Your mind is working its best when you’re being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity.
Banksy – Street Artist
A final thought for this section: healthy paranoia is a necessary condition for Working It. Paranoia is not a medicated condition. It’s not a psychiatric condition. It’s simply awareness of current COVID life and work disruptions.
A quick story: Andy Grove, Intel founder and Bill Gates, Microsoft founder were believers in the value of paranoia. Both believe that fear of complacency and stagnation is good for business. Grove said in Only the Paranoid Survive that fear is critical for creating and sustaining the passion and energy to win in the marketplace. Manageable fear is good for the organization, teams, and VUCANs. Fear provides the mechanism for overcoming inertia and for stimulating forward movement. Fear can be harnessed and channeled to try harder, do better, and take intelligent risks.
Quick story: Our firm – Quality + Engineering – does risk management. I always seem to asking ‘what if?’ My wife thinks that I’m always looking at the down side and even seem a little paranoid. I tell her I’m a realist and I’ve not medicated. I’ve never been clinically diagnosed as ‘paranoid.’ So, I put on my happy face until I see another hazard or another ‘what if.’
In my world, paranoia is a preemptive insight of what may occur: upside risks (opportunities), downside risks (consequences), black swan events, Murphies, and other unexpected conditions. A strong dose of healthy paranoia is good. I’m not talking about clinical or medicated paranoia. I’m talking about the risk-sensitive paranoia of looking at downside risks and planning on how to mitigate them. Organizational paranoia is good for companies. Personal paranoia is good for you.
These ideas may seem like heresy in today’s politically charged world, which says that fear is bad, tension kills, fear causes dysfunctionality, and it makes VUCANs go ballistic.
Work Lesson Earned: A friend of mine once said: ‘If you’re not paranoid, you don’t know what’s going on’ He probably picked this up from the Only The Paranoid Survive book, but it sure applies today in COVID time.