Reference reading
Impatience
Demanding an outcome while resisting the process that makes it possible.
Habitual unwillingness to allow the time or process that a worthwhile purpose reasonably requires.
Imagine this: A leader treats the necessary time for developing capacity as a delay that stronger demands ought to remove.
How the pattern works
The sapling becomes temporarily taller by losing its ground. Executive Impatience treats necessary duration as a defect that stronger insistence ought to remove. A worthwhile process is pressed to produce its appearance before the capacity behind the result has developed.
Training, investigation, integration and trust can all require active time. Their duration is not automatically justified, but neither is it removed by an urgent announcement. When the desired date becomes the only admissible reason, people may supply a visible result whose foundations are too weak for the reliance placed upon it.
What it costs the work
A rushed assurance can create more delay elsewhere through rework, incomplete understanding or commitments that cannot be met. People may also learn to hide the awkward parts of development because admitting them threatens the required story of progress.
A distinction worth keeping
Urgency can be justified, and unnecessary delay deserves examination. Patience is not passive acceptance of a slow arrangement. Impatience refuses a process its reasonably necessary time. Recklessness may result when consequences are discounted, but the impatience itself lies in the unwillingness to allow duration.
What a useful response can change
Distinguish necessary steps from inherited delay. Ask what the interval is doing and what evidence would show that it can safely be shortened.
Make progress visible in terms appropriate to the process rather than demanding a finished appearance at every review. Useful learning is not always the same thing as an immediately impressive output.
When the required date and available capacity cannot be reconciled, reconsider the commitment honestly. More pressure can change which limitation people report without changing the limitation itself.
Questions for reflection
- What work is this waiting period actually doing?
- Am I trying to shorten the process or shorten the account others are allowed to give of it?
Other perspectives
The individual may return upon, revise, restate, enlarge, and analyze the facts out of which suggestion springs.
John Dewey · How We Think · Read the source
Dewey makes reflection active: revisit and analyze the material from which a suggestion arose. A useful interval can improve an account rather than merely postpone its delivery.
Trifling alterations may, however, be made in it from time to time; and thus mathematical tables may, by the gradual extirpation of error, at last become perfect.
Charles Babbage · On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures · Read the source
Babbage describes progressive correction of printed mathematical tables. The concrete example values accumulated improvement; it does not promise that an organization can eliminate every error or delay.