The Fallacy of False Urgency

Hello Human

I think there’s a little irony in the fact that just a couple of months after I wrote a Muse on corporate lingo, jargon and buzzwords, today I am writing about a new piece of jargon (or is it?) I picked up this week.

Before I get into it today though - here’s a memory jogger from my September Muse on jargon and buzzwords:

“Not quite a cliché, not quite a term of art, a buzzword is a profound-seeming phrase devised by someone important to make something sound better than it is.”

My thinking is still ‘there’ of course, but now and again I hear or read something that stops me - and makes me think. Thinking is definitely under-rated - but I digress.

So I am reading an article in the HBR this week on False Urgency - more specifically, ways to combat false urgency at work, and it certainly got me thinking.

First and foremost I am thinking that ‘false urgency’ is way beyond the status of corporate lingo and buzzwords. I think that ‘false urgency’ is its own organisational phenomenon. I think that false urgency is yet another disease that infects work and workplaces. I think that false urgency runs counter to us as Humans.

You know it right: everything is urgent; everything is important; the deadline has to be met; the world of competing priorities where everything is No.1 priority.

And there’s the ubiquitous - ‘when do you need it’? ‘I needed it yesterday.’ ‘Right I am onto it - NOW’.

Scan your inbox Human - how many emails are tagged with some version of ASAP? How many of your Projects have arbitrary deadlines attached to them?

Are you contributing to the mess of false urgency? Think about that the next time you create a project plan or send an email.

If you haven’t quite latched on here yet, false urgency is a close cousin of another of my least favourite things about work and workplaces in the current era - the dehumanising phenom that is - busyness.

The HBR piece was penned by Dina Denham Smith; in it Smith writes:

“We are more connected and agile than ever, working at high speed to stay on top of workloads and remain competitive. A sense of urgency and scarce time permeates every day.”

“However, too often, much of the frenetic activity in organisations is false urgency: unproductive busyness that doesn’t lead to meaningful progress.”

Smith notes that it can be tough to draw a distinction between false urgency and real urgency:

“But it’s easy to mistake false urgency for real urgency — both look like high initiative and activity.”

Smith offers up some useful tips to combat false urgency, fairly aimed at leaders (leaders of other human beings), including ruthless prioritisation, vetting requests of your team and thereby creating a buffer for your team, and creating norms and rhythms with and for your people that help to distinguish clearly between the falsely urgent and the actually urgent.

I’ll leave you with this nugget of gold from the HBR article. Another of Smith’s proposed methods to combat false urgency is to practise what she dubs - strategic procrastination. I love it!

Strategic procrastination

- acknowledging that this tactic may require resetting expectations and repatterning relationships with stakeholders, e.g. managing expectations by proactively communicating timelines and articulating the reasons for them -

‘involves starting something and not finishing it until it’s almost due, allowing you and your team to think about it gradually and eliminating the unnecessary rush of low-value work. This provides time to consider ideas and enable insights to surface, and can result in increased creativity, innovation, and a better final product.’

Who’d have thought it right? Eliminate false urgency, and practise strategic procrastination, to enable ideas, insights, creativity, innovation, and better results - AND dare I say it - to enable humans to be at their best.

Go well Human