Beginning by Not Getting Started

if you’d rather finish sooner than later

Feb 10, 2023

Introduction

Over the last few weeks, in our three-part article, “Succeeding By Ceasing to Try,” we explored the way in which effective change often requires us to abandon our current change efforts rather than struggling to get them to work.

This then raises the question, of course, of what would be the best way to begin your change efforts so that you are less likely to have to abandon them later. The answer is to begin by being diligent and disciplined about purposefully not getting started.

This week we continue our broader theme of Keats’s Negative Capability, for a further lesson we can now take away from that line of thinking is that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

—Ellen and James

Beginning by Not Getting Started

if you’d rather finish sooner than later

The best way to begin any change effort, or any new and important endeavour where the outcome truly matters, is steadfastly to refrain from getting cracking.

Don’t get me wrong. Putting things off indefinitely, generally speaking, will get you nowhere. Yet the point is not to get started as soon as possible but to finish successfully as soon as possible. Not to start fast, but well; to start by looking, not leaping. Look—how can the optimum desired outcome be achieved as swiftly as possible with minimum effort, fewest resources and least risk? That is the question.

Taking Action

We are interested in maximally effective, efficient action, not impetuous, futile gestures serving only to burn off some adrenalin when we’re raring—but not really ready—to go.

Action! . . . Ah, “Action” . . . : the word has such a comfortingly dynamic ring to it, doesn’t it? Action Man, action heroes, action movies, action replays, action steps, the action items assigned in the minutes of the meeting, environmental action, taking action, “Lights, camera, action!” … and at the magic word “action” the cameras roll and the actors on set launch into their lines. Hey, check us out—now we’re taking action!

The word “action” snares us from the start and at every turn, as it conjures up images of physical movements in three-dimensional space, and, as in a cinematic car chase, the faster and more spontaneous the movements the more action. Right?

Wrong. Action is not about that. Not at all. Action no more consists of the making of physical movements in space than literature consists of the distribution of ink on suitably absorbent paper.

“Action” is simply the most abstract word we have in the English language for anything anyone might be said to do. “What happened?” “Oh, Fred did something.” “What did he do exactly?” “He performed some action.” This tells us nothing of course.

There are a limitless variety of things people might be said to do, all of them “actions,” from turning on the radio to ignoring the telephone, ratifying a treaty, clearing out the garage, catching the last flight to Denver, admitting fault, designing a resort, refraining from interrupting, interpreting the results, selling a company, emigrating to Australia, dominating a conversation, entering the Chinese market, adjourning a meeting, returning a favour, winning-over the skeptics, finding your glasses, finding a new cure for cancer, telling a story, forgetting an appointment, rehearsing, revising, prevaricating and so on and on indefinitely.

None of these actions, nor most of the examples you can come up with ad infinitum on your own, fit the fantasy-picture of mere “dynamic physical movements in space.”

There is nothing especially physical or dynamic about action, about “doing something” as opposed to reflecting or contemplating, say, both of which are still very much doing something. The archaeologist or geologist studying a stone is no less in the realm of action than the schoolboy who throws it as far as he can. A skilled diamond cutter may study a large, valuable raw stone intensively for weeks or months before placing the first cut on which so much of the eventual outcome, and the finished stone’s market value, ultimately depends.

Any undertaking worthy of the name—again, where what is at stake really matters—merits being designed thoughtfully to secure the outcome efficiently as well as effectively. After all, if your own experience is anything like mine, this is what you’d find if you were to look back on any of your most successful practical engagements: You will likely discover, upon ruthlessly honest, careful reflection, that your great success can be directly attributed to just one or two key small things you did, perhaps quite unplanned, while 90% of your efforts could in retrospect have been omitted without much loss, had you only done these few key things.

“Fools Jump In Where Angels Fear To Tread”

The first step in any practical endeavour is always the most hazardous, when we must take greatest care not to put a foot wrong—not to step headlong onto the top of a slippery slope, or to be led into setting off at the foot of the garden path. In any new departure, there are more ways to go wrong than right, and the nearer we are to the start, the greater number of potential wrong moves confront us at each juncture. The first step is likely to be the most fateful one.

Now what exactly is it that we are trying to do? We are more than likely wrong even about that, at least to begin with. It is rarely if ever a simple matter, and it’s worth getting right. For any significant undertaking can potentially be framed in such a way that it will prove difficult, time-consuming, expensive and fraught with risk. But equally, if we know how to go about it the right way, it can be framed in such a way that it will prove infinitely easier, quicker, cheaper and more certain of unqualified success.

In our rush to get moving, we may be heading off to our destination via a far longer and more treacherous route than necessary, and it will soon be too late for us to turn back without a lot of time, effort, resources and opportunities having been wasted—and, worse, at least some of those opportunities, often the most important ones, we will only get a crack at once. It is all too easy to make hostages to fortune.

