The image above describes many corporates: the house is the company and the people posing are the managers. Not one person is responsible for letting the house burn but collectively they’re doing a bad job of stopping it.
One of the great tragedies of how we’re hard-wired as a species is our preference for short-term gratification over long-term benefits. Given the choice most people would rather eat a chocolate bar than a nutritious meal, buy a lottery ticket rather than invest wisely or sleep around rather than build intimacy in a relationship.
Now, each of those things by themselves are not inherently ‘bad’ but if you make them your habits then you’ll find yourself much worse off in the long term.
Humans evolved in a pretty scary, uncertain and, literally, deadly environment. Putting your food aside for some future time made no sense when it was likely to be stolen or you were likely to be knocked off the next day.
The need for survival was immediate and daily. The average lifespan was significantly less and there was little, if any, comparative advantage to longterm planning. In some ways long term preparation might make you less safe. If you stockpiled food and built an awesome shelter you would probably just make yourself a really attractive target for rivals.
We don’t live in those times anymore but our hard-wiring does. Credit card debt is another example of how prone we are to short-term gratification. It’s instant money without work but often people get caught in vicious debt cycles that turn them into indentured servants to the credit card company.
Not only are we wired for short-term gratification but we’re also quite biased towards rewarding people for solving hard and urgent problems instead of rewarding people even more for preventing them in the first place.
There’s a lot more credit in the spectacular goalkeeping saving in soccer than there is in being a goalkeeper who’s so good at organising their defence that they prevent the other team from having a shot in the first place.
I remember reading a great story in the introduction to my copy of the “Art of War” by Sun Tsu that sums this up rather well, I’ll paraphrase:
‘The emperor asked his physician “Who is the greatest physician in the land?”. The physician said: “Well, I have two brothers, sir, and I am the oldest and we are all physicians.
I can cure a disease when all the symptoms are developed and the disease is clear to everyone to see so I am famous throughout China. Middle brother can cure a desease when it is partially developed and only some symptoms are showing so he is famous throughout my province.
My youngest brother can sense a desease even before it has begun to take root and he can prevent it from ever occurring at all so his name is known only in my house.”
When I look at politics and business I see the same issue. Kennedy is praised for his presidency for his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but which world leaders were praised for preventing things from getting that far? Too often they’re criticised instead for appearing to do nothing.
In business, too, there’s a distinct prevalence of short-term thinking. Managers and executives care for this quarter only as a long term plan that works might mean their successor gets the credit and not them.
It’s a selfish interest in resume-padding rather than the long-term health of the company. Stock options go a long way towards putting some skin in the game so that long-term financial health is in alignment with the private self-interests of upper-management.
Why does this issue concern me so much? Because I’m in SEO and SEO is most certainly a long-term game. If you optimise for gaps in the algorithm you’ll discover that you’re in trouble when Google closes the loophole.
This is what happened with the Panda update almost every other contentious algorithm update Google has done. Do you know what a long-term SEO plan looks like? I’ll give you a hint, it’ll focus on great, ever-green content, user experience and getting links that human beings will click on.
It’ll focus on delivering premium content that truly helps users and adds value to their lives. It won’t focus on vanity metrics, links for search engines or trying to go ‘viral’.
So how can we change ourselves, our companies and our politicians to be more long-term focused? For ourselves, it comes down to willpower around building habits and constantly reminding ourselves why eating our vegetables will work out well over the years.
For companies it’s fighting for your vision and choosing to work in a place that has that attitude baked into it’s DNA and for politics I don’t know what the answer is.
So, in your life, figure out how to have a long-term strategy whilst buying yourself time to implement it.
Photo credit: OldOnliner via photopin cc
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