The danger of being proactive

Proactivity is a buzzword term tossed around quite often in the business world. The orginal notion of proactivity is that of taking personal responsibility for your actions. This concept has been modified from the orginal intent. It is often identified as the opposite of reactivity. It is currently thought to be about reducing risk by anticipating and solving problems before they occur.

I recently had the oppertunity to learn how being proactive can have some very negative consequences. Several weeks ago I posted a video, "What's the Worst tha can happen?" This turned out to be a very viral video. I recieved lots of comments on the video, including several people who spotted the logic 'error' referencing Pascals Wager. After looking at this and googling it, I still did not realize the far reaching consequences of this argument until just the other day.

It all became clear while watching a video by the BBC called "The Power of Nightmares". It is a rather long series, but what caught my attention was in Part 3. A concept called the Precautionary Principle. It then dawned on me this is the same concept that was explained in this video above . Mainly:

If you want to get action, without evidence, simply have people imagine the worst possible consequence of not acting, and show that doing nothing may lead to worse consequences then taking action. This is a shift from a scientific (evidence based appoach) which breaks down to the statement "action without evidence is justified"

So a truely proactive approach is action taken based on evidence and not fear. It is a leadership skill to look forward with postive energy, assess the risk and create an action plan to mitigate it.

Remember the adatage, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". This is what tends to happen when we implement our proactivity acitivies from fear and not from evidence.

How this applies to proactivity??

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