Your mind is working its best when you’re being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity.
Banksy – Street Artist
Healthy paranoia is a necessary condition during these disruptive times. Paranoia is not a medicated condition. Paranoia is not a psychiatric condition. Paranoia is awareness of life disruptions that provide direction in how you work, respond, sustain, improve, and even excel.
Story: Andy Grove, Intel founder and Bill Gates, Microsoft founder are believers in the value of paranoia. Both believe fear of complacency and stagnation is good for business. Grove said in Only the Paranoid Survive that fear is critical for creating and sustaining the passion and energy to win in the marketplace. Manageable fear is good for organizations makers. You can use fear as a mechanism for overcoming inertia and for leaning forward.
Your fear can be harnessed and channeled to try harder, do better, and take intelligent risks.
Story: Our firm – Quality + Engineering – does risk management. I always seem to be asking ‘what if?’ My wife thinks I’m always looking at the down side and even seem a little paranoid. I tell her I’m a realist and I’m not medicated. I’ve never been clinically diagnosed as ‘paranoid’. I put on my happy face until I see another hazard or another ‘what if’.
In my world, paranoia is a preemptive insight of what may occur: upside risks (opportunities), downside risks (consequences), black swan events, Murphies, and other unexpected conditions. A strong dose of healthy paranoia is also good to sniff out opportunities. I’m talking about risk paranoia of looking at downside risks and planning on how to mitigate them. Also, I’m also talking about risk paranoia of looking at upside risks and opportunities and figuring out how to monetize them.
Work Lesson Earned: Organizational paranoia is good for companies. Personal paranoia is good for you. These ideas seem like heresy in today’s politically charged world, which says fear is bad, tension kills, and fear causes dysfunctionality.
A friend of mine once said: ‘If you’re not paranoid, you don’t know what’s going on’. Our paranoia process involves the 4P’s(R). You have to be proactive, preventive, predictive, and preemptive about opportunities. Proactive means you Intentionally Self-Manage. Preventive means you mitigate risks. Predictive means you look ahead and around corners to anticipate opportunities. Preemptive means you mitigate downside risks before they occur and position yourself to maximize opportunities (upside risks).