Paul: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:14

I'm Karen gimmick.

Paul: 0:16

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:18

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Is this urgent?"

Paul: 0:26

So we've talked before about how in a number of group processes decision making, brainstorming, working together that timeliness is sometimes a factor in deciding how we're going to work. And in particular, today, we want to talk about how a sense of urgency can impact that collaborative space between individuals that we so often come back to. How we might choose to do something in a different way, based on whether or not something is urgent versus us having maybe a little more time to deal with it, and what the impacts of choosing to act in those ways might actually be.

Karen: 1:12

So one of the things I want to point out, is that if we're asking ourselves, "Is this urgent?" we might want to ask ourselves, "Is this more urgent than everything else?" Because if we're in a space where absolutely everything is urgent all the time, then we can't expect also to have good collaboration and creativity and innovation and a lot of other things that we might want. And so I'll let you decide for yourself whether it's okay to be in a state that everything is always urgent, but if you get into a space of everything's always urgent, you can predictably say goodbye to really good teamwork, to really creative spaces, that kind of thing. So one of the things is not just does this feel urgent, but is this more urgent or more authentically urgent than the normal thing? Is there a reason to suspend our normal practices because this particular thing has to get done right now?

Paul: 2:15

I'm suddenly picturing the various incarnations of the Star Trek universe they call, "Red Alert!" and suddenly the lighting changes, and there's klaxon sounding and all this and the other thing. The ship does not run on Red Alert all the time. And that's kind of what we're pointing to here is that do we need to go into a sort of heightened state of awareness, of operation, of something that is different, that is out outside of our normal sphere. Because if we just operate at that higher level all the time, we're likely to approach burnout very, very quickly. Because I think something that almost always happens when we are in a situation that feels urgent is that it has a higher degree of anxiety with it. We can have deadlines, we can have time pressure, that isn't urgent, that doesn't feel that way. It's like, "Yeah, I've got this thing, it's due at the end of the month." Just because there is some time-bounded nature to it doesn't make it urgent. Something else makes it urgent and it feels different. And that and I think that's that heightened state of anxiety that comes in us and in the people we're working with, in the team. And so that's what we are pointing at is, are we in a state where we both are and it is useful for us to be at that higher level of alertness, awareness, and anxiety.

Karen: 3:48

So the first thing I want to say about it is name it. Whatever else you might do, you're way more likely to do harm if people have no idea why. Suddenly you're behaving differently because you're in this state of anxiety around urgency or urgency with anxiety, whatever leads that. But when you get into that state, it is predictable, that you'll act differently. It's even smart to act differently, effective to act differently. But if your team or the people around you don't know why, and they can't see this is an unusual thing that's being caused by particular reasons or situation, then they're going to be thrown off by it in a way that they aren't if you can say, "Today's a different day," or "This minute's different. I am behaving differently. I'm asking you to behave differently because this thing is happening." And it may even be a thing is happening I can't tell you about potentially, but anything is happening and today is different. And I need us to function differently for the next hour, for the next day, for this week, whatever it is, with as much transparency as you can give. But name that we're in a different space and that there is urgency that is causing us to do things differently than we otherwise would.

Paul: 5:08

One of the things that that's really useful for is pointing out that this is a temporary shift in operations, right? This is not "Here's the new way of working," it's "We are suspending our normal way of working for a period of time." And we're going to come back to that way of working that potentially more collaborative, consultative space we're going to come back to that when the urgency has passed, which we believe it will. Because I think if we don't do that, then we actually get sort of anxiety about the anxiety. Because it feels different and we don't know why and we don't know that it will go away. One of the things I found working in groups, when we need to go into that red alert mode, people are able to cope with it because they know it's temporary. They're like, "This is not the way that I want to be working in the long run, and I know that I'm not signing up for that right now." So flagging that and naming it is one of the ways that actually decreases the anxiety level in the group by being able to be a little more transparent about it.

