The Urgency Audit.

Joanne Kerrigan

I’ll start with a confession: I avoid instructions. Don’t map the route. Abandon assembly instructions on sight. Collect unread tutorial emails for always.

This avoidant tendency grows out of the same root that keeps me from any time-based content like podcasts and videos, instructional or not: even with the playback speed jacked, I have no control over the sequential, durational nature of my acquisition of the content, and I can’t handle it. Who spends 30 minutes listening to ideas that can be scanned in show notes in 30 seconds? Who spends 11 minutes watching a process demonstrated in a help video before they’ve tried to just make the thing work as it seems like it ought to? One of these days, I’m going to start keeping track of how much time I spend viewing the video anyway, after trying three different things I thought would work (classic “waste”, in Lean terminology).

The root is impatience. It is urgency culture. Understanding this is helpful, and not just because I can work to shift the tendency from that understanding. It’s also helpful as a perspective: I tend to notice impatience and urgency everywhere, because I’m working on my own. Maybe it’s a little like noticing, after treating yourself to some special new shoes, that they are actually massively popular and seem to be on absolutely everyone’s feet.

It’s not just me.

I have been noticing it particularly in organizations, increasingly over time (urgency, not shoe trends). This makes sense, given this moment of intersecting crises. It can appear that we are running out of time in these matters and therefore cannot actually afford to carefully plan and enact long term responses. Even in organizations whose purpose does not involve trying to respond to crises directly, the crises impact their operating in myriad ways, and the clock-ticking-down prognoses are just as present as they are in organizations whose purpose is to mitigate the crises. Fuel prices, insurance premiums, workforce dynamics, cybersecurity, supply chain, and regulatory compliance, to name only a few factors, are fast-moving challenges on ominous trajectories. (Underpinning all of our crises is, of course, capitalism and colonialism.)

So a standard operating mode of beat the clock, often unexamined, is now ubiquitous. The trouble is, quoting my mom quoting the emperor Augustus, “festina lente” (more haste less speed). Or, tying back to Lean while staying in proverbial mode, haste makes waste! It’s a conundrum: what if the results you need quickly can’t be well produced quickly? Alas, as I continue to experience in my own life, organizations may also know this, but that knowledge doesn’t automatically curb the tendency. This seems even more likely to be the case in an organization than it would be for an individual, given that organizations are made up of multiple distinct individuals performing multiple distinct roles. I may have arrived in better relationship to my urgency, but if my performance in the organization will be evaluated based on quantity over quality or starts over completions or busyness over impact, I’ll need to work in that way, if I choose to remain in the organization. Or the organization may stop encouraging or rewarding needless urgency, but if it hasn’t mapped out and implemented the corresponding structural or process supports (resource allocation, incentives and performance metrics, accessibility supports, roles, workflows, policy) to enable this shift, it will either become less effective or it will continue operating in perpetual urgency. An organization may even have all of the supports and structures designed accordingly, but if core funding emanates from urgency culture, those supports and structures will be unused or hacked.

What does it look like?

What symptoms might indicate that urgency culture is troubling your organization? Sometimes it might be the basics: problems with quality or delivery or impact, persistent overwhelm, burnout, and turnover. There can also be more insidious tells. For instance:

Lack of, or ignoring, strategic sequence. To speak proverbially just once more, this is “cart before the horse”. Perhaps you have a goal to flatten hierarchy and/or distribute leadership. This would, ultimately, be seen in roles and responsibilities, but if you skip steps on the path to that destination, for instance board buy-in or training, you risk a rocky road (that’s not even on course!). Sometimes it may be that steps were not skipped, because they were never planned to begin with. This is not necessarily an indicator of urgency culture, unless planning frameworks are being neglected in favour of “the real work” of product or service design and delivery.
Mission drift or scope creep, to chase funding or market. When things are difficult, the dream of the Quick Fix, or the Previously Undiscovered Solution becomes shiny and magnetic. It may happen internally, with leadership inspired by a popular new system advocated in a book or by a consultant. It may happen externally, with funders adopting a dissonant new priority, or shareholders captivated by a competitor’s new strategy. And of course learning culture is important, agility is important, continuous improvement is important, adaptive planning is important. But what will be your tests by which you’ll evaluate incoming suggestions to veer off plan or add new priorities? How will you hold space to maintain thoughtfulness in your responses to these pressures?
Consistent prioritization of “quick” work without a longer term throughline. Ideally, short duration tasks or projects are linked and leading to a desired longer term outcome. But in a VUCA world (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity), there can arise a feeling that longer term strategy is a dinosaur and that chaos must be accepted, and from this place we can find many justifications to “be nimble”. These may be housed in organizational values, relationships, or contexts, and over time could consistently produce mission-aligned results, but also abandoned longer-term strategies. If you’ve done the “what happens if we don’t” exercise with your strategies, it can be really helpful for sticking with the longer-term work that isn’t built of neat short term steps.

