Four Monk

How to Act Quickly Without Sacrificing Critical Thinking

An unbridled urgency can be counterproductive and costly. If you’re too quick to react, you can end up with short-sighted decisions or superficial solutions, neglecting underlying causes and create collateral damage in the process.

But if you’re too deliberative and slow to respond, you can get caught flat-footed, potentially missing an opportunity or allowing an emergent challenge to consume you.

To balance these two extremes, you need reflective urgency — the ability to bring conscious, rapid reflection to the priorities of the moment — to align your best thinking with the swiftest course of action. In my work, coaching leaders at every level through a variety of management dilemmas, I’ve developed three strategies to practice reflective urgency:

Diagnose your urgency trap. To get started, you need to identify what’s limiting your quality thinking time — the habitual, unconscious, and often counterproductive ways that you push harder to get ahead when you feel the pressure of too many demands.

Common urgency traps include: ending one meeting prematurely, only to rush to the next one with more unfinished business; multitasking during work that requires your complete presence and full attention, which only diminishes the quality and accuracy of your output; saying yes to projects that dilute your contribution and burn your energy, when selectively saying no is the wiser choice. Traps like these keep you stuck in triage mode. In this mindset, taking time out to reflect on your intentions and actions feels like a luxury you can’t afford.

But if you’re able to spot your trap, then you can stop the self-defeating habits that keep you in a constant state of elevated urgency.

For example, Jenna was a new manager struggling to adjust to the dueling pressures of delivering her own work, while keeping the team accountable for theirs. Trying to get it all done without any drop in performance, her urgency trap was an involuntary shift to extreme command-and-control. In her words, “Everything felt like an urgent crisis, so I acted like it was.”

This mindset triggered knee-jerk reactions to overinvolve herself in delegated work and to communicate harshly by bottom-lining every email, one-on-one conversation, and team discussion. The result was that her team felt increasingly micromanaged and less engaged in their contributions. And because Jenna’s conversations were all rushed and impersonal, she failed to deepen relationships and establish trust within the team.

Once you diagnose your own urgency trap, you can bring the same thoughtful reflection to your critical moments to disrupt the pattern.