Karen: 6:20

Yeah. So I think once you've named it, what then are strategies we can use, even in a teamwork environment, where time is very, very short? And I want to say one of the quickest ways to get efficiency, time efficiency in group, short-term time efficiency in group is hierarchy. To have someone who is "the boss" who says, "We're gonna do this thing," and everybody else goes, "Okay. Okay, I'll do that thing." There are moments where, in that moment of urgency, you're used to having this collaborative environment, somebody says,"Well, but wait, I'm not sure if that's the best idea." And it can be totally useful in urgent moments to say, "Normally, I would love to take time to answer that question and I can't right now. I just need you to do it." And if you're naming that's not my normal, this isn't the usual way, there's nothing wrong with you for having asked, and I can't because I don't have time, because I don't have brain capacity, my cognition is all filled up with these other things. I just need you to do this thing right now. And if you can be clear about that, you may have some hurt feelings you have to clean up later. Often you don't, because it's understood, we're in a strange circumstance. And the other person on the other side of that can go,"Alright, we're in urgency, they just need me to do that thing right now. We'll talk about it later."

Paul: 7:48

One of the things embedded in that is the idea that when we work in an urgent environment, oftentimes unless we're highly practiced at working in that an urgent environment the quality of our work will go down. Part of the reason to work in a highly collaborative way is because it leads to better quality. And by decreasing the level of collaboration, of the back and forth of the "Let's make sure we're really getting the best idea and everybody's bought into it," when you decrease that in order to increase the timeliness of your response, that means you're not going to be doing as good a work. An acknowledgment of that and that that is not what is needed in the current situation is really powerful. It's like,"You're right, this is not the best way of doing it, but it is sufficient. It's a high enough quality for right now." Being able to name that, I think is another thing that helps to sort of manage it. To say, "You're right. This is not how I want to do this in the long term. And it's good enough for now." And if you are the person who's making the decision, if you're the person who's in that role in the hierarchy, being able to cleanly own that is super useful to the team. Because to your point, I think that is one of the things that helps people go,"Oh, okay, cool." You don't have to do the repair afterwards if you can handle that quickly and cleanly, and as gracefully as you can in the moment with all the other impaired cognition, and things that you're worrying about sort of in that. But what I think makes that even more useful is if you already have a strong working relationship to leverage. Because in times of urgency is when trust is really important. Because you're basically going to be saying, if you're again in the role of decider, of the person who's in the hierarchy, "I need you to trust me on this. We just need to move forward." That is not a trust building move. That is a trust leveraging move. You need to have already built the trust. Because I think we've all been in this situation when we're the ones who are not the deciders, we're in that situation, we're being asked to do stuff and we're used to having input, and we're used to working collaboratively. And we have the person, the manager, or the boss, or whomever basically say,"I don't need your input right now." That's way easier to hear if we already have a good relationship with them. If we already have it, we can go, "Oh, I get why. Okay." So in a lot of ways, you want to prepare for urgent situations by doing that trust building and that relationship building beforehand, so that you can leverage it. Because if you don't have it in that moment, then absolutely, you're going to need to do more cleanup afterwards.

Karen: 10:47

Yeah. And I think another place that that plays out is that often we start asking for things that in normal cases wouldn't be reasonable. And what I want to point to here is that when we're in this kind of urgency, one of the things that's almost always at play is that there is a particular resource that is shortest. So there's a particular person who is the only one with the capacity to do most of the work or significant elements of the work. They can't just hand it off. So there is this moment where we say, "Okay, what we're going to do is, this is the person that has to be supported." That anything that they can not do, somebody else has to do it, even if it seems menial, even if it's outside their usual job description. Whatever that might be, this is the tipping point. This is where we need to put all of our energy. And I think of an extreme case of that and I will say this is something I've often wished I had the trust to do with other adults but got away with because I was working with kids was when I was bringing science programs into elementary schools. And so I would come two hours ahead with a minivan full of PVC pipe that I turned into a bunch of simple machines. And I got to a school one day, and my contact there met me at the door and said,"Great, I'm so glad you're here, you can start an hour early, right?" I thought, I don't actually usually arrive with an extra hour besides what I need. And I said, "Okay, well, I'll try." She said, "Well, we can send kids to help you set up," and I'm thinking, "Okay, they don't know how to do any of these things These are third graders we're talking about." And I thought, "All right, send me your best direction followers. I don't need the smartest kids that are going to ask a ton of questions. I need the ones who will just do whatever we need." Because in that situation I was the person that most needed to be protected. And if I could give away even 30 seconds of something, that was the thing to do. So I ended up with these five kids who you know, they were out a class, they were perfectly happy. I didn't have to worry about my relationships with them so much, because they're just happy to be there. So what I said is, "All right, give them a line and follow me around." And whoever's at the front of the line, "Okay, go put this in the trash and then get in the back of the line." And then okay, "Here, there's this task. So this five times times at all the stations, and then get back in the back of the line." But I have this ready supply of little helpers for any menial little thing. It didn't matter how small it was. If there was anything I could think of that somebody else could do for me, they were right there to do it. And it made me incredibly efficient, and I did do the setup in half the time it normally took me and was able to start on time, because I had a team that wasn't going to question. They would just do whatever the thing was. And they did it and followed directions, and it made it incredibly efficient. And I think that there are times when as adults, if we can figure out how to do that for each other, we really can get things done that otherwise really aren't possible.

