“Don’t fight the pain, accept it”
I have had the mis/fortune (depending on your perspective) to go through pain management therapy. When there are no more medications to take, no ways to reduce the pain, and the pain is not going to go away any time soon, what’s left is You. You going face-to-face with pain.
Your body can get used to a constant level of pain. Your brain can even filter it out. You tend to need pain management when you have constant pain that can spike or grow, and that change is a part of your daily life.
I can still remember my first informal “session”. I was having an “internal abdominal procedure” without anaesthetic. I won’t get into details here, but many gory movie scenes have imagined what was a daily reality for me.
The nurse who was holding my white-knuckled hand told me “don’t fight the pain, accept it”.
I Was Trying to Prevent the Pain
And something happened at that moment. The pain of the procedure did not go away or even diminish. But I stopped fighting it. I realized that I was trying to push the pain away through sheer force of will. I was trying to prevent the pain. But the reality was that the pain was already here. Fighting it caused its own pain, though, and that pain stopped. Once I accepted it, I could start to deal with it and eventually my body’s natural processes kicked in.
The next time I had the procedure, it didn’t hurt any less, but I did not need to grip a nurse’s hand.
Fighting bad things is a natural reaction. But that reaction only works to prevent future pain, not the pain in the present. Once it is in the present, we need to accept it so that we can deal with it properly.
The trick is to know the difference: am I trying to prevent future pain, do I need to deal with present pain, or both?
I’m seeing a lot of people (and politicians) in a global pandemic trying to fight the pain that they have right now. “Make it go away!”
I’ve seen a lot of business leaders fight with IT staff in the middle of a major cybersecurity incident. “Make it go away!”
Organizational Pain Management
It is folly to use approaches meant to prevent problems when the problems have already materialized. Our incident response, disaster recovery, and business continuity processes are designed to deal with the problems that materialize. But that’s not enough. In my experience, leaders and managers have a difficult time trusting those processes and they try to take over. What is missing is that leaders and managers need to learn organizational pain management.
There is a time for an attitude of “crush the problem!” but only when there is time for that approach to work. Leaders and managers tend to slip into a superhero mentality and swoop in to try to “save the day”, either through confidence, fear, or feelings of impotence. In any case, they reject the current reality and try to change it when it is too late, or inappropriate, to do so.
Of course, there are many situations that evolve where the impacts grow after we first notice them. And in those situations, it is important to prevent future impacts (pain). However, in practice, I notice that leaders and managers do not assess the situation first before trying to change things. They see the initial impacts, then try to push the pain away. This only makes things worse, as many incident response people can tell you.
Resilience and Different Pains
Preventing future pain and dealing with present pain require different approaches. The future requires decisiveness, commitment, and follow-through. The present requires acceptance, empathy, and grace. Both require great amounts of flexibility and agility.
Our resilience as people, as managers, and as organizations, is measured by our ability to realize what’s relevant in the present, accept it, and balance our focus between fixing things to prevent further problems and dealing with the mess we have right now.
Practising these “organizational pain management” skills is very important or else we will not improve. How could you incorporate practising these divergent skills in your next tabletop disaster scenario? Could you split responsibilities? Could you have scheduled check-ins at regular intervals to make an assessment?
What would your teams say is your greater strength? Fighting the future or dealing with the present? What do you want it to be?
Another way that fighting the pain can be seen is in leaders’ and managers’ tendency to punish their own people for failures. I talk about this at length in Four Ways That You Can Respond When Someone Causes a Breach