We all have one of those friends that lives in a constant state of frenzy, right? They appear to go from one crisis to another without ever finding a moment of peace. In their own mind, the chaos is far from their control. They often believe that they are perpetual victims of their circumstances.
Don’t get me wrong, I empathize with the pressure and exhausting uncertainty our panicked friends are in the middle of. I’ve been there, too. But if that becomes our norm rather than our exception, we have a real problem on our hands. In the Continuous Improvement world, we call this state instability.
Instability is all-consuming. It dictates your day for you. It controls your activities ruthlessly. Things appear to be burning and we have no choice but to set aside everything else to put this raging fire out. Beware. We will never move the needle of progress if we live perpetually in instability. Instability has a nasty habit of moving in and taking over. Only deliberate intentionality and preparation will prevent it from monopolizing your time and energies.
President Eisenhower famously noted that all demands on our attention fall into one of 4 categories based on a simple matrix of importance verses urgency. Stephen Covey refined the idea further by assigning numbers to the 4 quadrants to help us differentiate them better. The insight that is most striking with this attempt to visualize our daily workloads is that improvement will never be an urgent matter, and thus for our panicked friend, never even an option. Therefore, we owe it to ourselves to strategize how to gain freedom from the tyranny of the urgent and achieve stability.
Reaching stability has two important factors: control and acceptability. Let’s parse them separately. Control is a very misunderstood and misapplied term. Control as a verb, ie forcibly bending something to your will, is not applicable in this context. Instead, control is a descriptive adjective. By observation, we determine if something is BEHAVING in a controlled manner or not. If something is in control, it is steady and not easily perturbed. Control indicates that we aren’t surprised (or alarmed) by the behavior or output of a system. Control gives us the breathing room to let the system “run on auto” indefinitely and to just address the odd abnormality. Do your systems behave this way? They certainly can.
The other side of the stability coin in the acceptability concept. This is commonly referred to in quality circles as capability. It is the ability of a system to generate the “right” output reliably. Determining what “right” means is the tricky component here. Having intimate knowledge of your market and customers is crucial. If timing is key to business, your capability may be measured against takt time. If a product’s physical dimensions are critical, then it might be tolerances that are most important. If functionality of the product is paramount, well, you get the idea.
Stability is a measure of both the control and the acceptability of the system’s performance. And these stability problems certainly won’t fix themselves.
Until such point that we sick and tired of being sick and tired, the urgent will dominate our lives. We have to be disciplined about carving out significant time to address the important issues (Quadrant II) or Quadrants I and III will take over. My advice to people trying to transition away from the firefighting hell of the tyranny of the urgent is this:
- Be prepared for Quadrant 1 problems, but allow it consume for than half of your time.
- Set aside at least a third of your schedule for Quadrant II items at first. Grow this discipline over time.
- Learn to delegate Quadrant III items to appropriate parties whenever possible.
- Practice saying “no” to Quadrant IV distractions. These never move the needle for you.
The truth we all have to face is that if we set aside the important things of life until we have time, they will never get done. If we take a step to standardize our daily workloads, we can devote appropriate time to the things that will truly move us forward. Let me know if you need any help on this. I’m here for you. You’ve got this.
Lean in, and Lean on.