Chaos of Overreaction | Episode 013

“There is no chaos in the world except the chaos created by our mind.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj

Imagine that instead of washing five T-shirts at once in the washing machine, you decide to run each T-shirt separately. You can wash T-shirt after T-shirt all day long, be terribly busy, waste a lot of energy, but you will have only five T-shirts washed with five washing cycles instead of one.

Something like this happens in teams that have zero tolerance for the “inaction” of planning. When there is no “real” work, but only talking about what needs to be done. In such teams, hustle, even an artificial one, is elevated to an internal cult. In such an atmosphere, people are frequently in a hurry, and they are always late for something. They jump from meeting to meeting. They have a constant hamster heartbeat. They are startled by every deadline and even more by every new emergency that may be more urgent than the current one. Panic and sprinting between urgent tasks create the illusion that big and important things are being developed. But at the end of the day — there are only five washed T-shirts.

You can easily recognize the chaos of overreaction. First, if you notice that you are developing a hamster heartbeat yourself, you are parking and ignoring the new opportunities rather than exploring or discussing them. Second, if people in your office run between meeting rooms, forget their laptops at other people’s desks, spill their coffee more and more often, and finally, they always open their meetings with “there’s not enough time to do anything.”

By these signs, you recognize that you have a chaos of overreaction. What triggers it? Three primary reasons:

- lack of clear priorities
- inadequate resource planning
- inappropriate people in critical places

The ultimate responsibility for overcoming this chaos of overreaction lies with the manager. First, to clear this chaos from his own daily life. And then the manager to support the people in his team in this direction. Or even to find a third alternative that comes from the teams themselves.

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Buy the book “Cold Shower for Managers” by Plamen Petrov on Amazon — https://amzn.to/2Ka23CU

Originally published at https://www.equinox-partners.bg.