When your ‘go-to’ tool becomes your weakness..

About 30 years ago, the world started to speed up. Not for the first time, but the invention of the internet shifted the gears of the world.

For the first 10 years or so it was a bit of a novelty. Gone were the days of slow-moving letters and accessing encyclopedias and in came the ability to send emails (mostly jokes at first), get in contact with long lost friends and despite the difficulty of early internet search engines, the world of knowledge was at our fingertips. At first, we didn’t see the extra effort this new world took to operate within, but if there was extra effort, it was worth it given the power of what we now had access too.

Over the next 10 years, we started to understand and access the power of the internet. Productivity and efficiency gains were unlocked as we could now communicate at pace through email and the invention of smart phones. Moving content globally became easy and social media broke down the barriers of connection. Expectations of performance, mainly through the speed of communication, started to grow and we could feel this taking more effort but we coped with this because the extra effort was producing new outputs.

Fast forward 10 years, and the relentless pressure to be connected, and cover multiple and ever changing expectations has created resentment. Resentment due to the face that the concept of working hours has become blurred, the speed in which you are expected to perform and the sheer volume of issues to confront is never ending. We have responded quite simply with the only way we know how – with more effort and we are exhausted just trying to keep afloat. ?We have doubled down and relied solely on effort to get us through this period of change so it’s comes as no surprise that the world is on the cusp of burnout issues. Our go-to tool to make everything work has slowly but surely become our biggest threat.

I think organisations have seen this issue coming for a long time and over the last decade have tried to respond with a focus on inspiring leaders, good culture and, more latterly, wellbeing programmes as a way of disguising the fact we are flogging ourselves and our staff to maintain momentum. I don’t think this has been with malicious intent ?but by not dealing with the actual system of work, we are basically saying that we may know the effort is slowly destroying you but if we lead you well, have a good culture and shower you with wellbeing impacts, you may not notice the effort you will need to impart to keep this all going.

With the increasing level of circumstances being confronted (natural disasters, pandemics etc), quite simply there wasn’t enough effort to go around so decisions were made to drop, or at least slow down, the future to make it all work. We put things on hold like organisational development and digital transformations – the things that may actually make a difference, as we simply didn’t have any more effort to give. We cannot put these off any longer so they are now on the table at most organisations, but my worry is that we have not created the tools to approach this future other than a bigger effort tool – i.e. the predictable is that we are just going to have to accept we need to work even harder if we want it ever to be easier.

Throughout all the technological advancements of the last 30 years, we didn’t feel the heat of expectations growing, so never confronted or changed the system or how we do work. We simply doubled down on effort to make it all work and it slowly crippling us. I fear the impact this is ultimately going to have on people first and in the end, organisational performance.

We simply cannot carry on with the current unsustainable work methods. We are now left with a choice – do we continue to double down with effort and live with the consequences of this - or do we step into the unknown of a new way of operating, a new way of thinking and a new way of leading. We have to unlearn what has worked for us in the past and discover the practices that will unlock more sustainable work systems.

Marc Pringle , one of the partners at In Your Corner Ltd , once coined a phrase ‘You can invest your efforts generating trust and alignment or you can spend your efforts managing distrust and misalignment’. I don’t know if this is where the answer lies but I think it might be a good place to start!

PS – I am not sure who to give credit too for the image I have used on this post. It has been around a long time I have seen it so often, I don’t know who to acknowledge as the original source. I think, however, that it may be more appropriate than ever