How often have you told someone or been told to be proactive, take problems 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 around. To do this, they increased their in-house legal team so they could take cases to trial. Now, in addition to the added costs of a larger legal department, they also needed to spend a great deal of time and money investigating these claims in order to take them to trial.
Now, when you look at this situation systematically, the effect that the decision had on the entire company compared to the number of cases that were settled out of court, the view was very different. The cost of fighting these cases far exceeded 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. So we think that by being proactive and fixing the problems within our silo, we’re doing a good thing. Often the opposite is true, 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 us to understand how we are contributing to our own problems, and to find a solution that takes into account the entire system and not just our silo.