Trapped In Business As Usual…..

Recently, I wrote, Have We Become Complacent? But there may be a different way to look at the same issue.

A number of people reached out after reading the post. Many suggested, “Dave, we have never been busier! My people are working hard–they have escalating demands for prospecting, pipelines, and quota performance. Most are working very long hours. As managers, we’ve never been so busy! Between supporting our people, helping them get deals done and responding to requests from management and other parts of the organization, it’s impossible to work only 40 hours a week. We are working 50-60 hours a week and still don’t have enough time to get things done. We are all so busy–how can you call us complacent?”

Indeed, when we study organizations, we find people constantly busy, juggling too many balls, not having enough time to do their jobs.

Everyone is trapped in “business as usual.” Doing the things we have always done. Doing them in the ways we have always done, perhaps in higher volumes. The coping mechanism is often based on the premise, “How do we do more of what we currently do…..”  And there are endless consultants, guru’s and software providers who help us answer these questions.

And too often, we fail to recognize this simply cannot persist, instead of how we do more of the same, we have to think about how do we do things differently. 

When what we have always done, often, no longer works as well as it used to.  It’s seldom a sudden shock, it’s more often a creeping effect.  What worked before doesn’t work as well, so we do more, we make slight shifts, those things work for a period.  Then it happens again, we adjust again, and again, and again…..

Each time it becomes more difficult to achieve our goals.  Each time it seems to take more efforts to make less progress.

We rationalize what’s happening, what we are doing is what made us successful in the past, why not continue?  Our management is asking us to do more of those things.  As we look at competitors, they seem to be stuck in the same loop.  We keep on going, we keep working harder, longer.

And we slowly fail.

We struggle to understand, we are doing what has always worked.  We are trying hard.  We are working long hours.  We employ tools and techniques that help us do more.

We become prisoners of our experience–trapped in doing what we know, not recognizing the need to change, not knowing how to change.  And, often are so burned out, we simply can’t change.

Alternatively, we think change is driven by top management. Aren’t they supposed to set the strategies, drive the new directions, new approaches and drive the change into the organization. But senior leaders may be too distant from what is happening every day, being blind to the need to change (though frustrated by the organization’s seeming inability to meet performance expectations).

At all levels, we become trapped by business as usual, trapped by what we have always done.

It’s easy to see how this happens, you may be living that every day.

While recognizing this is probably just the way things are, it is no excuse!

But it’s not easy to do, but perhaps we can start to recognize the signs of this, catching ourselves and pausing to rethink and reconsider everything we do.

How do we do this?  Some thoughts:

1.  When you catch yourself or others saying, “This is the way we have always done it….”  That sentence usually starts invading our conversations when those things we’ve always done aren’t working so well, or when someone else asks “why are we doing it this way, what if….”
2. When you find you are focused on figuring out how do do more of the same thing, just to maintain current performance levels.  We often mistake doing more of the same thing as “scaling,” but if it doesn’t actually produce much more, then something’s not working.  At a minimum, doing more of the same thing should scale outcomes linearly, if it isn’t things are broken.
3. Related to the previous point, when we have to invest in more and more tools/training to help us increase our capacity to do the same thing, but it doesn’t produce proportionately better results.
4. When others, our competitors or others, are doing better than us.  When they are growing faster, or doing things differently.
5. When people start leaving.  We each want to be successful, and when we can’t achieve the same levels of success we used to, we tend to go someplace where we can.

Complacency is usually a sign of arrogance.  “Business as usual” is a different mechanism–and harder to recognize.

Both are devastating.