False Deadlines: Waiting vs. Delay (putting things off)
Posted on Thu, Dec 20, 2012
I am in the middle of reading Wait, the Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy. At first, the title through me.... I don’t believe that delay is a positive trait and coach clients to avoid delay. What Partnoy is describing is how considered decisions (collecting data) improve results.
The example he uses is the time one has to see a professional tennis serve and then return it. Partnoy describes the time frame in this way: A tennis serve from a professional is traveling across the court at 130-150 miles per hour. This means that the returner has between 300-500 mili-seconds to strike/return the ball. Almost everyone, within 200 mili-seconds, sees the ball being hit. The difference between the best and me is what we do with the remaining 300 mili-seconds. What has been researched is that the best hold off making their return for as long as they can.
During this time, what they are doing is collecting data. Then they act. Now this period of time may not seem like waiting to you and I. However, I would agree with Partnoy that it is waiting (not delaying making the return) and it separates professionals from amateurs.
Here are two examples, one involving delay and the other waiting...
DELAY: I have a client who has a non-performing employee. The employee has been in their position for years and has actually refused offered classes to improve their skills and performance. The decision, to keep the employee in a pretty important role, is essentially a decision to be loyal to one person and jeopardize many more (the rest of the employees - I said that this was an important position).
WAIT: Another client promoted a high performing employee to a first senior management role. The first few months the employee kept coming to my client and reporting failures in their organization, without taking action. My client’s nails were bitten down to the nub and yet he continued to coach and mentor (the coaching included some pretty tough actionable sessions). The client had set a date by which performance had to be on target. He had communicated the time frame to the manager. Five months in to the six month period, my client started to observe changes. It still took two more months to get on target (one month beyond the deadline). In this case, I would suggest that my client was waiting (collecting data and even moving out his decision to the last possible moment).
The difference between the two was acceptance of poor performance vs working a plan.
Where have you recently acted and then wished you could hit a replay button or delayed because you were living in hope? What do you do to self-manage and provide yourself the value of waiting?