Years ago, as I was beginning my consulting practice, I spent a week mastering the DISC assessment tool for behavioral and personality characteristics. Many of you are familiar with the DISC profile; there are actually a number of assessments within the DISC series, and I took several that week to broaden my familiarity with what they could reveal.
One of the assessments focused on listening skills. It defined five different aspects of listening and produced a score for each one. One of the listening dimensions was analytical listening – listening for the purpose of making a decision. I had a high score on that one. I could have told you that before I took the test.
But I was surprised by my low score in another dimension - comprehensive listening. This measures your ability to wait until you have all the information you need to decide or act.
Upon reflection I realized that my low score indicated a real, problematic pattern for me. I remembered times when I made a mistake because I decided too quickly. I was too impatient to wait for information that would have changed my direction.
Impatience also plays a broader role in my life. I carry more tension than I need to when matters are in process, which is exhausting, and which can make me very disagreeable to be around. My unconscious tendency is always to hurry things along. And since some things can’t be hurried, this can lead to bad results of many kinds. As a trivial example, I’ve had to train myself to let the clothes dryer finish its cycle, rather than pulling damp clothes out of the dryer and trying to justify folding them and putting them away.
Impatience is a common trait in our culture. Think of how many successful new products have been launched based on nothing more than a slight reduction in waiting times. Often the products themselves are inferior, but many people buy them anyway.
Much of the widespread frustration with our political process stems from impatience, and it’s reflected on both sides of the political divide. Our federal system, encumbered by checks and balances, usually adopts changes slowly. Both parties have pushed the limits of what our system permits in an attempt to implement policies important to them.
Of course, our system was purposely designed to move slowly, both to protect citizens’ freedoms and to ensure that new ideas are tested and widely supported before they are adopted. This has given our political system remarkable stability over the years. Parliamentary systems can move much faster when one party has a majority, but countries who have them can oscillate wildly between policy extremes. Others are splintered among many parties, which produces dysfunction of a different type due as small political groups with widely divergent goals try to form coalitions.
In Jack’s post this week, he examined how the interplay of events and public opinion can create an unstoppable momentum that brushes aside the risks or potential consequences of charging ahead. MacArthur’s push across the 38th Parallel in the Korean War was a prime example.
The opposite situation can also occur. While broadly shared views of the path ahead can produce powerful, even unstoppable momentum, divided opinion can induce paralysis.
When the political process seems stuck, the temptation is to find a way to make something happen. Sometimes this requires flouting rules that previously had been generally accepted; more often, it involves exploiting ambiguity in the rules themselves, so you can argue you are complying with the system even as you maneuver in a new way.
This rarely ends well. Whatever can be done quickly and outside of normal channels can be undone just as quickly. You don’t achieve real change – you simply waste resources as you refight the same battles over and over.
When a democratic system is stalled between divergent alternatives, I’ve observed that it’s usually because neither side has a truly viable solution. Yours seems better to you, but you are likely not fully weighing the second order effects that will follow. You may not fully grasp the unintended consequences of your actions.
With our equally divided electorate, every time a party gets to 51% they try to upend as many economic and governance systems as they can. They have to hurry, because their slim majority is likely to dissipate soon. There’s no time to sort the good ideas from the bad ones.
Bad ideas also can burst into public awareness after an outrage; our emotions demand that something be done. Sometimes the outrage is so great and emotions are so strong and widespread that some kind of action is inevitable, resulting in a mad rush to action. The collective hysteria we associate with the Salem witch trials has played out again and again through our history.
When the emotional pressure to act is overwhelming, waiting is often the most constructive thing we can do. When we act in haste, it is likely that we will repent at leisure, as the saying goes.
What is true in our national life also holds true in our personal lives. As the writer of Ecclesiastes wrote many centuries ago, there is a time and season for everything. A time for decisive action, and a time for caution; a time to act and a time to wait.
How do you know what season you’re in? We’ll explore that question further next week.
My dear late mother told me on more than one occasion that I have the patience of a piss ant. I don’t know what a piss ant is but I am very confident that it has very little patience.
Several of my clients toward the latter part of my career highly valued people with a very high sense of urgency. These kinds of people got recognized and promoted ahead of others. Those people were very impatient. They were high “Ds” on your DiSC assessment.
Today we face a crossroads in our country in which impatience is a prerequisite for survival - especially in three areas - immigration, managing the debt and the wildly unnecessary expenses that go along with it and creating a balanced budget accompanied significantly less spending.
Getting off our back side and taking action on these matters with a high sense of urgency will be necessary for survival. In these cases, having the patience of a piss ant is a good thing.
Good observations. I am not completely convinced that the "ax approach" is being used. However, that is certainly the media portrayal of it. Unfortunately we have not gotten a truly clear look at what DOGE is actually doing until Bret Baier's interview with Elon and his group. That was a good start. I suspect that broad swath changes could and probably are happening first before the scalpel is applied. One of the challenges here is that this particular problem has been building since FDR or even before. Unfortunately it has greatly accelerated in recent years. I just don't know about "durable change". Frankly, I think that's what the American people want - at least until their ox is gored. I not not at all convinced that durable change is what Democrats want. Regarding the client front, different organizations had different cultures. Some tolerated measured "systemic" change. Others detested it. Those that valued a high sense urgency most appreciated those leaders that had a strong bias for action without leaving too many bodies in their wake. On the other hand, those very same people greatly praised the people who took aggressive action but punished them much later when they left a mess behind. It's frequently hard to find the right balance. For me, I look at what our leaders have been doing (or not doing) with unchecked immigration, profligate spending and a total aversion to managing the country's resources and say to myself during this current state: "Whatever in the world have you been doing all this time?" I could write a book but "less is more" ... for now!