A Strategic Pause

Yesterday I was asked to "escalate" an issue. Someone out in the business hadn't completed some forms that had been requested a few weeks ago, and this was going to delay implementing some project changes. I was supposed to contact this person's line manager, highlight the lack of activity and generally bang the table ("escalate") until the recalcitrant miscreant did what was requested.

I thought I'd do a little checking before I started the escalation, and checked the forms. I found a mess - people listed in the wrong buildings, incorrect data, mostly people not associated with our contact ... etc. Hardly surprising that the forms hadn't been completed. Instead of escalating, I searched around for someone I vaguely knew in the relevant department and gave him a call to ask for assistance. He'd already gone home, so I took a risk and delayed doing anything until today.

Today I found that the person who had escalated this to me had got his information wrong, and the form is not due for completion until next week - it's been a long project, and mistakes are bound to happen sometimes. But I felt greatly relieved that I hadn't taken the escalation action that had been requested. That would have been counter-productive, made me look stupid (or at least uninformed) and high-handed. It was lucky I had taken a "strategic pause".

This seemed very relevant today when I was reading about the strategic benefits of doing nothing in business. While this might seem to encourage the idle, it does highlight the pragmatic approach to management that accepts over-reaction to data or events is just as counter-productive as ignoring information. Studying systems thinking (as I currently am), this links to the management of feedback to control systems. Make the control too reactive and the system rapidly oscillates between different states, while an unresponsive control introduces long lags between event and response. The secret is finding the appropriate balance.

So I'm not moving into the do nothing domain, but taking a "strategic pause" seems an appropriate response to many requests for action. One suggested response is in the art of being brave: listen, wait, do something different and keep it simple, to which I would add: ask lots of questions.