Chaos and Confusion

One of the things I feel like people in positions of power like to do is cause unnecessary panic.

With the recent changing of my company and team, there were a lot of things that we learned that were incredibly eye-opening and frustrating. So much of the process was completely backwards, and it was done in a very poor fashion. Not to toot my own horn, but I hate when I see people around me fail so I ended up doing a lot of the gap-work in the sense of we were given "X" directive and extremely vague information. I saw a bunch of people confused about it and ask what was going on, so I ended up writing quite a bit of documentation for the people to get things done successfully.

This type of stuff is incredibly frustrating because it just creates way more chaos than it needs to be. One of the things that I for sure felt like was intentional was creating a false sense of urgency, and incredibly short deadlines to do things. This meant that people had unbelievably short windows to review things like agreements and others, before they just had to agree. Who the fuck only knows what things were nested inside of those insidious agreements?

This false sense of urgency stuff really pissed me off. Not only was it unnecessary it was also completely unprofessional. There is a fair bit of animosity between me and the old company now, because I think what they did was extremely unethical. There were a few points that I tried to push back on their stupidity, and did push back but ultimately was not successful because the timeline was so short.

This got me thinking, that this is for sure a playbook. I don't know why it seems to be this way, perhaps it's psychological manipulation or something. I know it may seem a stretch to say that ultra-short deadlines and emergencies are intentional, but if you think about it, they really are. It's the shock and awe type of thing, where the people who are making these decisions want to give no time for fine-print to be read or for people to analyze what is going on and refuse to do X Y or Z.

I think that if I didn't see the same thing with the government and many companies over the last few years, I would say that it's just some bullshit that happened and we need to move on. We saw how the highest people on these hierarchies made dictates down to people, and gave them days or a week or two to make decisions otherwise you are reprimanded or fired. There was little-to-no recourse and rash decisions were made. Many people regret what happened except that it was very across-the-board type that it makes me feel strongly that it is a playbook.

Is it something that they teach in psychology classes for MBA programs? That I don't really know but what happened to us, and some of the things we had to agree to (nothing illegal, or diabolical lol) against our better judgement were pretty frustrating to some. I am grateful that we are on the other side now, and can get things back to moving again but I am unsure about the long-term consequences to that type of shit. What if I agreed to something that can get me fucked in a year or two? I really have no idea, and won't find out for a while.. but all we can do is just hope and pray that things go well long-term!

What about you, have you been backed into a corner with something and didn't have enough time to think things through, leading to decisions you would have rather not make? Let me know in the comments!