BEHAVIORAL MUSINGS

We’ve resisted adding our two-cents’ worth for quite some time.

After all, the debate started in the early 1990s, when email became a way of life.  That’s a long time to rage.

Today, opinionators and etiquette mavens, corporate security-types and bloggers, technologists and journalists offer solutions, ranging from more software (argh!) that will underwhelm the overload to Friday bans.  Here’s a sampling:

  • Strive for Inbox Zero.  [Then, what else will we have time for?]
  • Buy smart mail filters.  [On top of what we’re already charged for service?]
  • Set a time limit.  [Alarm clocks aren’t a good idea – they’re scary.]
  • Don’t sign up for junk.  [Your comment here … ]
  • Prioritize.  [If we could do that …]

Look at the suggestions:  They’re all driven by behaviors, good and not-so-good.  Much of which, in our worldview, is caused by some pretty common emotions:

  • ‘Suppose I overlook a critical time-sensitive message from my boss … and then fail on an assignment?’ [Fear]
  • ‘I’ll miss something important.’  [Uncertainty.]
  • ‘I don’t think I can manage without checking email.’ [Doubt]

Even with many unspoken concerns about managing email, the FUDs (fear-uncertainty-doubt) in many lives tend to dominate.  With 28 percent of our time spent writing, reading, and answering email (McKinsey), with 13 hours each week devoted to our beloved monster, and with double-digit email growth expected for the near term (Radicati Group), it’s time for a change.  Of the individual kind.

Anyone for establishing Emailers Anonymous?

THAT FUD FACTOR

Change management professionals know the acronym FUD well:  Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Most of us, in fact, are familiar with apprehension; it faces us almost every day.  Are we doing what’s right for our clients/employers?  How will we know this strategy-tactic-technique will succeed?  What will happen if it flops?

Lately, we’ve been hearing more of this anxiety in our conversations, subtly, quietly, in a hard-to-detect undertone.  Often, it’s a premature prelude to recommendations:  “I’ve only got a few people to implement this, so it’s gotta be simple to do.  Otherwise, we won’t do it.”  Just as frequently, it’s accompanied by budget caveats:  “We’ve got X dollars.  We need to make this count!”

It’s all fear-propelled, deep down.  That emotion could come from an unsteady economy, working in a volatile industry, personal concerns, new management, and all of the above. 

Understandable … yet disconcerting:  As professionals accustomed to the slings and arrows of continual crises, ongoing changes, and never-ending accountabilities, that fear-of-failure gene doesn’t inhabit our minds naturally.  It takes a great deal of courage to convince a CEO of the importance of a media interview, present a completely different brand strategy, champion a new campaign, and tell clients that this particular change won’t be easy.  Taking risks, in many circumstances, is embedded in how we earn our livelihoods; we prepare, we benchmark, we consult, we execute, and we measure.

Look at it from the corporate point of view:  In times calling for growth and innovation, overcautious, even negative-thinking employees become a distraction, if not detraction.  How do you shake colleagues out of the NIH* or paralyzed mindsets into taking calculated risks and, yes, managing possible failures?  Sure, upper management and executives can and should set the stage, even broadcast the “it’s okay to fail” message.  Is that enough? 

History gives us cues – in the form of Thomas Edison, Donald Trump, Richard Branson, and Michael Jordan (among hundreds of others).  It’s up to us, as brand and design and marketing and communications bearers, to translate those hints into a “let’s go for it” encouragement, every day.

*Not Invented Here