Imagine it’s early morning and you’ve just logged into your “mandatory all employee” call with the Executive Team. Between bits of corporate buzzword bingo and quarterly sales results, a phrase is repeated: “bias for action.” The CEO looks meaningfully into the camera, opining the importance of taking action to stay ahead of the market and competitors. It sounds like a call to arms, a mantra for progress and success. As other managers visibly nod their approval, you think to yourself how a “bias for action” sounds reasonable. In business, we want to foster agility, build momentum, move forward. Growth and progress tend to be at the center of management’s north star, therefore a sense of urgency to take action is comforting and appealing.
The problem is, action without coordination or deliberation can lead to catastrophic results. This becomes a near certain outcome when action is promoted as a value without due regard for the practices that make solutions and actions effective: problem definition and analysis, hypothesis and experimentation, collaboration and dialogue.
Despite what the “religion of work” evangelists would have you believe, a “bias for action” is neither effective nor sustainable. In this article, we will delve into the problems associated with “bias for action” as an organizational (and personal) value. Specifically, how single minded bias for action disregards the importance of current state analysis, increases waste and delay, and rewards hasty solutions over thoughtful, effective problem-solving.
The glorification of “bias for action” stems from the idea that taking swift and decisive action is the best way to avoid “analysis paralysis” and seize opportunities. It is true that reluctance to make decisions and act on them can lead to missed opportunities, organizational drift, and other negative effects. However, taking action (particularly without appropriate reflection and alignment) can equally produce or exacerbate problems. Action is a tactic, and deprived of any context, it is meaningless as a value or an objective. Ideally, we should seek a suitable balance between reflection and urgency.
Here’s a familiar scenario: a software development team finds itself buried in support tickets and increasingly bespoke customer requests. Frustration mounts as users, fed up with an unreliable platform and unfulfilled promises of improved functionality, threaten to take their business elsewhere. Months or even years of hastily implemented, half baked solutions and neglected maintenance have made it an impossible task to make changes with stability and predictability. The team wishes they could take time to finally root out longstanding risk and modernize their tooling, but any time spent on a task not directly related to a customer request is perceived by management as a “nice-to-have.” The cycle continues as the team is forced to battle its codebase to implement more hasty fixes.
If your experience resembles this, you may have also heard the following from management figures in response:
“It would be great to fix these issues, but right now we’re in firefighting mode and need to take action.”
“We don’t have time to reflect on how to improve our ways of working, we need to be ‘heads down’ and deliver!”
“To succeed, we need to be extremely hardcore. This means working long hours at high intensity.”
This mindset suggests that the main contributor to the situation described above is lack of action, and therefore it can only be solved with more action. In truth, these issues are more likely to be caused by too much action, the wrong types of action, and action without focus or reflection.
Some threads emerge from this narrative that will be expanded on below.
1. The suggestion that lack of action is the root of all problems reflects a breakdown of trust between manager and managed. The team is lazy so they must be compelled towards action.
2. Time spent reflecting or analyzing problems in the current state is perceived as wasteful or unnecessary. A “nice-to-have,” as opposed to a mandatory stage of the scientific method and the very foundation of human knowledge.
3. Action without focus or purpose can, paradoxically, slow down delivery by implicitly encouraging people to initiate shiny new projects rather than complete work already in progress.
4. “Bias for action” contributes to a vicious repeating cycle of delivering urgent, hasty solutions that diminish the possibility of ever being able to address deep rooted issues.
Action-biased managers take a page out of the Theory X playbook by assuming people are generally lazy and unmotivated if left to their own devices. In this infantilizing framing, employees are self-interested and irresponsible, so they must be compelled by a strong leader and material incentives to be productive. The allure of such behavior is also rooted in a shallow analysis of productivity which tends to equate growth as a proxy measurement of success. Examples of this temptation are numerous, such as Charles Schwab famously manipulating workers through competition to Silicon Valley normalizing its unsustainable boom-to-bust management practices. The most common manifestations of “bias for action” in the workplace appear to create toxic, cutthroat dynamics.
Let’s begin with a key problem of glorifying “bias for action” illustrated in the above hypothetical. Faced with a crisis (actual or perceived), pressure mounts on individuals to appear to be taking action rather than engaging in reflection and analysis. In turn, a critical point of leverage for improvement and success is pushed aside: understanding the current state of the system itself.
Perhaps a root cause analysis would find that much effort could be saved simply by implementing better monitoring systems to prevent incidents before they occur. Maybe a critical upgrade has been deferred for too long, and spending time on this would reduce support requests in a particular area, freeing up valuable time. In an organization that emphasizes performative busy-ness and bias for action, time spent on such analysis is time not spent fighting fires, and continually becomes subordinated by the arsonists in charge. Emphasizing action as the predominant behavior deserving of reward disincentivizes deeper understanding of the underlying issues. This generates misguided efforts and wasted resources.