But if the task before us is not only important but urgent, or at least time-sensitive, the temptation is to “at least make a start.” To do nothing—as it may seem to us on our usual ways of thinking—when something clearly needs doing, to still be sitting in our driveway when there is a long road ahead and no time to lose, can be really frustrating. Never mind—it’s what’s required. Yes, it’s frustrating. But we’d better make ourselves comfortable. Roll the windows down. Turn on the radio, or put on your headphones and listen to Spotify. We are going to be here awhile.

Above all, we must resist the ever-present temptation simply to do something.

The call to action (“let’s get going!”) perhaps in the car, or in the military arena or on the sports field, in the kitchen or the workshop, in a coffee shop, on a building site or on holiday, may be a call for an end to talking or reading or writing or thinking or googling or reading restaurant reviews or drinking coffee in order to get started instead on activity of quite a different kind—reversing out of the driveway, advancing down the field, frying the onions, knocking out a wall, strolling down to the beach or booking a restaurant for tonight. However, most of the time, in most human engagements of any complexity, “but now let’s get going!” is a call, rather, to get started on yet more activity of much the same kind.

More often than not, particularly in any kind of organization or anywhere in the world of affairs, the plea to draw the conversation (or the thinking, or writing) to a close in order to go off and “get started” is most typically a plea to go off and have some other conversations, or to write something, or to do some more thinking.

Admittedly, this “implementation” or “taking action” may take the form of conversation elsewhere amongst different people, involve different lines of thinking and level of detail, and so on. Yet this sudden change of scene or characters or lines may only obscure the fact that our actions are performed principally on the stage of communication in the medium of language, and that thought and action remain inseparable from start to finish, as they always have been.

We tend to get so wrapped up in the action on stage that we no longer notice the stage, or the medium in which the action is chiefly conducted. And of course when we are embarking on a significant undertaking of our own and it is time to adjourn our solo deliberations to ‘take action’, there may be no need for a change of scene and we may find ourselves needing instead to stay put in the same chair. Yet the action has already been well underway.

In any case, our thoughtful deliberations are never merely a preliminary to action but are necessarily integral to the action itself. A selection of the precise action to take in preference to numberless others we might otherwise have taken is a choice governed by a host of assumptions about what is true, or relevant, or useful.

Not only does anyone begin by assessing their situation and selecting the tactics for dealing with it, but they continue such deliberations on the hoof, whether they know it or not, continually revising their reading of the situation ambulando and refining their tactics.

The dichotomy between thought and action or between words and action is almost always a false one, and particularly when the situation calls for thoughtful action consisting, as it usually so happens, almost entirely of words. Unsurprisingly, then, the most critical dimensions of our action will inevitably, for the most part, be determined through thought as expressed in language.

The Most Elusive Matter of All: Figuring Out What to Do

We seem to spend half our lives learning how to do all kinds of things, or how to get them done for us. And the rest of the time we spend doing things as well as we can, or trying to get them done, in the face of the one question which just refuses to go away: “What should I do?”

It is a question for which we are left singularly unprepared by all our education and life experience put together. There is no shortage of things we can do in any situation. We know how to do many things which may or may not be what we most need to do right now. At every turn there are countless things for which we have, in the words of the criminal courts, “the motive, the means, and the opportunity.” The difficulty is in figuring out which things to do at the expense of the alternatives.

In other words, we have to try and anticipate which of our options will not turn out to be a (relative) waste of time, effort and resources. Above all, we have to try and avoid taking actions leading either to “more of the same” or to a result perversely opposite to the result we intend—which happens to all of us more often than we should care to credit. There is a gap that must be bridged somehow between our knowledge of how to do things on the one hand, and our ability to figure out what to do.

It is the tacit assumptions we tend to make about action that keep us from employing our knowledge and know-how as effectively as we might to achieve our ends. These tacit assumptions include not only the things we presuppose in our deliberations about specific courses of action on specific occasions, but the presuppositions we make about action in general, and what it is that makes action effective.

My own interest has always been in effective action—action that is maximally effective, efficient, swift, sure and elegant. It is about getting what you are after, results that matter, as quickly as you can, with minimum effort, smallest risk of failure or undesired side-effects, and fewest resources.

It is about action that is truly optimal—in short, it is about action that involves doing as little as necessary to get all that is desired. And jumping in to “take action” and do the first thing that comes to mind that seems to make sense is, in my experience at least, rarely if ever a way to achieve that. If efficiency or speed or execution is the name of the game, laziness may be a virtue but haste is not.

So here you are, still sitting in your metaphorical driveway. It may turn out that you will eventually turn the key in the ignition and drive to your intended destination after all. But equally, you may decide, on reflection, to drive to the airport only 20 minutes away where a flight to that destination takes off in two hours, enabling you to get there and back in the same day, in a fraction of the time, and at less cost.

Or you may realize it will be more effective, given the traffic, the short distance and the time needing to be spent getting through airport security, to take the train that’s leaving shortly or perhaps to set up a three-way Zoom for tomorrow morning and not go anywhere at all.

Or you may eventually come to the conclusion, with hindsight, that succeeding in your original planned mission would have been an “own goal” that could have set you back significantly, and you will end up, wisely, proceeding very differently instead.

Change

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