Infinite Raven

Coaching & Consultancy

The Raven Stays Late: Workaholic Companies

11–17 minutes

I’m a workaholic. I’ve spent years flying from fire to fire, unable to land. Companies can be workaholics too, trapped in constant motion and too busy to ask themselves whether they’re still flying in the right direction. In this article, I explore four cognitive traps that keep both people and organisations clinging to unhealthy and ineffective patterns of work: the productivity bias, the action trap, the operational rabbithole and the resistance dilemma.

The Emotional Life of a Company

Companies are more than the sum of their parts. They have distinct identities that breathe, grow, and struggle. Over my career, I have encountered depressed companies which lack the impetus to invest in themselves, shuffling listlessly through decades-old client lists without proactive thought. I have seen angry companies using clenched management styles, focused on market domination and incapable of collaboration or joint venture.

The companies that remind me of my own worst tendencies are the workaholic ones. They flail against a rising tide, unable to step back. This type finds reflection and reinvention impossible luxuries. Instead, they work harder and longer, squeezing resources and losing sight of their purpose.

How does a company become workaholic? Give me your coffee break and I’ll introduce four principles that operate at both the human and corporate level:

  • The Productivity Bias – when you aren’t allowed to do the fun stuff
  • The Action Trap – when you’re working harder not smarter
  • The Operational Rabbithole – when you can’t see past your workload
  • The Resistance Dilemma – when you have to lose ground in order to move forward
The Productivity Bias

Growing up, I was called a daydreamer. It’s a label often pinned to little girls who gaze through windows when they’re supposed to be paying attention. Now I know it was ADHD: a mind flooded with everything. Every sound, every thought, every possible connection. My attention wasn’t wandering; it was everywhere.

This got me into trouble at school and at the dinner table, where I soon got the message that I was supposed to be doing something else. A stricter, tidier kind of thinking that “mattered”, while whatever my brain was doing apparently did not.

Now adulting, we are told that if you’re not doing something productive, then you’re not working. Achievement in the workplace becomes an empty call sheet, a swarm of holding emails sent, an admin surge temporarily tamed. These little boxes to tick are easy to measure and easy to put in the “WORK” category. As workload grows, we get busier and come home exhausted but still bemoan “I didn’t do any work today” or “I didn’t get anything done.”

But if employees are only getting the WORK done, then what isn’t getting done?

In 2019, Gable, Hopper and Schooler published the results of a study examining the journals of professional writers and physicists. The researchers found that around one-fifth of the participants’ most significant creative ideas emerged during spontaneous mind wandering, when they were neither at work nor actively pursuing the problem (Gable et al., 2019). These were often the ideas that changed the direction of their projects or opened up new possibilities.

Change, progress and growth depend on the stuff that gets shoved into the “NOT WORK” box. In the workaholic company, relationship building, tracking, evaluating, reflecting and problem-solving are put into this category, to be done only if you have time after doing the WORK. Thinking time feels indulgent, meetings about vision feel wasteful, and strategy days are postponed because there is always “too much ACTUAL WORK” to do.

The Action Trap

Workaholic companies and “productive” people take the productivity bias to its logical conclusion, saying yes to more and more visible WORK until they reach a point where they no longer have time to breathe. They aren’t living, they’re WORKing. Slowing down, even for a moment, starts to feel like doing nothing at all.

When Anthony Patt, a climate policy researcher, and Richard Zeckhauser, a behavioural economist, joined forces to study decision making under uncertainty, they noticed that people often feel a powerful urge to do something even when the wiser choice would be to wait or do nothing at all. They called this tendency an action bias (Patt & Zeckhauser, 2000).

The French writer Voltaire captured the flavour of this impulse in the 18th century with his line that “the art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease”. He was poking fun at doctors who could make a living peddling treatments that existed only to reassure patients that something was being done.

