In this episode, we explore how exhaustion can take its toll amongst those of us who work with change.
Over the past couple of weeks, things have been a bit rough for various of my colleagues working on change.
(Not their real names here, of course, and some details also changed for obvious reasons.)
Ben sent a message saying that he wouldn’t be able to do our weekly meeting, after running on overload for too long.
Nick postponed his meeting for a couple of days, for much the same reasons.
Steve saying that he’s just come back from working up at the Top End and would have to take a raincheck on our Friday chat.
And then Dave called, wanting some help with the simple-but-not-so-simple career-changing question “What do I do next?”
All feeling worn down by the struggle.
And me? Well, I’ve been stuck in that state for so long now that I’m as worn-down and delapidated as a pair of old Blundstone boots…
Why? What’s going on? Why’s everyone so worn down?
For Ben, it was about month upon month of dealing with bureaucracy, following rules that even they’d admitted made no sense to anyone in that context, but insisting that the rules had to be followed because they were rules.
For Nick, it was about having to deliver yet another new plan for yet another new project in yet another new industry, up against unrealistically tight deadlines.
For Steve, it was both of those, working on a huge project with many hidden complexities and nuances and nightmare long-term maintenance-issues, yet dealing with managers who didn’t care about any of that but just wanted it all signed off before end-of-financial-year.
For Dave, all of the magic gone from tackling the same issues time after time after time in the industry he’d been in for the past two decades, and feeling he couldn’t face it any more.
And for me, it’s kind of all of the above, really. All of those things. All of them, all of the time, endlessly repeating, over and over, in every small way. And not so small, sometimes.
Small changes, yes, but the wrong kinds of small-changes. Or small not-changes, more often. ‘Death by a thousand small cuts’ - that kind of thing. That’s what gets us to be so worn down.
Either way, and more than anything else, it’s an outcome of the culture that we live in, that we work in.
A culture that rewards a focus only on the short-term - leading to relentless failure-demand, doing the same failed thing again and again without ever actually reaching completion.
A culture that wants simple rules and simple answers for things that aren’t simple at all.
A culture that demands certainty and control - or at least the illusion of ‘control’ - where there’s none to be had.
A culture that insists on everything staying the same, even when that everything is actually changing all around them - a desperate pretence that that we can keep on going exactly as we are, when it’s so painfully clear now that we can’t.
A culture that’s become a full-blown paediarchy - ‘rule by, for and on behalf of the most childish’ - in which childish irresponsibility will be rewarded and praised, whilst a more-adult responsibility is more likely to be punished instead.
And we then wonder why things don’t work out well.
Not A Good Idea…
Okay, sure, but why does this matter?
It’s because it’s those of us who do care, who do try to prevent the damage, or to help the culture recover from its own self-inflicted damage, who bear the brunt of it all. Who take on not just all of the work, but also all of the blame.
And we can’t keep on going like that. It gets us worn down to dust. Worn down to oblivion.
It leads to skilled people withdrawing from the context.
It leads to skilled people withdrawing from life. In every sense of that term.
Yeah, definitely Not A Good Idea…
If that’s the case, then what do we do about it?
Part of this is closely related to burnout, of course, so a fair few of the issues and tactics that we explored in the Burnout post here a few weeks ago would also apply to this as well. For example, in my discussions with Dave above, we recognised that much of what he was facing would be described well by the French term ennui: often misunderstood as mere boredom, but more accurately something more like listlessness, weariness, not just dissatisfaction but more a form of emptiness, nothingness. If that’s the case, then the counterpart that we need to reach or recreate here is the opposite of all of that: an aliveness, enthusiasm, a re-commitment to the work for its own sake. It may not be obvious straight away as to how we might be able to get there, but at least we’d know what we’re aiming for!
(It’s still common to describe these challenges as a matter of emotional-health or mental health. Yet although those themes may indeed play a part in this, technically it’s more often a matter of spiritual-health - ‘a sense of meaning and purpose, a sense of self and of relationship with that which is greater than self’. Those distinctions are important, and I’ll aim to do a post here about that somewhen in the next week or so.)
The other common challenge here is a tendency towards over-responsibility. In part this is because it’s so clear to us that these are crucially important changes that need to be faced, and that someone needs to make sure that they’re properly addressed; and yet because it’s so painfully obvious that no-one else seems to be taking up that responsibility - or even acknowledging it at all - then it easily seems that the only one who can and will do it is us. Yet we also need to recognise that that’s a trap: trying to do it all ourselves will only get us worn down even faster. Instead, we need to find allies and companions in the work - and yes, they are there, once we allow ourselves to look for them.
And no matter how urgent the work may be, or seem to be, we won’t be much use if we’re too worn down to be able to do it anyway. Given that, it can sometimes be useful to remember the advice once given to me by a fellow-contractor, which he described as ‘the Contractor’s Creed’:
“Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and charge…”
Somewhat cynical, sure: but it was definitely the right attitude to cope with the disastrously-incompetent manager on that project. Sure, we need to do what we can to minimise the damage being caused in that kind of context; but trying to be over-responsible, to compensate for someone else’s failings, ultimately only hurts us, and doesn’t resolve the problem anyway. So yeah, we do need to be responsible about our own tendencies to be over-responsible, and keep those too-natural tendencies at bay as much as we can. After all, we don’t want to get worn down all over again, do we?