Your False Sense of "Urgency" Subverts Your Quality Assurance Efforts

Creativity thrives when managers let people decide how to climb a mountain; they needn’t, however, let employees choose which one.

- From this article (HBR article)

The word urgency has become synonymous with the daily work of so many corporates today. I am referring this, not to degrade the importance of urgency, but to understand how the ‘false sense’ and ‘frequency’ of urgency impacts everybody and the organization. The worst impact is on the product and / or services.

In almost 2 decades of my career life, I have seen innumerable instances, whereby corporates just love managing things on fire… not for a few days in a year, but almost every now and then. This creates a belief in the minds of majority of employees, that something worth doing has to be defined as urgent! Such beliefs create “belief systems”, which in turn creates the appropriate organization culture.

As rightly said by Mr. Martin Zwilling (Martin Zwilling's Blog)… “Many confuse the Sense of Urgency with a Sense of Emergency”.

Why did I wanted to write on this topic in the first place?

This is because… urgency has a direct impact on quality! Once quality takes a backseat, we have many more problems that crop-up to make this vicious circle even denser.

Let’s start by understanding, how urgency is so helpful … It helps us with –

1. Bringing in a change: To bring a positive change with an aim to win… urgency helps.
2. Creating “intrinsic motivation”: It helps to keep team-members on their toes and pushes them further on.
3. Finding opportunities from a crisis: It helps to find out newer ways to deal with a standard process and optimize it for better results.

Unfortunately, the positives of using urgency for our advantage is turned into creating a “false sense of urgency”. This is extremely important and what we should be “aware of”.

Why do we love (the false sense of) urgency in the first place?

As humans, with the advent of technology and huge amount of information overload (Yes! we are surrounded by a never-lasting feed of data from around the world now), the current generation of humans are slowly developing a ‘daily habit’ to –

• Find information, that invigorates or motivates them
• Share updates with others for ‘something new’ almost every day of our life
• Feel the need to multi-task and get a sense of ‘achieving more’

I have heard so many times from my earlier colleagues, boasting about managing 100+ emails daily and being able to multi-task. As per what I see here, such acts are highly detrimental on our overall productivity, since – 

1. Multi-tasking is a Myth: There is research on neuroscience, that multi-tasking through true for computers is not the same for our brains (refer an article here). On the contrary, our brain is only doing “multiple-switches” and due to this, it saps much of our energy and focus. With the latter, we are losing efficiency.
2. Too many priorities kill creativity and also productivity: Please refer a very nicely written article from HBR (click here) on this one. It shows how management / executives use urgency along with multiple priorities, or urgencies with different priorities daily, to not only kill creativity but also interfere with process compliance.

At the end of the day, the overall quality of the product or service has an impact, since employees are not able to comply with the required processes (or even validate a process outcome) Or, employees get bogged-down with the ‘mundane’ nature of urgency.

Apart from an impact on product / service quality, this has also created a negative side-effect in our mental capacities, as –

1. Creative Abilities: Our abilities to sit at one place and cherish boredom (boredom fuels creativity)
2. Concentration: Our ability to focus on a single task for a very long period (~ more than 4 hours) has been reducing
3. Psychological Withdrawal Symptoms: Our abilities to socialize, make important decisions of life and dealing with pressure are additional factors affected.

To Conclude...

Below are certain steps, that management / executives should take to effectively use urgency for the company’s growth.

1. Focus on the quality of employee productivity: Do not focus on the amount of time the employee stays in office but focus on his / her outcome. Again, quality of outcomes should be analyzed to assess productivity.
2. Correctly identify the ‘key business objectives’ (not more than 3), for a focused approach: Keep limited business objectives for a specific period of time based on the operational domain. 
3. Provide a high-level of clarity to middle-management: This helps teams develop focus on end-goals and helps management to develop and perform objective assessments.
4. Ensure, procedures are kept simple and employee friendly: Start with very simple procedures and metrics. Assess compliance and then make procedures complex, after taking feedback from teams.

- Written by Anand Nanavati (SupraDigit Solutions)