Harvard's John Kotter described two kinds of urgency. From the outside, they can look the same: busy people, full calendars, a sense that things need to move. Underneath, they do very different things to how a team thinks and makes judgement calls.
False urgency
Kotter described false urgency as driven by anxiety and anger. Packed calendars. Back-to-back meetings. No time to think. His verdict: "activity, not productivity".
Anxiety and anger pull judgement in opposite directions
Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner (2001) found that fear and anger shift how people judge risk, in opposite directions:
Fear makes risks look bigger.
Anger makes them look smaller.
Put both in one team and you can get something odd: a team that catastrophises and charges ahead at the same time.
True urgency
True urgency, in Kotter's words, is "a deep determination to win, not anxiety about losing". It shows up as focus on the few issues that matter, and real progress every day.
How to tell the difference
- Meetings. False urgency: updates, decks and "we need to move faster". True urgency: decisions about who does what, by when.
- Calendar. Back-to-back with no space to think, or space for what matters most.
- End of the day. Anxious, frustrated and tired, or tired but clear on what moved.
- Focus. Everything feels important, or the critical few.
The difference is in how pressure is perceived
Psychologists describe two ways of reading pressure.
As a threat: something that could harm us. Or as a challenge: a stretch worth meeting.
A meta-analysis by Andrew Hase and colleagues (2019) found a challenge state is linked to better performance across many studies.
Under threat, the brain changes what we see
In experiments by Shana Cole, Emily Balcetis and David Dunning (2013), people judged a threatening object to be closer than a neutral one. Separately, Amy Arnsten's review (2009) describes how even mild stress that feels out of our control can rapidly reduce our capacity for clear, flexible thinking.
Try this
- Ask: what's on your calendar that doesn't clearly move things forward?
- End every meeting with who does what, by when.
Both simple; the hard part is doing it consistently.
True urgency sharpens focus. False urgency skews judgement. Next in this series: the third way we read pressure, and why it can wear teams out.
Originally published on LinkedIn by Progression. Follow us there for part two.
