Know when to slow down
In this episode, we explore an essential challenge for anyone engaged in urgent large-scale change…
Following on from last week’s episode about ‘Lost for words’, how well do we manage the stress of working on large-scale change? How do we know when to slow down, take a break, allow ourselves a bit of time to stop and smell the roses?
Sure, everything’s urgent - or at least, the ones we notice will seem to be urgent, anyway. We know that.
And for the small urgent tasks, that’s usually not that much of a problem: we get the job done, take a breather, look around, see what else to do, then get on with that, and so on.
Yet with the changes going on around the world right now, there’s an increasing range of contexts where dealing with dangerous emergencies is becoming a non-stop, full-time task. For example, a lot of Australian firefighters have spent the past few months fighting wildfires in Canada, and they’ve now come back home to get some rest get ready for what’s likely to be a really bad bushfire season here. But the bushfire season has already started, a month or two earlier than expected - so they’re straight back into that task, without any time for that break
And when there’s no space for a break, no let-up, and the changes are at larger scale and over a longer timescale, then there’s likely to be a cumulative effect where at some point the stress will suddenly become too much bear. And when that happens, the body, mind and pretty much everything else can break down, seemingly without warning.
The Japanese have a term for this: karoshi, or ‘death by overwork’. Not A Good Idea…
Let’s see how that pattern develops.
The first point is that it’s a context where we have a driving sense of urgency that won’t let up.
Next, add into the mix that classic sense of over-responsibility - that we believe that we must keep working, that we’re the only ones available with the skills needed for that task, and often also the belief or fear that it will be our fault if it doesn’t work out well. When that happens, people try to keep going even when they’re worn down by the struggle - that even though they know when to slow down, they don’t, or can’t.
Now add into that mix a relentless sense of dread, about something that can often seem entirely capricious yet is also utterly devastating if it does come our way. Bushfire is like that; the front-line of a war-zone even more so.
And now place that in a context that continues onward and onward, without a break, seemingly with no end in sight.
How long people can keep on going under those conditions?
It turns out that we have some hard-data on that point. In a segment from 23m10s to 25m18s in the current episode of the YouTube channel World War Two in real-time, relating to the week of October 7, 1944, presenter Indy Neidell asks:
What does all this do to your head, if you’ve been in the actual fight? … [At this point] the British had been at war with Germany for more than five years, the Russians for more than three years, and the Americans for nearly three years. The strain of so prolonged a conflict had long been evident to the commanders of every army.
He then quotes from a report from the US Surgeon General that General Eisenhower had sent out to Allied troops in Europe on 4 October 1944, that warns about ‘the psychiatric problem’, and that “the danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down”. Neidell comments:
It also explains to all that it is impossible to ‘get used to combat’: you can’t. … [Each] of these moments adds a cumulative stress that will break down a man as inevitably as bullets and shells will. There are some figures in the report. The Americans estimate that in Italy an infantryman can last around 200 combat days. The British pull their men out of the lines for rest for four days after each twelve, and they think their men could last maybe 400 such days.
Taking a break makes it possible to keep going, for some while longer at least; but we can see from those figures that if we can’t take a break at all, the breakdown happens faster. British bomber-pilots were required to take a lengthy break after each ‘tour’ of thirty bombing-sorties, and experienced ones were often pulled back to train others; overall, they managed to keep going throughout the whole war, despite devastating losses. By contrast, German pilots and, even more, Japanese-navy pilots, were required to keep on going, without much if any break, until they could keep going no more, leaving only inexperienced, barely-trained rookies to take up the fight in their stead; the result was a steady decline in capability and performance, from initial success to almost complete collapse by the end of the war.
In that sense, knowing when to slow down - and actually taking those breaks when the opportunity permits - becomes crucial for success in the longer term.
True, right now we’re unlikely to risk being shot at or the like, in our work on getting everything in place to help our world survive the tsunami of huge changes that are already starting to arrive. (Though given the political climate, there’s no certainly that ‘being shot at or the like’ won’t happen somewhen in the near future… - and those capricious, seemingly-unpredictable risks from global-scale climate-change or from global-scale socioeconomic-collapse will affect everyone.)
Yet though those risks may seem distant at the present time, all of the other conditions do already apply:
there’s a driving need for urgent action, and there still aren’t anything like enough of us to do all of the work that’s needed;
a lot of us are already falling into that trap of over-responsibility - especially as most people are still unwilling are still unwilling to take any responsibility at all;
there’s often a real sense of dread about the sheer enormity of what we’re facing;
it’s already been a decades-long struggle, and there’s still no end in sight.
So yeah, we need to take this seriously. We need to know when to slow down; and we need pace the work - festina lente and all that. And above all, perhaps, that no matter how hard the work, we must slot in the time to ease off, to stop and smell the roses, metaphoric or real. The world needs us to do this work: we have a real responsibility here to ensure that we can keep on going in that work for as long as we can.