The negative effect of the action bias on decision making was vividly demonstrated by the sports psychologist Michael Bar-Eli in a study of goalkeepers facing penalty kicks in football games (Bar-Eli et al, 2007). Statistically, the best strategy is to stay in the centre of the goal. Yet he found that goalkeepers jump left or right 94% of the time, because they feel compelled to act. When a goal is scored after a goalkeeper has jumped, they feel less regret than if they had stayed still because at least they did something.

In the past, when I was overwhelmed at work, I worked longer hours; when I was still overwhelmed, I worked weekends; when I was still drowning, I just worked harder still. I felt viscerally afraid of dropping anything, convinced that if I let the pressure ease for even a moment, everything would come crashing down; to stop would be to do nothing, and to do nothing would be to fail.

In business, this looks like chaos and then burnout of your staff, of yourself, and ultimately of the company.

Workaholic companies think that they just need to sell more, make more, hire more, work more and one day the company will simply sprout wings once everyone has worked hard enough for long enough. Volume becomes the goal, and all processes begin with triage. Pace is driven by whoever jumps the queue, though the definition of “urgent” becomes harder and harder to pin down. Every day becomes a rescue mission with all hands on deck, and the organisation lives in crisis mode. Leaders and managers become backup, doing work they are paid too much for. Resources are co-opted and jerry-rigged, and everyone gets disengaged and demotivated.

It reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes (1845), a dark fairy tale about a girl cursed to dance without stopping. Her story is a mounting crescendo of desperate effort and movement with no way out except collapse.

The Operational Rabbithole

When I was a teenager and in my 20s, I was so caught in the visceral and immediate that I didn’t notice I was skipping across my life like a stone across water. I was doing the WORK of life because it never occurred to me to stop and do the NOT WORK of Self. I didn’t imagine the kind of adult I wanted to be, let alone give serious thought to how I was going to change the world. I was caught in a myopic tornado of NOW.

In business too, it’s easy to become hyperfocused on the operational journey. Clients are the Red Shoes and the order book is the dance card. You don’t have the time or the energy to waste on fluffy things like visions and goal setting; it’s about fighting fires and “pushing through”.

Chris Argyris, a social psychologist interested in how people and organisations make decisions, called this single-loop learning: being so focused on detecting and correcting what is in front of you, that you never question the underlying assumptions, goals or values that created the problems in the first place (Argyris, 1976).

Later, working with Donald Schön, Argyris applied this insight to organisational learning, likening an organisation stuck in single-loop learning to a thermostat that continually adjusts the heating but never questions whether the target temperature itself makes sense. They identified ways organisations could shift to a more strategic double-loop learning style, moving from cycles of reactive firefighting toward intentional pursuit of strategic goals (Argyris & Schön, 1978).

What does it look like when a company is dancing themselves into a frenzy, blind to everything but forward motion? Some of the signs I have noticed: Recruitment is reactive, only after existing staff can no longer push themselves past their limits, and it’s usually more of the same, reusing old adverts and job descriptions. Training gets postponed, inductions are rushed, one-to-ones become monthly, then bi-monthly. Systems decay because no one has the time to do the NOT WORK of maintaining, developing or interrogating them. Every new hire inherits a mess of half-finished spreadsheets, sticky-note hieroglyphs, and abandoned processes. But order books are healthy, and the customers keep coming, and as long as the team can cope, it all keeps ticking over.

Leadership are so busy down their rabbithole that they don’t notice the company has become a rubber band being stretched past its limit. Instead, the workaholic company doomscrolls through the same reinforcing policies, paralysed by the momentum they have accrued and avoiding any source of disruption that might lead to stoppage and painful truths.

So how does it all end?

The Resistance Dilemma

The prospect of an honest stocktake can trigger a great deal of resistance.

I have talked to clients who don’t want to explore staff satisfaction because they know what the issues are but say they don’t have the resources to address them, so they “don’t want to raise expectations” and anyway it’s just “been a busy time,” “maybe next year.” I have had clients tell me that during times of transition and upheaval and restructuring, they don’t want to look at staff engagement because it might “trigger” extra problems and they want to focus on getting the business “on an even keel,” it’s “not the right time.”

