Nuclear Proaction

1) An extreme “over pre-action” to an event occurring in the future.
2) Extraordinarily proactive measures taken in spite of detailed processes already in place to address the situation in question.

Communications are typically verbose, meticulously detailed, and far exceed the authority of the originator. Commonly encountered via email, examples often contain combinations of “wall o’ words”, check-lists, outlines, attachments, or screen shots and are often sent to multiple recipients using separate email chains in a shotgun effect. Whether intended or not, nuclear proactions are demeaning to their recipients because they are generally unnecessary and infer ineptitude on the part of the recipient.

Proactor discovers a problem impacting a tiny percentage of the company’s customer base. Following procedures, he notifies his direct supervisor in a 500-word paragraph explaining the problem. Without delay, Proactor proceeds to forward the communication (crafted for his supervisor) to co-workers including a comprehensive check list they must follow in order to identify examples of the issue for collection.

A separate communication goes to all Field, Network, and Database engineering teams. This note has a subject “FYI” with text in the body of “Please Assist” and 14 screen shots detailing the sole example collected (the 15th screen shot was left off to prevent the message from being too large for the company’s servers to process). Attached to this Engineering communication are the two prior emails Proactor sent. This final concoction gets forwarded to a manager with the company VP blind carbon copied.

Satisfied with his Nuclear Proaction, Proactor puts up his out of office message and leaves for the day.