Growing Pains
I was thinking about the idea of growing pains, and how it's such a tidy, handy turn of phrase.
Because if you think about it, it does double duty: in just two words, it acknowledges that things feel off and aren't working, and it insinuates there's a perfectly good reason why -we're in the process of outgrowing something, things will feel a little wonky until they don't, but it's all temporary. We'll grow out of it - and no one's to blame.
It's also a useful way to describe when things feel messy at work. But here's where I think we sometimes misperceive it.
"Growing pains" was originally meant to describe pain in children assumed to be related to growth ("bone growth," not true, but anyway). So it presumes that it happens once, for the most part, the majority of adolescence being the (physical) growing pains from childhood to adulthood.
So in work parlance, when we throw around terms like "growing pains," I think there's a very subtle, underlying assumption that it's a one-off, one-time situation, that we "just need to get through this," and then we'll be good for, I don't know, the rest of work eternity.
What happens though is that this leads us to believe:
1 - growing pains should only happen once (or only at Major-with-a-capital-M inflection points)
2 - if we are constantly going through growing pains, we're doing something wrong
Not true! The reality is, we should be prepared to experience growing pains a lot more frequently than we realize.
As creative business leaders today, we have to be ready to evolve. All. The. Time. I'm not saying you should be *constantly evolving* for the sake of it, but I am saying you should be *consistently evaluating* your people, your processes, your operations.
Don't fix what ain't broke, but don't rest on your laurels either.
✅ This: regular check-ins to gauge what's working, what's not, being curious about ways to improve
🚫 Not this: Shiny Object Syndrome, chasing quick fixes, abandoning new efforts midstream
There's a version of regular growing pains that I think is a *good* thing. It means you're challenging yourself and your team, to grow, improve, pivot.