Paul: 14:03

What that really points to is the real challenge particularly those of us who try to work in very collaborative, very consensus-based sorts of ways is that in urgency, we need to exercise skills and we need to exercise ways of being and communicating and ways of working that are not familiar to us. There are different things we need to do. We maybe need to use a little bit more authority. We maybe need to use a little bit more hierarchy. We need to communicate maybe in a slightly more trust-laden fashion, where there's less of, "Let's discuss." And if we haven't built those skills, we aren't going to operate very well in that environment. I think that's the real challenge, is that it forces us one to think clearly about what do we really need to do, and two to think in a different way than we are habitually used to. And so it's very hard. We talk about collaboration and hierarchy as not exactly polar opposites but but showing up in different ways, and this is one of those demonstrations of the fact that it is useful to be able to operate at different points along the hierarchical-to-collaborative spectrum. When you have the skill of doing it, you can choose the mode of operation that's appropriate to the situation you're in, particularly when that situation is outside of your normal operational mode.

Karen: 15:52

Yeah. And I think we need to pay attention to the cost that that brings. There's a reason we don't operate this way all the time. And so the last thing I want to point to is one of the things to do when we're in a state of extreme urgency is ask ourselves, "Is this real?" I can flip into my urgent mode. I can add my hierarchy. I can concentrate resources where they need to be there. All that kind of stuff, we know how to do that, and we know it will come at a cost. Is the thing that I'm afraid of not getting done is the consequence of not meeting this deadline worth the cost of going into that space. Or does it actually make more sense to extend the deadline in some way, or to shift, or just not do the thing. And so just having a little bit of discernment even as cognition is shut down because anxiety is higher, and even as we're not making decisions as well, and we already have so many more things to have a little bit of space in our brain for, "Is this urgency? Is this tack for this situation, and addressing this as urgency actually the thing that is most useful?" Because it might be. It often is, but sometimes we go into that mode and we put a lot of stress on ourselves and on the team. And at the end, we're like, "We didn't need to do that." You know, the newsletter could have gone out a week later or the world would not have come to an end. But we just got caught by that deadline and didn't totally engage. So I just want to name that piece of it, that you want to make sure that you really need these strategies.

Paul: 17:43

To track where we've been talking about this idea of urgency urgency comes along with a sense of heightened anxiety and awareness. It isn't just that we have a deadline, it's that there's something about the pressures around that, around the timeliness in which something may be unexpected needs to be done. So we need to recognize that it is emotionally charged to be in a space of urgency. And so using techniques to work with that charge things like naming the fact that this is urgent, this is not our normal mode of operating and so we probably are going to want to do things in a slightly different way that's useful. Leveraging the trust and the relationships that you've already built in the collaborative space is useful. So if you've built them ahead of time, you're better able to absorb those urgent, anxious moments, and maybe need to do a little bit less cleanup afterwards. Recognizing that if you are used to working in a highly collaborative way, that those default behaviors are probably not going to be as useful to you in those moments. And to be able to move fluidly, gracefully, clearly into a space where you rely a little bit more on authority and on hierarchy. And on naming the fact that quality is going to go down when we're working in that way, and that we're we're accepting that we're taking that on. And we're not going to stay in this mode of operating forever. This is temporary, this is in response to something that's happening out there. And to your last point, and that we have made a conscious decision to do that, because it's justified by what's happening. Choosing to respond in this way, to meet this deadline, to achieve this level of timeliness is worth the cost, is worth doing it rather than responding maybe in a little bit slower way in our more normal mode of operation. That it makes sense to make that trade off. Those are all things that we find useful when we're sort of operating or feeling like we need to operate in a more urgent mode.

Karen: 20:04

Absolutely. And that's going to do it for us today. Until next time. I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 20:09

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.