Management by Emergency--why it feels good.

Some years ago it was popular for OD consultants to observe that many US organizational cultures "managed by emergency." People in these organizations rushed about in a constant state of urgency, "putting out fires." I won't repeat the literature on the effects of this kind of management on planning, productivity and morale, but I do want to share an observation about it that I did not remember seeing in this kind of discussion. It is much more of a cultural and personal insight.

It has been clearly pointed out that USian culture values time as money and wasting time as at least secularly sinful. We were taught in the the Calvinistic vein that "idleness is the devil's workshop," rather than that "Leisure is the Basis of Culture." We are unleislurely, according to Aristotle, in order to have leisure. But why then do we resist leisure when we have adequate resources to take it and profit from it. What is the compulsion, greed, insecurity that leads to chronic workaholism?

I suggest that one of the psychological mechanisms that drives us to live in and perhaps revel in states of urgency is that it provides identity and hence importance, making us significant and needed. In a culture where we are largely defined by what we do rather than where we are from, doing is the key to identity. Urgency is the attitude that broadcasts to ourselves and others that we are here to do what we do and to be heroes at it. Having something to do helps me sense my worth; having something urgent to do undergirds my sense of capability as well as tells others that I have a role, an identity in something that concerns us all. 

This is, also, I suspect related to a refusal to be seen as victims, those helpless in a moment of need or emergency. Hence also the cultural tendency to look down upon those who feel victimized as in fact lazy, lacking imagination and initiative.