I don’t blame them. When you are caught in the action trap and tumbling down the operational rabbithole, stopping to take stock can feel like taking a step backwards. It may create new problems to solve, force you to retrace steps you thought you had completed, and ask you to write off investments you have already made.

In psychology, this tendency to cling to past investments is known as the sunk cost fallacy, a cognitive bias first named by behavioural economist Richard Thaler in 1980, based on his observation that people treat past, irrecoverable investments as if they still matter for current decisions (Thaler, 1980).

In a 2017 interview during Nobel Week in Stockholm, after receiving the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Thaler illustrated the idea with a story about being given free tickets to a basketball game an hour’s drive away. When a snowstorm hit on game day, his friend said: “There’s no way we’re driving in this snow, but if we had paid for those tickets we would be going” (Thaler, 2017). Economic theory and common sense would point out that the game, the snow and the drive remain the same regardless of whether the tickets were free or not. What was paid, and by whom, should not influence the decision to go to the game. Yet Thaler’s friend instinctively brings that imagined payment into the choice: if they had paid, they would feel obliged to go so the money was not “wasted”.

In a workaholic company, leaders may be similarly trapped by thoughts of past investments: the money already spent on that software system that isn’t working, the years invested in building relationships with clients who are no longer profitable, the time poured into a strategic initiative that hasn’t delivered results. Examining staff satisfaction might reveal these investments were misguided and that you need to hire more people or restructure roles. Questioning your strategic direction might mean admitting your current client base isn’t sustainable. Facing these unpleasant realities feels like admitting waste and failure. The company may prefer to push forward, gambling that more hard work will eventually justify the investment rather than confronting the pain of writing it off.

There is a family of mathematical logic problems known as river-crossing puzzles that perfectly illustrate the value of being open to strategic retreat in order to make progress toward your goal. These puzzles, first recorded in a 9th-century manuscript and later traced across multiple cultures by ethnomathematician Marcia Ascher (1990), ask the solver to work out the steps needed to get people or objects safely across a river. One well-known variant is the missionaries and cannibals problem. The story goes that three missionaries and three cannibals are trying to cross a river in a tiny boat. The boat can only take two at a time, and at no point can the cannibals outnumber the missionaries on either bank.

Every valid solution involves a moment where you deliberately row someone back to the “wrong” side, and it appears that you have spent valuable rowing time on a mistaken trip. Then you find that this has worked a magical sleight of hand that gets everyone on their way again. At the moment you make the decision, it feels as though you are sacrificing ground, but it’s the only way to get everyone safely to the other side.

It isn’t easy to stop and look behind us; the human spirit wants to keep going, keep moving forward. When we realize we have driven down the wrong road, it feels wrong and almost painful to retrace our steps. But like the river-crossing puzzle, breaking free from the action trap sometimes requires the courage to go backward before you can move forward.

Rediscovering Wings

For the individual workaholic, the disruptive wrench in the machine is often a member of the family or a close friend staging an intervention or delivering an ultimatum. It may also be a health crisis, trauma or bereavement, which acts as a thunderclap, forcing a personal reckoning and providing the non-negotiable permission for change.

Someone who felt that coaching “wouldn’t help someone like me” and “it’s a luxury I don’t have time for right now” can suddenly realise they need to finally make time to work out what they want and come up with some plans for their future.

When I finally admitted to myself that I had lost years of my working life to doing work that didn’t mean anything to me, I was horrified to think of the time I had wasted and the toll it had taken on my mental and physical health.

But when I flew up out of the clouds and took a good look around, I couldn’t wait to start thinking about what I actually wanted to do next and begin to move forward in a more intentional and powerful frame of mind.

That’s what I want for the businesses I work with – informed, intentional decision making which leads to something transformational.

First though, you have to look up from your desk long enough to see what’s happening. Only then does the REAL WORK begin.

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