Introduction

How does urgency affect our work and results? What causes so much urgency and reactivity in our workplace? Why has the pace of business accelerated so much over the past few years? And how do we learn to use urgency purposefully to ensure we deliver meaningful work in a timely way, rather than running around in a panicked frenzy? These are all questions we need to explore if we are going to harness urgency to drive us forward, instead of struggling against a headwind of constant urgency that makes progress harder than it needs to be.

Urgency is a reality in our modern workplace. But of course, not all urgency is within our control. Nor is all urgency bad; some things are impossible to plan for. Most of us are working in roles with many moving parts, balancing everyday issues with more complex initiatives. It’s complicated.

Consider a project. A project is a proactive endeavour that in a perfect world would have minimal urgency associated with it. If you are clear about the outcome to be achieved, and you plan the project well, and you estimate the duration of each activity effectively, and everyone does what they need to do when they need to do it, and you have no unexpected issues or delays, and you are not distracted by other work or issues, and nobody gets sick, and the world decides to work with you and not against you, then you might sail through the project with minimal urgency and reactivity. But that is unrealistic. Life is messy. Projects are complicated. People are busy and overwhelmed.

Urgency, when used appropriately, can create traction, build momentum and get things done. Urgency helps us to overcome inertia and complacency. But if used inappropriately, it can also distract us from other important priorities, waste time and resources, and burn people out.

We have to expect a certain amount of urgency in life. I’m not suggesting we can eradicate urgency, but we can minimise unproductive urgency. This is the urgency that could have been avoided in the first place. The unnecessary urgency that creates stress and slows work down. The urgency that can become a toxic part of your culture, and then become the norm.

Why are we in so much of a hurry these days?

My father, also named Dermot Crowley, was the head accountant for the ESB, or Electricity Supply Board, in Ireland. It was a senior role, but it never seemed to be a busy one, at least not by today’s senior executive standard.2 Dad had a big office, and I loved visiting him with my mum when we were in the city shopping before Christmas, or when we were going to a show or the movies. This would have been in the 1970s, when I was about eight years old.

I remember being led into his office by his secretary, and it seemed like a whole floor to me. It was huge to a small boy, with a big desk and a meeting table. My favourite thing in Dad’s office was his cheque-signing machine. Because he had to sign every wages cheque in the organisation, he had a machine that printed his signature onto the cheque. (This was in the days before personal computers.) The signing machine was kept in a huge safe in his office, and it was all very James Bond to me.

Despite the impressiveness of the surroundings, Dad never seemed that busy, and was never in a hurry! He always had a clear desk, and always had the time to meet us for lunch. In fact, he always took lunch. Later on, he would have lunch in the staff canteen, but when I was really young he would drive home for lunch (about twenty minutes each way). He would start work at 9 am and be home by 5.30 pm, which must have meant he left the office at 5 pm.

Imagine that nowadays! A senior executive who starts at 9 am and finishes at 5 pm, and has time for lunch each day! It seems impossible to most. But back then it was a different time. It just wasn’t as busy. People did not have the same relentless pressures on them. They didn’t attend as many meetings. They certainly didn’t have the volume of emails to contend with on top of everything else.

What has happened over the last few decades? Are our priorities so much more important now? Are things so much more urgent now because business has changed? Or have we changed, and just allowed the pace of business to get faster and faster, and told ourselves stories about how this increased pace has led to better outcomes?

To my mind, urgency has increased in our workplaces because of one crucial innovation that has changed the way that we work and the way we live. Technology. In my father’s day, computers were just coming into the workplace, but in the form of large mainframe systems in big rooms, not laptops on each desk. But of course, today’s workplace is radically different because of technology.

Technology has sped the world up, and this shows itself in numerous ways:

• communication technologies such as email have shortened the time it takes to communicate a message to others
• the ability to easily communicate across geographically spread offices means that someone is always working and requiring work from us
• the ubiquity of laptops, tablets and smartphones makes us contactable at any time, in any place
• the expectation of instant gratification driven by tools such as social media and online shopping has bled into our workstyles
• technology-driven media ensures that issues that affect our organisations are very public, very quickly
• technology that has enabled faster product development cycles that require speedy innovation to stay relevant and profitable.

Now, I love technology, and in fact have built a business around leveraging technology to help people stay organised. I believe that, overall, the impact of technology has been incredibly positive, and even the ways that technology has increased the pace of business are not necessarily bad. They are just a reality that we need to acknowledge and be aware of.

This change in the working landscape has not just led to us being busier and more reactive as individuals. I believe it has changed the very cultures we work in and, unfortunately, how our organisations are led. Many of us now work in overly reactive cultures with leaders who struggle to deal with the issues that arise from this faster pace of business.

The reality is that the fish rots from the head down, so reactive cultures can often be caused by reactive leaders.

If you are a manager or a leader, this might not be a comfortable statement for you. Just like Al Gore called climate change science an ‘inconvenient truth’ for governments, I call urgent cultures an inconvenient truth for leadership teams. Leaders are a part of the problem. Too often, in my experience, they use urgency as a blunt instrument to drive work forward. If leaders are not directly causing the urgency, they may be turning a blind eye to the long-term effects of acute and chronic reactivity. And I believe that this is having an incredibly negative impact on the workforce.

One of the key reasons I decided to write this book was to raise awareness of this issue for leadership teams, and, dare I say, create an urgency focus on addressing this issue in their organisation. The challenge I faced was that if I suggested to a leadership team that they ‘dial down the urgency’, they would usually push right back and say, ‘Hold on, we need our people to be working with a sense of urgency. That’s how we get traction and drive important work forward.’ However, this paradigm shifted for me earlier this year on a trip to the United States.

The urgency trap

I have been thinking about the problem of urgency for many years, but always struggled to find the right frame to discuss urgency and its associated problems. Then in 2019, I spent some time at Harvard, studying under Professor Ron Heifetz, a leading thinker in the field of leadership.3 Listening to Ron and his team, it dawned on me that there may be a way to deal with the urgency problem without just slowing work down. Leaders and managers need to help their teams to moderate urgency and use it in a more meaningful way. They need to help their teams to avoid the urgency trap.

The urgency trap is where we end up working with too much or not enough urgency. Leaders and managers should aim to apply just the right amount of urgency in a purposeful way to get things done on time.

Remember, not all urgency is bad. The negative effects of urgency can be minimised if we learn to use urgency with a sense of purpose. That is, to use it when required but to use it sparingly.

This is easier said than done.

As we work, different demands and pressures will present themselves. Most of us have lots of things to do and may have a busy meeting schedule to juggle alongside a list of priorities demanding our attention. Most of us are struggling to keep up.

If you are leading people you will need to manage this dilemma both for yourself and for your team. Of course, you need to keep work moving forward, making sure deadlines are met and issues are dealt with in a timely way. But what happens when everything becomes urgent, and your team start getting overwhelmed? Or if they switch off, or burn out and grind to a halt?

Urgency forces us into unproductive zones if we are not careful. In fact, there are three zones in which we operate as we do our work:

1. reactive
2. active
3. inactive.

Figure A (overleaf) helps us understand the different types of urgency we deal with...