Never Enough Time

This is the second part of a four part series on Kurt Lewin’s (1890-1947) influence on our understanding of leadership. Many consider him to be the founder of social psychology, group dynamics, and organization development. As a professor at MIT, he was the first person to coin the term “action research.”

In this 4-minute piece Early Braxton, Ph.D. continues his talk on Lewin and about how the speed of complexity and change is increasing at a rate that outpaces the capacity of our brains. He states, “So, when you hear so many people talking about how stressed out they are, how tired they are, how fatigued, and how much they keep doing…if you listen to people in organizations saying there isn’t enough time, they aren’t lying. There isn’t, there just isn’t.”

He argues that to deny this is to decrease our effectiveness and our capacity to see. To accept this means then that we need to change how we do our work. This includes 1) slowing down the pace 2) creating spaces for reflection and 3) avoid trying to fix something before understanding it.

In one analogy he gives, Earl points out that if a car is going 90mph, what you see outside that window is different than when the car is going 40mph. It is too late to see and understand the landscape once you pass it. If you keep going at that speed you will accumulate the things you don’t know that much faster.

Earl is a psychologist specializing in transformational thinking and the management of change in high risk / high stress organizations. He briefly outlines a process for leaders to assist in this world of increased complexity and change. At the top of that list is that if you are to lead others, you must first know how to lead yourself.