The Hindu Business Line : Make real progress every single day

What is one particularly important enemy of urgency? A crowded appointment diary, says John P. Kotter in A Sense of Urgency ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com). We are too busy with dozens of different, often unrelated activities, Kotter observes.

Our meetings run at 30 miles an hour and that sets everyone’s expectations, he adds.

“When you are going from one meeting to the next, all on different topics, all run inefficiently, attitudes and feelings about urgency drain out through sheer exhaustion.” Clutter and fatigue undermine true urgency, the author rues.

He cautions that an overcrowded appointment diary can create the words-deeds mismatch, a lethal effect that leads to cynicism.

In contrast, when your diary is not cluttered, you will find time “to hold impromptu interactions that push along important projects faster,” and ensure that behaviour does not undercut your words.

More importantly, as Kotter explains through examples of effective managers, your actions will serve as a model that people see every day, even if they are not entirely aware of it. Your uncluttered actions, in a sense, “give other people permission to delegate and purge, even if tradition and social forces do not.”

At the very beginning of any effort to make changes of any magnitude, if a sense of urgency is not high enough and complacency is not low enough, everything else becomes so much more difficult, the author avers.

He warns that complacency is much more common than we might think and often invisible to the people involved.

He also advises you to check if your sense of urgency is a false one – a great deal of energised action, but driven by anxiety, anger, and frustration, and not a focused determination to win, and win as soon as is reasonably possible.
False urgency shows in the form of action that has a frantic feeling, describes Kotter: “Running from meeting to meeting, producing volumes of paper, moving rapidly in circles, all with a dysfunctional orientation that often prevents people from exploiting key opportunities and addressing gnawing problems.” Plus endless PowerPoint presentations and email tornadoes.
What happens when people have a true sense of urgency? “They think that action on critical issues is needed now, not eventually, not when it fits easily into a schedule. Now means making real progress every single day.”
Driven by a gut-level determination to move, and win, now, people “quite naturally search for effective ways to get the information to the right individual – and not when they meet him or her next month. With a true sense of urgency, people want to come to work each day ready to cooperate energetically and responsively with intelligent initiatives from others.”
And they don’t move at 30 miles per hour when “sixty-five is needed to win.”
For an urgent read.

D. Murali

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