Fans of the 80’s classic film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, may remember him saying ‘Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it’. Reading the Bersin by Deloitte Global HR Trends report recently made me think of this, as it talks about Moore’s Law which, although originally applied to semiconductors, is applying to life and business – the principle that the speed of things double every two years. The pace of life and change is doubling exponentially, with innovations in how we communicate making everything more visible, available on demand, and faster. Everyone seems to be rushing, rushing, rushing on to the next thing.

In business, we’re all expected to do more, and achieve it quicker than ever before. I started my career in 1995, and I caught the tail end of a time that is now consigned to history. No email, no internet – orders placed by hand in order books with carbon paper to make three copies, customers paying by cheque, communication between branches of the shops I worked in by phone or written orders delivered by the company van. Now look at us! And it’s only getting quicker. We are riding a Kondratiev Wave of Information Technology that will just keep gaining pace.

But what does this mean, and how can we not drown? Which brings me to the analogy: Are you a plate spinner, or a pilot? Plate spinning entertainers have several plates spinning away on poles, and they constantly are running from one to the next, firefighting which one needs immediate attention, spending all their energy just managing to keep the plates in the air. Frenetic, frantic and downright exhausting to watch, let alone manage!

Contrast this with a pilot. They sit in their cockpit before and during a flight, calmly controlling their destiny with the aid of a multitude of dials that indicate the status of their whole operation, giving them live status reports on everything they need to control. Speed, altitude, location, weather, other aircraft, fuel levels, etc. They check these dials for indicators of trouble so they can take pre-emptive or corrective action quickly. The whole process to achieve success (a safe journey from take-off to landing) is managed with maximum efficiency and minimum stress.

Which to you feels better? Who would you rather be? It should be an obvious choice. So what can we do to be pilots instead of plate spinners?

Here’s three things that immediately spring to mind:

Use Checklists

Pilots run through a checklist of things they need to do before they take off. This principal has been applied to spectacular effect in operating theatres by a surgeon in the US called Atul Gawande. By introducing a very simple, 19 point list that takes 2 minute to complete, he saw a 50% reduction in operating theatre patient deaths. (He wrote a book about it if you are interested). You can apply this principle to any task or process you undertake on a regular basis.

Use Technology

There are a multitude of tools that are readily available to us now to manage tasks and keep a tab on what we are doing. The pace of change has made these tools even more efficient, quick and affordable. For example, I use Todoist, Trello and Salesforce to run my day and you can find any number of free or inexpensive tools to fit with what you are doing. Visibility on all your tasks and KPIs is essential to managing your workload and just knowing exactly where you are on everything is vital.

Carry Out a Pre-Mortem

Rather than dissecting things after the fact and looking to improve on what could have gone better or what went wrong (which by the way is still a valid practice), avoid these in the first place by carrying out a pre-mortem on what you are about to do. Walk through it in your mind or on paper at a theoretical level and anticipate what might go wrong, so you can build contingencies into place before they happen. OK so you may never get complete cover as there’s always some things that are totally unexpected, but minimise risk & stress by anticipating trouble or failure.