Pitfall 1: Stuck in the Status Quo

Early this year in this newsletter I wrote about the four common pitfalls we face when trying to get things done:

1. We get stuck in the status quo.
2. We try to do too many things at once.
3. We may not be systematic about our goals.
4. We fail to achieve our goals because we aren't realistic.

In today's newsletter I want to give you more context about the first pitfall and provide you with strategies and tools to practice to avoid it.

The status quo is powerful. People feel comfortable in it. People are benefiting from it. People are invested in it. 

It is much easier to keep doing things the way they have always been done than to change. But you have to do things differently if you want to get things done. You have to change the order of things for the better if you want to lead.

So how do you overcome the power of the status quo? 

The first step is to envision a future state that you and your team can get excited about. How would the world be different and better? 

I don’t believe that good leaders can just be vision people. But having a vision is important. In fact, seeing possibilities is one of the most important qualities of leadership. 

And before you can prioritize effectively, you have to understand the full set of possibilities – everything that you could get done to make your world a better place.

Seeing possibilities is not simply vision – and it’s not simply optimism. Seeing possibilities requires first that you be clear-eyed and realistic about the current state – or where you are today. Second, it requires that you be hopeful and optimistic about the future state – where you could be. What could be.

The process to do this is straightforward and powerful. First, start by defining your current state. In order to make progress, we need to be very clear-eyed about where we really are today, in all dimensions, from all perspectives. We must pick our heads up and look around us. We must understand our context – everything that’s happening around us, internally and externally.

You need to be clear-eyed and honest about the current state because, if you don’t describe what is happening accurately, guess what? You’re not going to change anything. You’re not going to get anything done. Or, you’re going to kid yourself and say, “Awesome. We really nailed that one. We got that one fixed,” when in fact you’re just kind of rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. How would you describe where you are today? The more specific you can be, the better. The more quantifiable your descriptions are, the better. 

For example, it’s more helpful to say, “We are serving 10,000 clients” vs. “We don’t serve enough clients.” It’s more helpful to say, “I spend 10 hours a week in update meetings” instead of, “I think I spend too much time in meetings.”

Then, you need to be equally clear about the future state. Remember, your future state is how things would be different if you changed things for the better – what specifically would be better, and how. Here is where you need to see possibilities. If you can’t see possibilities, you can never imagine a future state that’s better. 

You have to be clear-eyed about the current state so you truly understand your situation from all angles, but you have to be ambitious and optimistic enough to say, “You know what? It could be this way.” And you need to be equally clear, equally diagnostic, equally prescriptive about the future state. 

Spend some time thinking about your current and future state in the way we just discussed.

Then, write down the key activities in your current state. How do you and / or your team spend your time? What about your money? What activities are considered most important?  

And in the future state, list all the goals you think would be important to achieve – don’t worry about how many there are and don’t worry about writing the perfect goal. Just get them down on paper for now.

This gives you a long list of things you could do, that you think you should do at some point. But as we know, we can’t achieve all of that right now, in one go.