Everything Is Urgent. But Did It Need to Be?
How constant urgency leaves leaders busy, stressed and with too little time to think ahead
“The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”
Last week I was walking from the station in the evening rush, surrounded by people heading home. It reminded me of John Brack's Collins St., 5p.m. — that stream of workers trudging home together at the end of a grey day.
Two women were walking just ahead of me.
"How are you?" one asked.
"OK," the other replied. "I feel like I'm doing everything and nothing."
Then she talked about work.
"It's just constant stress. Everything is urgent. Why can't people do things ahead of time?"
I suspect plenty of people would recognise that feeling.
You can spend an entire day answering emails, moving between meetings, solving problems and responding to requests, then get to the end of it wondering what you actually achieved.
Sometimes that's unavoidable. Things go wrong. Clients change their minds. People get sick. Systems fail. Something you couldn't have predicted suddenly needs your attention.
But not everything that becomes urgent is unpredictable.
A decision gets delayed. A difficult conversation is put off. A deadline everyone knew about gets closer. Someone sits on information. An emerging problem doesn't seem serious enough to deal with yet.
Eventually, the options narrow and something that was once simply important becomes urgent.
Often, someone else then has to absorb the pressure.
The email saying, "Sorry for the late notice, but I need this by tomorrow" may be entirely reasonable. But sometimes it really means, "We didn't deal with this early enough, and now I need you to make up the time."
That's worth noticing if you're a leader.
Why we wait until it hurts
Ronald Heifetz, who has spent much of his career studying leadership, draws a useful distinction between problems with a known fix (technical problems) and problems that require people to change how they think or work (adaptive challenges). The second kind gets avoided until the pressure of a crisis forces it. That happens in organisations every week.
There is also a cost when this becomes the normal way of working. When most of your attention goes to responding to what is immediately in front of you, you have less time to think about what is coming next. The planning gets postponed. So does the conversation that might prevent a problem, the improvement that would make the work easier, or the decision that would give everyone some certainty.
And next week, there is another urgent thing to deal with.
Foresight: a useful tool
This is where foresight becomes practical.
It doesn't require you to accurately predict the future. It can be as simple as looking ahead while you still have room to move and asking:
What are we allowing to become urgent that we could deal with while it is still merely important?
For me, this is part of Adaptive Stability. Leaders need to respond when circumstances genuinely change. But they also need to protect enough time and capacity to notice what is coming, make decisions before their choices narrow, and prepare for what they reasonably can.
Because if we use all our capacity dealing with foreseeable problems at the last minute, there isn't much left when something genuinely unexpected happens.
Perhaps that woman on the walk home had identified something bigger than a frustrating day at work. What looked like doing nothing was actually urgency overtaking her day, one demand at a time.
What's currently important in your work that hasn't become urgent yet, and what would it take to deal with it now?
