideas and experiences. I’ve written about “artful plagiarism” in the past, but in these diverse experiences we can learn things that we can tweak and adapt to fit our own situations, allowing us to change and grow.
• We need to focus on some fundamentals: Our purpose and our values.
• ???

I’ll stop here. As I mentioned, I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m talking to a lot of people who are doing the same.

I’m deeply interested in your thoughts.

*Continued thanks Tom Morris.