Between the Roar and the Silence

The space where stuckness lives.

The roar from the crowd was electric.

“I don’t know about you, but I am tired of being #5.”

That was the statement that kicked off a massive event to bring over 10,000 people together, to reset and realign with the new strategy. Sitting in the audience, listening to the CEO speak, if you had walked in off the street, you would have thought you were at a rock concert. We saw demos, heard stories, and saw what was possible. The energy that week was contagious, and you couldn’t help but be excited.

And then, the week came to a close. On Monday, we all returned to our regularly scheduled work - the same meetings, the same to-do list.

Then a few months later, I was sitting in a quarterly planning meeting. We were reviewing progress on the key initiatives that were planned based on the week-long event. Most of them were struggling to make progress. I sat there wondering, if these are our strategic priorities, why do they feel like they are always on the back burner?

That gap between the electricity of the event and the lack of real progress in the months that followed, that’s what sparked my thinking about organizational stuckness.

The One Truth

When I started researching organizational stuckness, my hypothesis was that there was one singular reason, a root cause. And as it sometimes happens in research, my hypothesis was wrong.

Organizational stuckness is the result of multiple things coming together at the same time. I’ve taken to calling it the perfect storm of stuckness. The combination of our brain wiring plus organizations steeped in factory age legacies, and rapid unpredictable shifts in the world are the three forces that come together to create stuckness. But this stuckness doesn’t meet your traditional definition of stuck. This is a form of stuckness that happens while we are in motion, it is the stuckness that happens when we are busy jumping on calls, running to meetings, putting out fires. It’s a tricky kind of stuckness that we cannot really put our finger on but we sense it is there - hence why I coined the term Stuckifyed to describe the level of stuckness we are experiencing today.

So, when I was sitting there in the quarterly review meeting, watching all the activity around me, I could sense it, but I couldn’t name it. And I couldn’t answer the question - what was causing this?

The One Insight

Our brains love novelty. A big event that breaks up the monotonous work week triggers excitement. That electricity in the room was real. What’s also real is that our brains struggle to translate big abstract ideas into clear, manageable actions.

But then Monday rolls around, we are back to our regularly scheduled work lives. After a week away, we are greeted with full inboxes, packed calendars, and an overflowing to-do list. We are excited about what we learned at the big event, but we are not sure where to get started. The combination of business as usual and new strategic work is overwhelming, and this brings me to another feature of our brains.

Our brains want to conserve energy. Figuring out what to do takes far more energy than carrying on with what we’ve always done. So, we jump into the meetings we’ve always attended, respond to the emails, and scan the to-do list for the easiest tasks. We tell ourselves, we’ll get to the strategy work, just as soon as…[insert your preferred alternative task here]. Mine is caught up on emails.

But our brain wiring isn’t solely to blame. Organizations play their part in this, too. The strategy is set at the top, as it should be, but what doesn’t happen that should is translating the strategy so that everyone understands what it means for their level. What does all of this energy and excitement mean on Monday? What do I need to stop, start, and continue? Where do I get started? This level of clarity is almost never provided to the people who need it most.

This is what I call poor strategic clarity with a side of unfocused priorities.

You have a strategy that people struggle to translate, and the prior work that may or may not align with the new strategy isn’t reviewed to see what work should stop, what should continue, and what needs to start. The result is piling on more stuff. This combination is fatal because, when people are feeling stretched with a workload that has tasks they know how to do and tasks they have to figure out, the easy stuff will get priority, while the important, hard stuff gets pushed to the bottom of the list.

Insight into Action

Getting Unstuckifyed requires giving people a clear starting point. Not just any starting point, the smallest possible first step. And if you are scoffing at this…hear me out. Yes, I agree it is a very simple insight to action, but over the past 12 years, I have collected so many examples of how leaders failed to do this that I could write a book (and so I did).

The smallest possible first step is effective because it reduces a few things our brains don’t like…ambiguity, overwhelm, and energy expenditure. But there is also another reason…

You know that feeling you get when you have crossed something off your to-do list? That feeling of satisfaction? That is your brain rewarding you with a release of dopamine (the reward hormone). It is literally your brain’s cheerleader going “yay, you.” Every time we cross something off the list, we are rewarded. And that reward encourages us to do the next thing. And the next thing. It is a self-fulfilling upward cycle that helps us build momentum toward achieving big things.

And when you pair this with the electrifying energy of a novelty event (like the one in my example), you create an effective recipe for generating outcomes quickly.

Get Unstuckifyed

Okay. It’s your turn to try it. What’s the big thing in your world right now - the project, the decision - that you are stuck on? What’s the smallest possible step you can get started with?

And here is a bonus pro-tip: Once you’ve identified it, schedule it. Put it in your calendar like a meeting.

Till Next Time

Organizational stuckness is a tricky problem. What we actually see and experience are symptoms. And when we don’t understand what’s triggering them, our attempts to fix them don’t work. That frustration is why I do this work because it doesn’t have to be this way - better is possible.

Thanks for checking out the first edition of Unstuckifyed with Dr Dani. Tune in next week, when we dive into why our brains keep us stuck, even when we know better.

Thanks for getting Unstuckifyed with me.

Dr Dani