How often have you told someone or been told to be proactive, take matters into your own hands, take charge and stop being reactive? This sounds like good advice, and we often hear people in job interviews tell us that they are proactive.
Consider the case of a company that thought it had been sued too often. The proactive manager decided that he was going to fight these law firms and stop settling out of court. They were going to stop being pushed. To do this, they augmented their in-house legal team so that they could take cases to trial. Now, in addition to the additional costs of a larger legal department, they also needed to spend a great deal of time and money investigating these claims in order to bring them to trial.
Now when you look at this situation systematically, the effect the decision had on the entire company compared to the number of cases that were settled out of court, the picture was very different. The cost of fighting these cases far outweighed the small number of cases that were actually won in court. Instead of concentrating on what they were good at, the company had almost become a law firm.
By identifying an enemy out there without gaining a true understanding of the entire system, we can end up doing more harm than good. Too often we forget to see our company as one big integrated system, instead we see our department and the role we play in that. Therefore, we believe that by being proactive and fixing the issues within our silo, we are doing a good thing. The opposite is often the case, by pushing on this side of the globe, the problem appears elsewhere.
Being proactive doesn’t come from throwing resources at a perceived problem, that’s often just being reactive in disguise. Instead, being truly proactive requires that we understand how we contribute to our own problems and find a solution that takes into account the whole system and not just our silo.