Why Your Team Can't Think Strategically

Many leaders want their team to think and work more strategically. Focus on long term outcomes instead of short-term problems.

Even leaders get into the pattern of running around putting out fires and then, at the end of the week realize none of their work is focused on long term outcomes.

Many of us find ourselves procrastinating, doing what feels urgent, avoiding, and overworking but underdelivering.

Why do people do this?

There's actually a very simple reason. It is in our biology.

These days, most people are functioning in a stressed state.

The way I define stress is that you have the perception that your demands outweigh your capabilities, and therefore you are in danger.

In many ways, it's our scarcity thinking that creates this danger.

"There is not enough time, we are not going fast enough. I don't have enough resources, and I don't have the right skills. We will never meet this goal."

Scarcity thinking creates stress.

Stress is an evolutionary response that allows us to focus on short-term solutions over long-term solutions.

If there is real danger right now, it would be unwise to focus on long-term outcomes.

The problem is that we are so good at creating scarcity mindsets in our minds these days that we create scarcity when it doesn't exist.

Then we find ourselves running around without focus, procrastinating, overworking, micro-managing, and doing all kinds of things we know aren't ideas.

The reason we do all these things is because humans have evolved four responses to stress:

1. Fight: approach the problem or person and confront it. This can look like outbursts and anger.
2. Flight: escape the problem. This can look like overthinking, which is one of the most common escape mechanisms we have today. Since thinking seems like a good thing to do we often don't realize we are hurting ourselves.
3. Freeze: don't do anything until the danger goes away. This can look like procrastination or any other avoidance behavior.
4. Fawn: focus on the needs of others in a extreme way. This is the newest stress response discovered by researchers. It is essentially a care taking response. This can look like taking on work from IC's, micromanaging, or overworking.

These evolutionary stress responses were highly effective in preserving the species. If you consider that 25% of a tribe reacted to each stress response, this would optimize the tribe's survival potential. The fawn response would help save the children, ensuring that the genetic line would continue.

In modern times, we have trouble differentiating between real scarcity and perceived scarcity. Real danger and perceived danger.

For most people, it seems like a good idea to think of all the possible dangers so that they can be accounted for and avoided.

The problem with this is that always focusing on danger creates at least one of these stress responses that results in you or your team focusing on short term behavior over the long term.

The solution?

Learn to create perceived safety. In my experience, there is often significant evidence on both sides. How we are doing well and how we are not doing well.

Although it feels counterintuitive to focus on what we have done and what is going well, it is necessary to create teams and leaders that are future focused and think strategically.