When busyness becomes avoidance

The urgent work is real

A couple of years ago, I worked with a leadership team approaching an important stage of a technology-enabled transformation. At the same time, they were dealing with serious operational pressures. Those pressures were absorbing attention, tying up cash and creating risks that deserved a responsible response.

It would have been easy to say that this was why the project had not received enough attention from the leadership team. There was certainly no shortage of pressure, but that explanation felt incomplete.

The leaders all said they understood the importance of business readiness and the critical role they needed to play in it. And yet they kept getting distracted by the operational issues.

That raised a deeper question for me. It is a pattern I have noticed in many leadership teams, and in myself at times:

Is the urgent problem-solving work really preventing the important work, or is it also giving us a reason not to do the important thing that feels uncomfortable?

Familiar work lets us feel capable

Many leaders have built their careers by becoming good at solving problems. So when pressure rises, familiar work offers something valuable: we know how to approach it, we can make decisions and give direction, and we can see that we’ve been useful. Even when the situation is difficult, we recognise the territory.

The important strategic work often feels very different. It may require a conversation whose outcome we cannot control, a decision based on incomplete information or a move into an area where our experience no longer guarantees competence. The leaders may be working extraordinarily hard, and the urgent work may genuinely matter. That’s what makes the pattern difficult to see.

Busyness can be genuine and still function as avoidance. That’s why it’s so easy to confuse the two.

Research on the threat-rigidity effect offers one way to understand the pattern. Barry Staw, Lance Sandelands and Jane Dutton brought together evidence suggesting that threat can restrict information processing, concentrate control and make individuals, groups and organisations more likely to rely on well-learned responses. They also made an important qualification: familiar responses are not always dysfunctional. When the environment remains broadly stable, what worked before may still be appropriate. The danger arises when the situation has changed and the familiar response is no longer enough.

Under pressure, leaders can therefore become more attached to the work they know at exactly the point when adaptation requires something different. Part of that pull lies in what the unfamiliar work might cost us.

The risk may be real. The catastrophe may not be.

Sometimes the feared downside is entirely credible. A wrong decision could affect cash, customers, jobs or the viability of the organisation, and responsible leadership means taking those consequences seriously. But a credible risk and an unexamined catastrophe are not the same thing.

When they remain bundled together, leaders can experience every move as a threat to the whole organisation, their reputation or their career. More analysis then feels responsible even when it is no longer changing the decision. The useful work is to make the fear more specific.

What could actually happen? Which scenarios are plausible? How likely is each one? What protection, contingency or recovery route would allow the organisation to cope?

Psychologists Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor described a strategy they called defensive pessimism. Their experiments suggested that, for some people, considering negative possibilities could help them use anxiety to prepare rather than allowing it to become debilitating. Interfering with that strategy impaired performance in their study. That doesn’t prove that every leader should assume the worst, but it does challenge the idea that looking directly at a feared outcome is inherently unhelpful.

Sometimes imagining the downside is avoidance. Sometimes it is the work that turns a vague fear into a practical contingency. The difference is whether the thinking makes responsible action more possible or simply postpones it again.

When I faced the downside more specifically

Around 15 years ago, my own business was going through a tough period and the idea of losing everything was all-consuming. The imagined downside felt enormous, but I hadn’t really examined what would happen if it came true. I was sticking my head in the sand to some extent, but my subconscious had other ideas, so I was constantly feeling that low-level anxiety I couldn’t really explain.

While that fear remained abstract, it was difficult to think clearly about it. Then, working with my coach at the time, I started to break it down into smaller pieces. If the worst credible outcome happened, what would I actually do? How would I recover? What would the plan be? More usefully, how could I mitigate the risk of it happening?

Working through those questions certainly didn’t make the outcome any more desirable, but it did make the situation feel survivable. It became something I could respond to rather than something I was circling around and partly avoiding.

The key in all this was recognising that the anxiety and those middle-of-the-night wake-ups were signals I wasn’t paying attention to. When I started to face more specifically into what was causing the anxiety and take action to address it, the anxiety began to ease and the middle-of-the-night wake-ups became less frequent.

Protect the downside without building a hiding place

Contingency planning can create the confidence to move, but it can also become a more sophisticated form of delay. There will always be another scenario to test, another report to request or another safeguard that would make the decision feel more comfortable. The question is not whether all uncertainty has been removed. It is whether the credible downside has been protected sufficiently for a proportionate next step.

That may mean creating financial headroom, agreeing a rollback point, clarifying who can make which decision, securing visible sponsorship or choosing an experiment whose failure the organisation can absorb. Once that protection is in place, some fear may remain, but continued discomfort is not, by itself, evidence that the action is unsafe.

At that point the bias needs to move towards doing something.

One specific action can change our relationship with the problem

When a problem keeps me awake, my mind often won’t settle because it is circling the same threat without changing anything. I’ve found that writing down one specific action for the following morning can be enough to alter that relationship. The problem hasn’t disappeared, but I’m no longer only thinking about it. I’ve committed to movement.

Research on implementation intentions supports the broader value of making action specific. Peter Gollwitzer’s work examined plans that connect a recognisable situation with a defined response, helping people translate intentions into action rather than repeatedly postponing them.

In leadership settings, the next step doesn’t need to solve the whole problem. It needs to move the organisation towards understanding or changing the cause. That could mean holding the conversation that keeps being deferred, delegating an operational task that doesn’t require executive attention, testing one assumption with the people experiencing the change or deciding what evidence would trigger the next move.

A small action isn’t meaningful merely because it’s easy. It matters when it changes the situation, improves the evidence or makes the next decision possible.

What deserves your attention most?

The pattern isn’t always obvious because the activity itself may be valuable. The operational problem is real, customers still need a response and cash still needs protecting. The organisation has to function today while preparing for tomorrow.

The warning signal is repetition.

If the same symptom keeps consuming senior attention, if the causal work remains untouched and if the actions only leaders can take are repeatedly deferred, then lack of time may not be the whole explanation.

Ask:

• Which recurring problem is consuming the most leadership attention?
• What underlying work would reduce the likelihood of it returning?
• Which part of that work can only the leadership team do?
• What are we afraid might happen if we act?
• What is the worst credible outcome, rather than the worst imaginable one?
• What protection would make one responsible step possible?
• What familiar work could be delegated instead of used as a reason to wait?
• What exactly will we do next, and when?

These questions can help reveal what busyness may be protecting us from, but avoidance isn’t the final point. The greater concern is the value being left on the table while leadership attention remains too small. Time spent repeatedly managing the same symptom is time that cannot be invested in building capability, preparing people or creating the future the organisation says it wants.

Operational problems still need attention, but leadership also requires us to keep sight of the larger possibility beyond them. A useful question is:

What one thing would make the biggest long-term impact on this business?

Then look honestly at where your valuable attention is going. Is that one important thing receiving the time, thought and action it deserves?

Busyness and avoidance are not opposites. Sometimes the work that makes us feel most useful is also the work protecting us from the place where leadership is now required. The question is not whether you are working hard. It is whether that hard work is moving the organisation towards the value only its leaders can help create.