Well, today is May 22, and contrary to the internet rumor I wrote about in one of my previous posts, the Big One has not taken place, and Tokyo is still standing.

The day has been cool and rainy, but the city is still intact. My workday, however, has been an absolute mess. We’ve been plagued with systems issues since a new release of front-end software over the weekend, and said issues have been interfering with the business in ways I never thought were possible in a professional setting. The bottom line of all this is that the activities I had been planning to do this week have been pushed aside as the business struggles to just get the basics back to normal.

This could have all been easily avoided if we had just stopped trying to do things on the cheap. Like many big organizations, we assume we can shave off just a little more savings here and there, and before you know it, the organization has bargained away its resilience, the only thing that makes sustainability possible in a world of increasing uncertainty. Then, when the inevitable crap hits the fan (as it always does some day), people scramble around fighting fires and wondering who to blame for lighting a match.

You see it all over the place these days, in different ways and in different industries. I know this because I’ve seen it in practically every place where I’ve worked. In fact, I think it’s gotten worse. It’s becoming harder to see what’s on the horizon, and the faster things accelerate the more difficult this becomes. So organizations and individuals wind up only looking at the world right in front of them because that’s all they’re capible of doing. The same behavior is present outside the world of business as well; just take a good hard look at academia or government.

Talk about gucha gucha (squish squish). Who needs extraordinary events like massive earthquakes when we have each other to make our lives more complicated on a daily basis?