Reading Time: 5 min
A compass can be only a few degrees off and still point north. For a while, it doesn’t matter much. The path looks right. The scenery is familiar. You are still moving forward.
Keep walking, though, and those few degrees begin to matter. You may eventually arrive somewhere you never intended to go.
Direction is strange that way.
You can be moving for quite some time before you realise you are no longer heading where you thought you were.
Life can work like that too.
We often think of choices as moments that deserve our attention. A new job. A difficult conversation. A decision to stay or leave.
But some of the choices that shape us are much less dramatic. You answer the message because it will only take two minutes. You take on the task because you can do it faster. You don’t challenge the decision because everyone is already stretched. You say yes because saying no would require an explanation. You postpone the conversation because today isn’t the right day.
None of these decisions looks particularly important. And sometimes, it isn’t.The interesting question is what happens when the same kind of decision keeps appearing.
The two-minute message becomes an evening habit. The task you took on temporarily becomes something people automatically bring to you. The conversation you avoided becomes a conversation that gets harder to have. The person who always says yes starts receiving more opportunities to say yes.
Eventually, something subtle can happen. The choice begins to disappear.
You don’t think, Should I take this on? You think, Of course I’ll take it. You don’t think, Should I respond now? You think, I need to respond. You don’t think, Do I actually have capacity for this? You think, I’ll find a way.
The decision has become part of the background. That is where direction becomes interesting. The most consequential choices may not be the ones that feel difficult. They may be the ones we stop experiencing as choices at all. This can be particularly important when we think about burnout.
By the time exhaustion becomes impossible to ignore, it can be tempting to look backwards for one obvious cause.
The impossible deadline. The difficult manager. The long hours. The project that went wrong.
Sometimes there is one. But sometimes there isn’t.
Sometimes there is simply a long trail of perfectly understandable decisions.
A little more responsibility.A little less recovery. A little more accommodation. A little less speaking up.
Each decision may have made sense at the time.
That doesn’t make the eventual direction inevitable. But it does make it easier to miss. And this is where the individual experience becomes interesting for organizations.
Organizations also move through thousands of small decisions. Not just the decisions written into strategy documents or approved in boardrooms. The everyday ones.
Who gets listened to when they raise a concern?What happens when someone says a deadline isn’t realistic? Who gets asked to fix the problem when something goes wrong? What behaviour gets noticed? What behaviour gets rewarded? What happens when someone says, “I don’t have capacity”?
A company does not need a policy saying, “Always say yes.”
It can create that expectation in much quieter ways. The person who raises an issue may discover that solving it themselves is easier than raising it. The person who delivers under impossible circumstances may become the person trusted with the next impossible assignment.
The manager who is always available may unintentionally teach others that availability is part of being committed.
None of these moments needs to be dramatic. But they tell people something. And people adjust. Over time, what was once a choice can become an expectation. And what was once an expectation can become difficult to question.
This is not necessarily about a bad organization or bad intentions. Often, the people involved are simply responding to what is in front of them.
The problem is that every response also creates information about what happens next.
A team learns what gets tolerated.
A manager learns what gets done.
An employee learns what is safe to say.
And gradually, the organization can begin moving in a direction that nobody consciously selected.
That makes direction worth noticing.
Not because every decision needs to become a philosophical exercise.
It doesn’t.
We cannot stop at every crossroads and ask whether this particular email, meeting or decision is taking us towards our ideal future.
But occasionally, it may be useful to step back from the individual choice and look at the line connecting them.
For a person:
If I keep responding to situations this way, where might I end up?
For an organization:
If we keep rewarding and repeating these behaviours, what kind of place might we gradually create?
Neither question tells us what the answer should be.
Perhaps that is the point.
A compass doesn’t tell you where you ought to go. It simply tells you where you are pointing.
And sometimes the most useful thing we can do is notice the direction before we have travelled too far to wonder why we ended up there.
~ Megha.
OutoftheBurn. Ambition with Ease.
