Reference reading
Inconstancy
Transferring the cost of fresh beginnings to everyone carrying the previous commitment.
Habitually abandoning considered purposes or commitments without an adequate reason.
Imagine this: Another fresh priority redirects the organization before the previous considered commitment has had a fair chance to become useful.
How the pattern works
The third railway branch is attractive because it has not yet encountered the difficulties that interrupted the first two. Inconstancy repeatedly abandons a considered course without an adequate reason, often when novelty has lost its immediate reward.
An executive can redirect the organization more quickly than its people can recover the time, relationships and unfinished work committed to the earlier direction. A fresh priority arrives as a clean announcement at the top and as several incompatible obligations below. The new beginning is celebrated while the cost of ending the old one remains unnamed.
What it costs the work
People become reluctant to invest serious judgment in a direction likely to be replaced before its awkward stage is complete. Dependencies multiply, partially finished work accumulates and another declaration of urgency carries less useful information.
A distinction worth keeping
A changed condition, a discovered error or a more important need can justify revision. Rigidity refuses relevant reasons to reconsider; Inconstancy does not require adequate reasons before leaving. Perseverance is also not blind persistence: continuing a harmful or pointless course does not become virtuous because it is difficult to stop.
What a useful response can change
State what changed in the evidence or purpose and why it warrants the new course. Disappointment with the ordinary difficulty of implementation is not the same as a changed justification.
Name which earlier commitments end, which remain and who must help reconcile the transition. A new priority cannot settle the old obligations by merely being announced.
Give worthwhile work a fair account of progress through its unglamorous stages. A review should be able to recommend continuation as well as another exciting beginning.
Questions for reflection
- What new reason supports this change beyond the appeal of a cleaner start?
- Whose unfinished commitments survive beneath the announcement of a fresh direction?
Other perspectives
It is not accident, then, that helps a man in the world so much as purpose and persistent industry.
Samuel Smiles · Self-Help · Read the source
Smiles emphasizes purposeful, sustained effort. Read as a claim about application, the sentence challenges serial beginnings; it does not explain every unequal outcome or guarantee worldly success.
It is good, also, not to try experiments in states, except the necessity be urgent, or the utility evident; and well to beware that it be the reformation that draweth on the change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation;
Francis Bacon · Essays · Read the source
Bacon distinguishes a reform that requires change from a desire for change dressed as reform. His caution concerns political experiments; here it prompts examination of the new priority’s reasons.