RUNNING THIN? SLOW DOWN
Little things start to go wrong. A contact advertises my participation in a webcast before checking dates. A routine meeting requires 6 calendar invites — sent, rescinded, changed, cancelled, re-written as two meetings now. A casual phone call, just for fun, takes days to achieve. A friend greets me with “Happy Friday!” –but it’s Sunday.
On their own, none of these things matter. But they remind me of how complex systems fail. At Amazon, engineers know that, every now and then, AI systems go haywire and have to be reset. They don’t know why, only that it happens. In software, for every 100 lines or so of code, there will be at least one bug. Proofreading my new book, new errors creep in where before there were none.
“We are running so thin.” That was the phrase people used to describe working at what was BP’s Texas City refinery. What they meant was that the pipes were wearing thin, and the people were wearing out. Years of cost-cutting, outsourcing, efficiency and neglect made work dangerous and people fragile. That was before the accident that killed fifteen people.
Today, we are all running thin.Quarantine was exciting at first. A change, something different. Huge chatter about Zoom, BlueJeans, TeamMeetings, Zencastr. As though tech were the story. Then about toilet paper, pasta and facemasks as though supply chains were the story. Then we all became epidemiologists as though the data were the story. But the real story is that we are running and running thin.
The supply chain of relationships becomes fragile as we try to do too much, too fast, with precarious processes that simulate but aren’t reality. An email is a simulated conversation, not a real one. A calendar entry lacks the warmth of a real invitation. These substitutes are the best we have right now and they convey something that isn’t the same as understanding. They seek but fail to drown out the background hum of dread: will I be healthy tomorrow? Our fear frightens us, so we run from it.
In a crisis, slow down. Time to reset. Resist the rush to action. Take time over decisions. Think about how you treat people; don’t send invites, talk to them. Use an extra minute, make the extra call. Try to say something using your own words. Walk don’t run.
Beneath all of our chatter runs fear — of dying, of losing someone precious, of failing to rise to the empathetic and collective challenge of now. Kindness won’t stop the pandemic but it can limit collateral damage. It gives us agency, the sense that we choose how to respond: with speed or by slowing down, with transactions or relationships, with efficiency or humanity. Our bodies are quarantined but our spirits are not.
