“Something’s Happening Here, What It Is Ain’t Exactly Clear…”

I’ve been in various businesses in a variety of jobs for close to 4 decades. I’m experiencing and observing something I’ve never encountered. Over the last several weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations–some I initiated, some initiated by others. Conversations with clients, colleagues, business friends. We are all seeing similar things, each from different perspectives. It’s very difficult to describe or put words to it. But it’s something each of is is sensing. We struggle with describing it. We struggle with “What do we do about it?”

Most of those I speak with have been through all sorts of business cycles. Different economic cycles. Disruptions in markets, businesses. We’ve been involved in differing businesses and business models, every aspect of technology, industrial products, professional services, embedded products, basic materials. We’ve been involved in high growth businesses, start ups, very large businesses. Some have been involved in turnarounds. I could go on looking at the depth and breadth of experience of these people.

But we are all seeing similar things, things we have never experienced, things to which we have no answers.

Robbing a line from For What It’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield, “Something’s happening here, What it is ain’t exactly clear…..”

So here is some of what we are seeing:

• There seems to be systemic, pervasive burnout, at all levels. Mental, physical, spiritual exhaustion.
• There is pervasive overwhelm. Too much information, too many distractions, too much that has to get done, too much…..
• What we see in our business worlds is a microcosm of what we see in society. And both weigh heavily on everyone.
• We seem to live in a “whack-a-mole” world. We focus on one area, address it, and multiple immediate challenges pop up in other spaces. While many of the people I speak with have dealt with similar things in the past, the scale at which this seems to occur is orders of magnitude greater than ever experienced.
• And the previous point creates behaviors, “Why should we address this at all? Is it simpler to live with it, despite the consequences, than face everything that happens after we address it?”
• I don’t sense it’s fear of failure. These people have experience failures, they know how to recover, how to move beyond it, how to find success in whatever they are doing. There is something else that’s preventing them from moving forward.
• People who would, normally, be very action oriented are much less so. It is not just caution. It is not FOMU–most know how to deal with this. It’s not fear of change, they have track records of driving huge change initiatives. It’s an exhaustion factor. It’s a feeling of “let’s just manage this and get through as best we can. We can do this, we can defer the change….”
• Interactions with between trusted colleagues and business friends have changed. We are being ghosted, we are ghosting each other. I think it’s perhaps an avoidance mechanism, “Do I really want to talk to this professional friend about the futility and burnout I am experiencing?”
• The normal conversations and professional interchanges are not happening as they have in the past (even in tough times). And out of this, a greater sense of isolation seems to be arising.
• And these people are succeeding, most are very high performers and tend to outperform others . But despite that success, they know they might do more, but opt for good enough.
• And while people are busy, doing good things, engaging their teams and customers, sometimes it’s going through the motions. The joy one usually experiences seem rare.
• I do see some differences in the degree to which people seem to feel this way. In what I call the “dirty businesses,” some of the basic materials, embedded products businesses, I see the same things, but not to the degree I see in technology and professional services businesses.

I think the common denominator across all of this is the extreme uncertainty everyone seems to be experiencing. While uncertainty is always with us, the degree to which we experience it now is discomforting.

I’d like to turn this discussion over to you.

• Do you see or are you experiencing the same thing, or am I suffering from “hallucinations?”
• What are some of the things you are doing to deal with this? What are you seeing others doing?
• How do we talk with each other about this?

Yesterday, Mitch Little, and I were talking about this. As we concluded, I said, “Mitch, I’m stubborn enough and probably stupid enough to keep pushing at this. We can’t settle, there have to be ways to move forward, I just don’t know what they are!” Mitch replied, “I’m with you, except for the stupid part. The first part is for more of us to be talking about it and how we might feel less isolated in moving forward.

Mitch is right!

Afterword: It’s fascinating how prescient the lyrics to Buffalo Springfield’s song, “For What It’s Worth,” are. They released it in 1966.