Sense of Urgency – A Cure for Complacency

In a fast-moving and changing world, a sleepy or steadfast contentment with the status quo can create disaster. For too often people are content with status-quo and are resistant to change. Complacency is much more common than we might think and very often invisible to the people involved. Success easily produces complacency. It does not even have to be recent success. An organization’s many years of prosperity could have ended a decade ago, and yet the complacency created by that prosperity can live on, often because the people involved don’t see it. Complacency is a feeling that a person has about his or her own behavior, about which he or she needs to do or not do. Almost always, complacent individuals do not view themselves as complacent. They see themselves behaving quite rationally. They can be creative in justifying their point of view. They pay insufficient attention to wonderful new opportunities and frightening new hazards. They continue with what has been the norm in the past. As an outsider, you may correctly see that internal complacency is dangerous, that past successes have created sluggishness or arrogance, but complacent insiders just don’t have that perspective.

To get over this complacency, organizations should create a high enough sense of true urgency among enough people. We live in an age when change is accelerating. The rate of change will continue to go up and up. To address the constant and continuous change, the sense of urgency will move from being an important issue every few years to being a powerful asset all the time.

True urgency focuses on critical issues. It is driven by a deep determination to win. When people have a true sense of urgency, they think that action on critical issues is needed NOW. A sense of urgency is not an attitude that I must have the project team meeting today, but that the meeting must accomplish something important today. Underlying a true sense of urgency is a set of feelings: a compulsive determination to move, and win, now. When it comes to affecting behavior feelings are more influential than thoughts. Thoughts are important, but whether it is contentment with the status quo, anger and anxiety, emotions influence action even more. Great leaders win over the hearts and minds of others. Martin Luther King Junior’s speech addressed not only the strategic plan that called for equality for blacks, but mostly it pounded away at people’s gut-level feelings with poetic rhetoric and passionate words about justice and morality.

Tactics for creating a true sense of urgency should aim at the heart. It should provide human experiences that work appropriately on all senses. People not only hear, but they see something in front of them or in their mind’s eye that helps raise urgency.

• Bring the outside reality into groups that are too inwardly focused. Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards. Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, video, sites and sounds.

• Behave with urgency every day. Demonstrate your own sense of urgency always in meetings, one-on-one interactions etc., and do so as visibly as possible to as many people as possible.

• Find opportunities in crises. Always be alert to see if crises can be a friend that can destroy complacencies.

• Deal with NoNos. Remove or neutralize all the relentless urgency-killers, people who are not skeptics but are determined to keep a group complacent or, if needed, to create destructive urgency.

To sustain urgency over time requires that it not only be created, but that it be re-created again and again. Sense of urgency leads to success, and success may lead to complacency if the sense of urgency is not re-created. The ultimate solution to the problem of urgency dropping after success is to create the right culture. Create the behaviors like being constantly alert, focusing externally, moving fast, stopping low-value added activities. When these behaviors become the norm, then a culture of urgency is instilled. People will then grab new opportunities, avoid new hazards, and continually find ways to win.

p.s This blog summarizes the learnings from the book “a sense of Urgency” by John P Kotter.

Happy Reading,
Ram