The Third Way

Urgency

Two insights from our urgency survey stood out.

Together, they paint a picture of the Big Urgency Energy (or BUE) dominating many organizations.

We experience BUE firsthand in our client work. More often than not, reflection is seen as a nice-to-have, not a must-have. It’s something an organization will "get to eventually" when they reach a natural pause point, which of course never arrives. Not when there’s always another fire to put out.

We also see teams willing to hold space for retrospectives but unwilling to go too deep, because they’re eager (or under pressure) to get back to the "real work" of solving problems. When the "Now we reflect and sensemake" part of your team’s operating rhythm is glossed over, it becomes exceedingly difficult to learn from the patterns that show up across multiple retros.

In this way, urgency can curtail learning and cumulative improvement.

The costs of avoiding reflection:

Difficulty knowing whether intended changes lead to intended outcomes. If you don’t reflect on how tweaks you’ve made to [insert project or initiative here] have either helped or hurt, how can you know what’s working versus what’s tanking? Steamrolling change after change without integrating learning is a recipe for no learning at all.

Cursory reflection turning into blaming and shaming. It takes practice for a team to step back and thoughtfully reflect on its work. Without an actual system to nurture that feedback, reflection can take a turn for the personal and result in blaming, say, Mike and Sheila alone for a project’s problems.

Burnout and frustration. Pausing can stop swirl in its tracks. It’s exhausting, even demoralizing to confront the same challenges again and again without having repeatable ways to tackle them. But teams that don’t engage in building shared understanding around what does and doesn’t work are more likely to repeat mistakes, thus kicking off another cycle of complaint and avoidance that traps them in reactivity.

Different takes on current and past realities. It's human to form different understandings of the past and the present. But if we never pause to share our beliefs about what’s happening and calibrate them so we’re all on the same page (or at least realize we’re on different pages), we get further apart in our understanding of what’s going on. At best, that can lead to rowing in different directions. More likely, it leads to disagreement, resentment, and gridlock. 

The ROI on holding space for reflection:

Separating reflective work from "real" work means missing out on chances to optimize what we’re doing—or to identify opportunities for growth and innovation that would come into view if only we slowed down enough to see them. As long as organizations are paying down the costs of urgency, they’ll forgo the long-term benefits that come with practicing the art of slowing down like:

Being able to emotionally process and make sense of challenging or difficult situations, and then retain or regain agency over what happens to you and how your work goes.

More effective teamwork, because everyone understands what's happened before, what that means, what the current reality is, and the direction we now want to explore.

Making systemic improvements that pay off long into the future rather than wasting time, energy, and attention on muscling through the same tensions over and over.

Accelerated learning and growth, which occurs when we take the time to notice new experiences and balance them against what we already know.

The clarification of lessons learned that can be shared broadly throughout an organization and scaled.

How to prevent a churn-y start to 2025?

1. Before a next project kicks off, hold an ICBD session with your team. ICBD stands for Intentions, Concerns, Boundaries, and Dreams and it’s an exercise to make the implicit explicit. Too often, these things remain unspoken when a team begins something new—which means they’re either assumed or misunderstood, and then clarity goes out the window. If you take the time to share your desires and worries upfront, you stand a greater chance at increasing awareness, trust, and empathy before the first fire breaks out.

2. Hold quick "hot washes" after important meetings, launches, or deliveries. It can be as simple as sending a quick Teams or Slack message: "How do you all feel that went? Anything we should do again next time or do differently?"

3. Put Retrospective meeting dates on your calendar now. Today! We’ll wait. If you’re on a persistent team and don’t yet have a regular cadence of reflecting on what’s working, what’s missing, and what could be better, protect this time before January rolls around. Retros are the most underrated yet high-value meeting to decrease urgency and increase learning in real time. Start with holding retros every six weeks. Here’s a pre-populated calendar with four retro dates in 2025 you can invite teammates to ASAP.

Resources to get started!

Need a template to use when your first retro rolls around? Here! And here’s a video demonstrating what it can look like in practice.