FAKE SENSE OF URGENCY

Guess what, gang? For this article, I'm not the experiential guy. Today I'm the "what the hell is wrong with our industry?" guy.

Let's start with a story.

A few years back I worked at an agency where the highest-ranking client lead was a very intense woman with almost zealot-like tendencies. "Anything and everything" was her catchphrase, and she meant every word of it. Clients had her cellphone number and were actively encouraged to reach out whenever they wanted. And they did.

A client would have a 3 a.m. spiral thought. They'd text her. She'd text us at 3:01. Somewhere in the message would be the familiar phrase: "We need this first thing in the morning."

The client would go back to sleep.

She would go back to sleep.

We couldn't.

So we'd scramble. We'd Hail Mary our way to a 9 a.m. deliverable and fire it off into the email void. "Received," she would reply at 11. Then she'd forward it to the client, who by that point had largely forgotten whatever existential crisis had inspired the request in the first place.

The document would sit untouched in a virtual drawer. Days later, maybe weeks later, somebody would skim it. Nobody would remember who made it. Nobody would know the names of the people who pulled an all-nighter to produce it. Nobody would remember that the agency did them a solid.

The client would remember one thing: how responsive she was. Not the agency, not us, her.

A thankless job for everyone else involved.

That's nowhere near the worst story I've heard. Most agency veterans have their own collection of horror stories. Stories we all know. Stories we've all witnessed. Stories that have become so normalized we barely question them anymore. Stories that would make any Gen Z employee clutch their emotional support dog and immediately schedule three therapy sessions just by listening to them.

Now before anyone gets worked up, sometimes things genuinely catch fire. A venue falls through. A shipment gets lost. A keynote speaker cancels. A CEO decides they suddenly hate the campaign two days before launch. That's life. That's business. That's part of what of the industry's way of life.

Pressure builds capability. Deadlines matter. Adversity creates resilience. I've always enjoyed difficult challenges and solving impossible problems on impossible timelines. Some of my proudest professional moments came from being resourceful in those situations.

That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about something far more common and far less useful.

I'm talking about people who mistake their anxiety for urgency.

People who get overwhelmed spinning their own wheels and create a domino effect that makes everything feel like it's on fire when nothing actually is. People who become uncomfortable with uncertainty and decide that everybody else should become uncomfortable too. People who experience panic internally and then impose it on everyone else.

Thing is, your overwhelm doesn't have to become everybody else's overwhelm. If you're senior enough to impose urgency on an entire organization, you should be experienced enough to know the difference between a crisis and a discomfort.

So for all my corporate readers out there, I'd like to introduce a brand-new acronym:

FSU: Fake Sense of Urgency.

Once you notice it, you'll see it everywhere.

You'll see it in LinkedIn posts from managers desperately asking for candidate recommendations because they're "drowning," only to ignore every recommendation that comes their way. You'll see it in executives demanding emergency meetings, then spending the first twenty minutes figuring out what the meeting is actually about. You'll see it in managers pulling timelines forward because waiting for the work makes them anxious.

The funny thing about fake urgency is that it rarely survives inspection.

The deck that absolutely had to be finished by 9 a.m. sits untouched for a week. The strategy document marked urgent somehow doesn't receive feedback for ten days. The request that justified everybody sacrificing their weekend disappears into a black hole the moment it's completed. If you've worked long enough, you've seen this movie so many times you can practically predict the ending before the story begins.

The panic always arrives on schedule.

The consequences rarely do.

What makes FSU so destructive isn't the occasional late night. We all signed up for professions where sometimes things get intense. Sometimes the plane really is going down and everybody needs to grab a parachute.

The problem is that FSU trains people to treat every situation like the plane is going down.

Eventually people stop trusting priorities. They stop believing deadlines. They stop distinguishing between the genuinely important and the merely loud. Teams become trapped in a permanent state of reaction, sprinting from one perceived emergency to another, generating a tremendous amount of activity while making surprisingly little progress.

The irony is that most people creating FSU genuinely believe they're doing the right thing. They think they're driving accountability. They think they're maintaining standards. They think they're creating momentum.

What they're actually doing is spreading anxiety through an organization and disguising it as leadership.

Somewhere along the way we've confused responsiveness with effectiveness. We've convinced ourselves that every email deserves an immediate response, every concern deserves immediate escalation, and every passing thought deserves immediate action. The result is a workplace culture where freak out becomes the default answer to every problem, regardless of whether is actually appropriate.

The longer I spend in this industry, the more convinced I become that one of the most valuable leadership skills is emotional regulation. Not vision. Not charisma. Not strategy.

Emotional regulation.

The ability to remain calm when everybody else is losing their minds.

The ability to absorb pressure without immediately passing it downstream.

The ability to distinguish between a real emergency and your own discomfort with uncertainty.

Because the people creating the best work aren't usually the ones screaming that everything is on fire. They're the ones calm enough to identify which fires deserve attention and which ones can safely burn themselves out.

And judging by the amount of FSU drowning corporate America these days, that's a skill we could all use a little more of, because the biggest irony is, FSU wastes resources and gets in the way of creating really great work.

Take a chill pill everyone, and maybe a day off.

Peace ⚡