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Press Release |
Financial Times, January 23 03.
Doing nothing just will not do
By Virginia Matthews
At least 80 per cent of the business projects that are shelved or dismissed as "failures" each year were probably never started in the first place, according to a study. While organisations are right to expect project managers to consult colleagues or read up on their subjects before taking action, the tendency to disguise chronic procrastination as "creative thinking" is responsible for stifling some great ideas at birth, concludes the research by The Morgan Leith Partnership, a UK business coaching and management consultancy.
Graeme Leith at the consultancy believes that the inability to make decisions is one of the great ills of the modern boardroom: "People often procrastinate because they find it exciting to deal with very tight deadlines - or they want to be seen as fashionably overworked and important as they wrestle with a series of last-minute phone calls and e-mails."
"By delaying the report for two months, or sitting on a presentation for six weeks, they end up producing something quite inadequate in a couple of hours but earn the breathless admiration of their more plodding colleagues." If last-minute procrastinators are searching for thrills and status, it is the "congenital" delayers who do more real harm, he adds.
"Many managers in both the public and private sectors are dilatory because they are reluctant to make unpopular decisions. By failing to act altogether, they believe the situation will eventually resolve itself."
"The trouble is that someone down the line always suffers when a manager or director cannot make up his or her mind about a new appointment, say, or a change of supplier. It may make them feel that their power has been diminished, or it may even foster a general sense of apathy and impotence in the organisation as a whole."
Morgan Leith's research suggests that taking the first step to carrying out a project, be it arranging an initial meeting, getting the appropriate e-mail addresses or even composing a list of priorities in a notebook, is always the hardest when an important task is looming.
"Like pushing a car, the biggest effort is in getting the thing to shift in the first place. After that first step, it's comparatively easy to keep it moving," it says.
Although it tends to be managers who are criticised for failing to act, chief executives are also guilty.
"CEOs are popularly assumed to be decisive men and women of action but they will often hide their inability to decide on a course of action under furious amounts of red ink," says Judi James, business consultant and author. "While doing nothing can be a good negotiating point in certain circumstances, in wage bargaining, say, when silence may force the opposition to declare their hand, a great leader will try to instil a sense of urgency throughout the organisation."
John Barton, personnel director of Geberit, the Swiss-owned plumbing and drainage equipment group, says "analysis paralysis" inhibits many organisations from taking on their rivals: "We have made strenuous efforts to combat procrastination and delay by aggressively challenging what we call the 'rattling coffee cups' scenario, when a great competitive idea is strangled by too much fat-chewing."
"Decision-making by committees, inadequate budgets, lack of confidence and the fear of failure are four of the biggest triggers of procrastination in business."
"By choosing the right mixture of thinkers and doers to handle a project in the first place, and by making sure our people know that there is no shame in failure, we have begun to challenge the view that the best course of action is probably to do nothing."
Mr Leith adds that the culture of procrastination is particularly marked in the west but less obvious in the east. "Many managers in eastern companies take the view that consensus is very important, right down to the office cleaner. Yet while the canvassing of opinion about a particular course of action or project takes forever, once the decision is made action follows swiftly."
"In the Anglo-American model, decisions appear to be made very quickly, often before the right people are even consulted. But when push comes to shove, they often remain little more than 'feel-good' pieces of paper. Just because the chairman has decreed that project X will be carried out, it doesn't necessarily mean that anyone has lifted a finger." |
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