Tag: fear

When things stall

Fabrizio2 Comments

Sometimes you hit a winner.

It might be you have changed something in your routine, or you have worked more smartly and efficiently, or you have hired somebody for your team, or the situation around you changed. And things start to work. You achieve goals, you get praises, you march expedite towards the success you have defined for yourself and your organisation.

And then, it stops.

Just as suddenly as they have started, things stop working. The growth line is flat, goals are far off, the team starts raising questions and demanding change, you feel like you are a fraud and everything you have achieved so far is just a coincidence.

A common thread I found when this happens is the tendency to intensify work. You do more, you ask people around you to do more, you hire more, you grow your operations. And while doing that, you get the chance to do more of what brought you to the initial success: more marketing, more sales, more product development, more everything. Very soon, you (and your organisation) are in a frenzy state, you do not have time to think about what is happening because there’s a new urgency, you become like an unintelligent robot repeating things you did in the past expecting a different outcome. Needless to say, this rarely works.

What tends to work, instead, is taking a break. That does not mean going out of business and start anew. It means sitting with your team, looking at the fundamentals of what you are doing and see what changed. Is it the size? Is it the why? Is it the who? Where in the process did a critical shift happen that was not noticed? Is there anything that is still working? Of course, this is a process that requires awareness and openness, and hopefully you have established such an environment when things were going well (rarely those will spark in dire times). When you are done, you’ll have a new plan, that possibly will require you and your team not to do more, but to do better. Not to find more customers, but to find better customers. Not to hire more people, but to hire better people. Not to do more marketing, but to do better marketing. Not to add more processes and levels, but to act on better practices and experiences.

Be ready, because if you are lucky, you’ll have to go through the process very soon.

A matter of choice

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With 2.41 billion monthly active users and its stock trading at the high-end of its 52 weeks rolling average, Facebook is not going to take responsibility for the damages it does to society and democracy. Businesses tend to change when things go bad (we all do, to be honest), and despite some slaps on the wrist for its malpractices, keep your expectations low on the company making it its priority to modify what made them rich.

Regulators and politicians, on the other hand, are late in taking actions to avoid Facebook and others to keep wreaking avock in our communities. The former are chasing a change in society and business that they clearly struggle to understand, and operating at national level they are more concerned with making sure home companies are competitive than with doing what’s longly overdue. The latter, well on all sides they have embraced the platforms using all of the possible subterfuges and tricks they could learn to make themselves more visible, more likeable, more approchable, and eventually more votable.

There’s still a missing part in this picture, and it’s the 2.41 billion monthly active users. That’s us. The ones that use Facebook, the ones that create content for the platform keeping it alive, the ones that endorse their policies and business model whether we like them or not, the ones that cannot leave because, you know, “I have all my pictures there”, or “there’s that group I want to follow”. It’s once again a matter of what is fair and what is convenient. Until we keep choosing convenient, it’s pointless to storm social media channels every time something terrible happens.

Find the challenge

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It’s pleasant to hear we are right, to be praised for the great work we are doing, to be surrounded by people who let us do what we believe is worth doing.

And yet, it’s a position in which we should feel uncomfortable.

As nobody is perfect, and most of us are far from it, if all we hear are praises and applauses one of two things is happening: either the criticism and the alternatives are being hidden from us or we are in an environment that lacks diversity. In both cases, we are not hearing the other side of the story, the one that would make our understanding rounder and more effective.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

John Stuart Mill

Reporting relevance

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In July, this blog has gotten most visitors in a single month than ever, more than doubling the number from June. Views per day and per post have doubled as well. The reach was expanded to new countries, such as Ukraine, Papua New Guinea and the Netherlands, and viewership in an important country such as Germany was consolidated (visitors increased 1,000% month-over-month). The most popular hour to post is confirmed to be 8PM, as most of this blog’s audience seem to be online then.

This is all true. And of course, it is irrelevant.

With the amount of data we get exposed to nowadays, it is easy to get distracted by numbers and fake successes. We have actually developed an extended capacity to focus on the numbers that confirm what we believe is happening and boost our confidence, without talking about the ones that actually matters.

Why are you tracking what you are presenting? How does that affect the change you are trying to make? Are you closer or farther away from achieving that? Can you measure the final change? Is an history of those numbers, going back at least 12 months, available? Would people react differently if they would see natural numbers rather than percentages?

Those are important questions when preparing your next report. If you don’t know how to answer them, or if you catch yourself cheating while answering them, do everyone a favour and do not press send.

When we are afraid

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Heights scare me.

It’s a truth I get confirmed every time I stand at more than two metres above the ground. Last week I was on a panoramic tower at an amusement park with my son. I thought I could do it, as it looked safe and was completely closed by one big window. And he really wanted to go. But as soon as we started moving up, I realised it was a bad idea. No way to go back, there were many people with us, and the climb was automatized. As we were sitting there and moving up, I grabbed my son, telling him to stay seated and composed, as moving too much could be dangerous (not true). At some point, I have also put a whole arm across his chest (as a sort of safety belt), and he immediately reacted by removing my arm and asking “daddy, why are you doing this?”.

Why was I doing it?

Of course, I was seeking control. When we are afraid and when things start to slip away, we seek control. We want to make sure that the world is comfortable and predictable, and the way we try to achieve that is by taking control on what we have power on.

It’s a natural reaction, and yet one that has at least a couple of problems.

First, it prevents us from experiencing the situation: I have no memory of what I saw on the tower, no clear idea of what I was feeling and where, and not a single more tool to try to fight the fear should I find myself in the same situation again.

Second, it prevents others around us from experiencing the situation: my son was bothered by my behaviour, he probably enjoyed the ride anyway, but I am not sure he would like to go again with me, and to be honest I cannot blame him.

For as difficult as it is in certain situations, letting go is the best thing one can do in the face of fear. Appreciating the fact that the present moment is scary for you, understanding how it makes you feel, taking a deep breath, and completely taking in what is going on.

Train with small things first, then pass onto the bigger ones. It will be liberating.