3 Reasons You May Feel Stuck and 4 Possible Solutions: A Note For Employees on Stuck Thinking

I hate the treadmill (I call it the “dread”mill). I have this intense dislike because although I am putting in lots of effort, I am not really going anywhere.  When I run, part of the joy is to be outside, see the scenery, and actually go somewhere.  Sometimes in our organizational lives, we feel like we are stuck on a treadmill – lots of effort but no real movement. 

3 reasons you may feel stuck:

1.      You are too far in the weeds.  It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day that we can’t see the bigger picture of what is going on in our context or organization.   You can’t work on it if you are too busy working in it.

2.     You are solving the wrong problem.  Because we feel caught in the day-to-day, we aren’t exactly sure of the problem(s) we are working to address. This leads to a misalignment of time, energy, and resources.

3.     You are applying program-level changes to systems-level problems.  Rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship is still change – it’s just change that isn't ultimately going to address the bigger issue.  When we try to solve significant, weighty problems with programmatic decisions, we spend lots of time making a short-term impact at the expense of long-term change.

Perhaps you or an organization you are involved with is wrestling with one or more of these “treadmill” like experiences. 

4 things you can do to get off the treadmill and make forward movement:

1.      Schedule consistent time to look up.  Bake in time with your team or for yourself to look around and survey the landscape of your context.  This could look like creating a context dashboard that you review monthly at a leadership meeting or a structured conversation around your goals or impacts with your staff.  The win here is setting aside time and not letting the tyranny of the urgent get in the way of what’s essential.

2.     Ask “why” five times.  Be clear on the problem you are trying to solve.  Whether it’s at the program, organizational, or systemic level, you need clarity.  One way to get that clarity is to ask “why” five times to identify the root cause of the issue you are trying to address.  This also allows you to validate or invalidate the assumptions you have about the problem.

3.     Map out a picture of the system in which you operate.  What are the cause/effect loops in your work?  Where are the delays between implementing a program or taking action, and when you start to see the impact?  How does your work impact (for good or for bad) other organizations operating in the same space?  These kinds of questions can help us get a clearer picture of how our work impacts (and is impacted by) the bigger system(s) in which we operate and how we make tweaks to get unstuck and move our missions forward.

4.     Get an outside perspective.  Sometimes we just need an outside perspective to help us see a bit more clearly. This is why we use mentors in our Mission Forward Acceleration work – an outside perspective can help us see ourselves, our organization, or our context more clearly.  So, set up a coffee meeting to talk to someone, a colleague outside your organization, a friend, a coach, a mentor, etc. who would be willing to listen and ask questions to help you see things a bit more clearly.  (If you want to talk to someone on our team, you can go here to set up a free 45-minute conversation.)

We don’t have to be stuck on the treadmill – we can step off and apply that energy to breaking through our barriers and moving our mission forward.