“A culture of reactivity alone insures that we have time to do little else but fight fires.”
Scott Ellis in Changed People Change Process
I once heard Zig Ziglar talk about the difference between reacting and responding. He urged the audience to think about going to the doctor because you have an illness. What if the doctor prescribes medication and you come back the next week?
If the doctor says you’ve had a reaction to the medication, that doesn’t sound good. That means you have broken out in hives or worse. The medicine isn’t helping.
But if you return and the doctor says you have responded to the medication, that means it is working and you are on the road to recovery.
It can be very easy to react to a situation. Frequently, a flurry of emails comes in with scores of very hot jobs. If you are servicing twenty different customers in a day, you can have twenty different hot jobs. The next thing you know, you spend the whole day putting out fires.
But what if we trained ourselves to respond instead of react? Instead of jumping at every hot job that comes in, what if we prioritized and looked at the big picture of the workload instead of attempt to put out twenty different fires?
It can be as tempting to react like the Sunday school teacher is in my cartoon. But if the teacher in this example reacts in a way that prevents her from the lesson and highjacks the rest of the time in class, it can be wasted time in class. That’s what reaction does. It creates waste.
Our challenge is to minimize a culture of reactivity and transform it into a responsive culture. Scott Ellis’ book has already given me some great insights on how to do that. Stay tuned and I’ll let you know how things progress.
