Reactive management

I could not remember how many times in my career life someone tells me that patience is a beauty or similar kinda crap (mind my language). I have my reasons... On the other hand, you always have people who really good at reacting.

Here is what I found out on on Friday afternoon in the building. Because of the economy, Xmas everything, things appear to wind down a lot. What is interesting to me is that if you watch closer you will see most of people, esp. those who do not really have a written down process to define every second of their daily behavior, lost their clues of what to do. ALARM!

If within a business, people do not know what they should be doing even there are road maps, meetings, corridor chats happening all the time. What went wrong? It will make more sense if we sit back and chew it a bit longer. The obvious difference leads me to remind myself of what they were like before - frenetic, absolutely frenetic! 

A normal day of their working will normally start with a few of customer complaining emails or phone calls, which will by default change their priorities either because to get a battle won will just make things look good or just because to think, plan, pre-empt about what to do is so much a hard-thinking work to do, and hey, we are all lazy nerds.  

Now we have work to do, actually, most of the time we do not really know how and what it takes to resolve these hot potatoes for dear customers, we start to raise our eyeballs and look for easy targets, internally - either to shift work with an as angry as the tone we received, or simply kick off the email war. Maybe in the end, after some stupid parties - normally will be the not much outgoing engineers - pick up the shit and sort things out, they step up to release the good news to everyone in a more or less exaggerated manner.

At the end of the day, on the way driving home, we have totally convinced ourselves that what a good day it has been - some fires have been put off by us.

Sounds familiar?

Sorry that I have been extremely sarcastic, not intentionally, as I can assure you. The point I want to make here is the situation created from reactive management.

As being said already, to estimate, plan B, pre-empt, work out risk management actions, foresee what is coming, stop issues from happening, sensible negotiation and decision making, all of these are difficult. This leaves us an easiest option - reaction. We do not need to worry about triggers; we do not worry about reasons; we do not worry about cost and consequence of resolution; we do not worry about knock-on effects. We just do it. Some people even claim that this is on the same philosophy ground as GTD (get things done). (In fact, every time if someone really tries to piss me off, he will say this.) Let's just say our species are born with a talent of finding a way out.

Anyhow, anyway, the damage of reactive management not only will cause huge managerial panic tornado easily, but also will destruct the possibility of stopping what is happening appearing again in the near future. Most dangerously, if people have already trained themselves in this mindset of reactive working habits, you will see more and more headless chicken, no matter there is a panic situation or not.

Quick turnaround time again, could be lying to us when we do not have a clear idea about what we are really dealing with - is it this defect itself, or is it something else? What I would recommend here is to give it a go with five why practice.