All signs point to urgency culture troubling my organization. Now what?

If you’re like me, you’ve had this article open in a tab for two weeks before finally reading it. Maybe you’ve been reading it, in parts, over a week. Maybe you’ve been feeling pressure to stop reading it because it’s not as mission critical as other work you might be putting into this time (or, if you’re reading it in personal time, it’s not as mission critical as other living you might be putting into the time). How might you overcome the conundrum of urgency culture preventing you from dealing with your urgency culture?

This will likely be as varied and individual as anything relating to motivation tends to be. For me, it might be philosophical. For instance, I have long liked to ponder time as having realities other than that of “absolute” time. The Aboriginal thinking on Dreamtime. Einstein’s notion that “time is suspect”. In some ways, it feels a bit like cultivating abundance mindset. What do I need in order to allow myself to act from this mindset? Some boundaries? Some co-conspirators?

Once you’ve given yourself permission to tackle this, there a couple of ways you might begin.

Get curious. If you are seeing symptoms like those described above in “What does it look like?”, and you suspect that urgency culture is a driver, try a deep dive into the matter. What’s going on, why is it happening, what’s contributing to it? It might lend itself to Five Whys (5Y), a root cause analysis popular in Lean and Six Sigma approaches to process improvement. For instance, if the symptom is turnover and you suspect urgency culture is playing a role, the five whys might be answered like this: the exit surveys consistently mention unreasonable management expectations, those expectations are influenced by the compensation system being based on very challenging delivery targets, those targets have been set to compete with the performance of the sector leader which is a much more resourced organization than ours is, unreasonable targets have been set in part because planning does not include the perspectives in the organization that would have flagged this and the culture here doesn’t encourage upward feedback. If you are wondering what happened to the fifth why, you are probably going to be great at this “get curious” step! And the answer is that the Five in the name of the technique is illustrative rather than literal. The goal of Five Whys is to uncover root cause, and that may take more or fewer Whys than five.
Go sleuthing. Where is it living? if you are hierarchical, start at the top, as the philosophies and structures there will tend to inform or even dictate the structures, practices and culture throughout the organization. This may be the board, it may be funders. What are your funding cycles? On what basis is the organization evaluated? How about leadership – what are they evaluated based on, and how often, and what rewards or penalties are they subject to, relative to their performance? What does a resource lens show: are there mismatches between priorities and their people and budget allocations?
Measure it. Intentionally and thoughtfully design a means of documenting the impact that the urgency-fuelled troubles you’ve identified is having. This is how you’ll make your case to prioritize making this change in your structures and culture. (That change process is another topic for another day). Build it into your pre and post mortems, your employee and customer surveys. Any place you are asking “how” something was or is, in addition to simply checking off completion, is a good place to include this inquiry. For instance, if you hold a customer appreciation event, include in its evaluation questions about the planning and management of the event that may reveal urgency-driven concerns or opportunities for improvement. How often is the event held and what is the impact of this timing on overall workplans? How much time is allocated to the event’s planning and preparation? If you are already monitoring quality and impact in your organization, those mechanisms may be a good location for your urgency monitoring. Scan input and feedback about time, both in planning and evaluating: “ran out of time”, “timeline was too tight”, “deadline was not met”, “there’s no time for that”. Do the same about prioritization: “a nice-to-have but not possible”, “we’ll have to get to it but it’s not going to make it into this cycle”. Create an urgency log to collect these flags.

Be sure to design your Urgency Audit to capture equity and inclusion impacts, as urgency culture disproportionately affects equity deserving people, and as such will be a crucial element of your growing understanding of urgency in your organization. Highly recommended reading on this is Lydia Phillip’s “Resisting a Rest: How Urgency Culture Polices Our Work”.

If you think that external support might be needed in any of this work, or in the organizational changes that it will lead to, we’d love to hear from you!

Big Waves is about making work feel better, and eliminating needless urgency is such a powerful way to do that, as it changes the work on multiple levels: improving impact, reducing waste, and supporting healthy, equitable and enjoyable orientations to the work itself.