Clear Definitions #3: Initiative
What does it mean to take the initiative?
And when you take the initiative, what is ‘the initiative’ that you take?
Work can be divided into three parts: feeling, thinking and doing. The first two parts are internal — the third part external. You feel like doing something, you think about doing it — then you actually do it. That moment when you pass from feeling and thinking to actually doing, that moment is taking the initiative.
It’s picking up the phone to call someone. It’s walking out the door. It’s handing in your notice. It’s saying the thing you’ve been thinking of saying but never said before. It’s actually committing.
Taking the initiative is a critical moment, because it’s the point where a bridge is built between the internal world to the external world. You can feel an infinite number of feelings, think an infinite number of thoughts, without anything actually happening. But when you take the initiative, something happens. Something begins. In that moment, there is a shift from infinite potential to specific, limited, concrete reality. Action is always specific — it’s located in time and space. And taking the initiative is the first step on a journey of fully articulating whatever was felt, whatever was thought.
We have different names for all kinds of categories of initiative. You might set out on an expedition. You might create an artwork. You might start a company, set up an organisation. Start a project, launch a campaign, establish a committee. Call it an enterprise or an undertaking or a piece of work — but underneath it’s always the same thing: the part of work, where something invisible is brought into the world, starting with the moment where someone takes the first step to do so.
Typically, this last third of work — the world of initiatives (rather than impulses and ideas) — is viewed as the whole of work. If you look at work solely through the lens of ‘getting things done’, then work is just a matter of carrying out initiatives. But the truth is that no initiative lives in isolation. Every initiative starts with someone taking the initiative. And that moment of taking the initiative is the expression of an unseen idea, an unseen need that that person has. The initiative is a response to some invisible question. In order to understand the nature of the initiative — what is required, where it is headed — then it’s necessary to uncover what that invisible question was.
When involved in any initiative, we need to stay connected to the need that inspired it in order to navigate successfully. And we need to stay connected to that need — that personal, singular need — in order to know when it is done.
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