Organizations that prioritize action over understanding tend to experience a cycle of repeating mistakes and fail to learn from past experiences. This problem runs deeper than hindering improvement efforts today: a “bias for action” degrades the capability of the system to improve in the future, too. When action-as-such is incentivized, the organization becomes flooded with change, initiatives, and busy-ness, which muddies linkages between cause and effect (which not-so-coincidentally is the base condition needed to understand your system). Organizations and managers who espouse “bias for action” make it difficult to detect which actions (if any) led to an outcome. Worse, they often mistakenly attribute the wrong factors through their own confirmation bias, keeping everyone stuck in a positive feedback loop without understanding why improvement remains elusive.
As stated, bias for action amounts to performative busy-ness. In a culture that promotes this value, one might expect to see its standard bearers disrupting operations with new, shiny projects that will “save the business” – typically band aid solutions that deprive resources from the long term, systemic solutions required to see a meaningful change in outcomes. The emphasis on starting work rather than finishing it results in excessive waste and delay as individuals and teams jump from one task to another without completing them satisfactorily. An obsession with starting new initiatives can lead to a lack of focus and accountability, ultimately hindering organizational effectiveness. Recalling the hypothetical software team described previously, “bias for action” exacerbates the situation, piling hasty fix upon hasty fix until the codebase becomes a monster one must wrestle to implement even the smallest change.
When we look at complex systems in nature, such as the human body, equilibrium is maintained by the careful management of cause-and-effect relationships between parts – not a disorderly “bias for action” where all organs of the body relentlessly prioritize activity and motion. Behaviors in nature tend to optimize for balance of competing forces, such as a dog chasing a stick thrown into a lake: the dog does not prioritize action by making a direct-line approach; rather, it balances “fast movement” (running along the shore) with “slow movement” (swimming) to find the optimal path. Such balance is even mathematical in practice: “conservation of flow” is paramount to maximizing the capacity and performance of systems in a service and management context. The “bias for action” mindset amplifies organizational entropy and necessarily places value on the illusion of beneficial short term growth.
Recognizing this tendency–our innate association with urgency as a proxy for effectiveness–rather than glorifying it is the first step to improvement. We are instinctually allured by urgency and this causes us to overlook the quality and viability of our solutions (Baumeister et al., 2001). Researchers note how “the weight of the evidence suggests that people are more strongly motivated to avoid bad views of self than to claim good ones”. By mistaking action, activity, and motion as an indicator of capability and competence, the “bias for action” manager falls into a trap of satisfying their own desire to avoid negative perception by others, even if a better outcome would be reached through thoughtful analysis and understanding.
Still not convinced? This effect even manifests among highly trained professional athletes competing in the world’s most popular sport:
“Consider professional soccer goalies and their strategies for defending against penalty kicks. According to a study by Michael Bar-Eli and colleagues, those who stay in the center of the goal, rather than leaping to the right or left, perform the best: They have a 33.3% chance of stopping the ball. Nonetheless, goalies stay in the center only 6.3% of the time. Why? Because it looks and feels better to have missed the ball by diving, even if it turns out to have been in the wrong direction, than to have stood still and watched the ball sail by.”
(Source)
Bias for action might look flashy for the camera, but in practice, it can discourage thoughtful, in-depth problem-solving and hinder the pursuit of long-term, sustainable solutions.
In conclusion, the prevailing notion of a “bias for action” as an organizational value is misguided and detrimental. While it may seem appealing to prioritize action and urgency, the emphasis on immediate activity without coordination or reflection leads to a host of problems:
- The belief that lack of action is the root cause of all problems reflects a breakdown of trust between managers and employees. It assumes that individuals are lazy and need to be compelled to take action, eroding the potential for collaboration and teamwork.
- The relentless pursuit of action neglects the importance of current state analysis and problem reflection. Time spent understanding the existing system and identifying underlying issues is dismissed as wasteful, when in fact, it is a crucial step in effective problem-solving and improvement.
- An excessive bias for action can paradoxically hinder progress by encouraging the initiation of new projects without completing existing ones satisfactorily. This lack of focus and accountability leads to wasted resources, delays, and superficial progress rather than tangible results.
- Glorification of action over understanding prevents organizations from learning from past experiences and improving their systems. By not allowing for a clear understanding of cause and effect relationships, organizations become trapped in a cycle of repeating mistakes and fail to achieve meaningful improvement.
Ultimately, the allure of urgency and action as indicators of effectiveness needs to be recognized and tempered. Human psychology’s inclination towards urgency can lead individuals to overlook the quality and viability of their solutions, prioritizing perception over thoughtful analysis and understanding.
By challenging the glorification of bias for action and embracing a more balanced approach that values coordination, reflection, and deep problem-solving, organizations can foster a more effective and sustainable path towards progress and success.
More thanks to Heather Stephens for the continued edits, insights, and contributions to this article. If you desire feedback on your writing, Heather is a fantastic editor and collaborator – I’ll connect you!
The Benevolent Troublemaker 