the California-based maker of smart, eco-friendly outdoor gear, grew so fast that it stopped training new managers properly and lost control of its ballooning network of product divisions and distribution channels. In response, Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner, went into quick-fix mode, restructuring the company five times in five years. ‘I was driving everyone crazy by constantly trying new ideas without a clear direction for where we were trying to go,’ he wrote later. To find that direction, Chouinard eventually pulled the Andon rope. In 1991 he took a dozen of his top managers to southern Argentina for a walkabout in the real Patagonia. Like biblical prophets seeking truth in the desert, the company brass spent two weeks rambling through the harsh, windy landscape, chewing over the Big Question: what sort of company do we want to build? They returned from Argentina with a bundle of ideas that eventually crystallised into a mission statement: ‘Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.’ To embed that creed in the chain of command, Chouinard took lower-level managers on week-long retreats in US national parks. Having taken the time to answer the Big Question, Patagonia was finally able to put its house in order, cutting out superfluous layers of management, streamlining inventories and taming its sales channels. Today the company racks up annual sales over $540 million while continuing the policy it started in 1985 of donating 1 per cent of those sales to environmental causes.
Businesses aren’t the only ones to benefit from thinking hard about problems. Under its new safety regime, the RAF uses psychologists to drill down through the so-called ‘human factors’ that play a part in every accident. ‘Each piece of the puzzle has a story, and behind that story is another story and another – whether it’s a man who left home early in the morning because he was out late last night, had an argument with his wife or partner, or got to work and the books he was meant to reference weren’t there,’ says Group Captain Brailsford. ‘We’re talking about pulling the Andon rope to get to the very bottom of each problem. It means we take longer to think before acting, but when we do act we are able to apply the right solutions to the right problems.’
The same goes for matters of the heart. To mend a broken relationship, you must take time to work out what is really going wrong before seeking the right fix. When counselling couples in Toronto, Dave Perry places a small, ceramic tortoise on the table between him and his clients. ‘It’s just a little visual reminder that you need to take the slow and patient approach to get to the heart of the matter,’ he says. ‘At first, people struggle with it because they want a quick fix, but once they feel they have permission to slow down, it comes as a huge relief.’
Taking time to identify and frame the problem is very much the modus operandi of IDEO, a global design firm famous for the deep, probing research it does before prescribing a fix. When the Memorial Hospital and Health System of South Bend, Indiana, asked for help in making plans for its new Heart and Vascular centre, the IDEO staffers spent weeks on the wards, observing, listening, asking questions. They interviewed and ran workshops with patients, families, doctors, nurses, administrators, technicians and volunteers. They even recreated the experience of arriving at the hospital for everything from a simple consultation to open-heart surgery from the point of view of the patient and family members. Many of their suggestions went into the final design of the new wing. ‘Instead of just investigating people’s needs by asking directly, “What would you like?” we take a more meditative, experiential approach that involves immersion and percolation,’ says Jane Fulton Suri, Managing Partner and Creative Director of IDEO. ‘When you spend more time getting deeply familiar with a problem, that creates space for new and surprising insights.’
It can even lead to a complete recasting of the original problem. If a client requests a new, improved toaster, IDEO might flip the question round to ask: is there a better way to make toast? Or how could breakfast be different? IDEO took a similar tack when helping Apple develop its revolutionary computer mouse in 1980. ‘Right from the start we ask, “What is the real problem we need to address?” says Fulton Suri. ‘There is always a danger that the solution is already embedded in the way we frame our original problem. If we take the time to reframe it, we can open up alternative, and often better, ways to address the real need.’
That principle is even paying off in the staid world of traffic management. When accidents occur persistently along a stretch of road, the traditional fix is to tweak the street furniture – install new lights or speed bumps, say, or put up signs urging caution. Why? Because the more guidance you give motorists, the better they drive.
Or do they? After years of watching this golden rule fail to deliver safer roads, some engineers began to wonder if they were posing the wrong question. Instead of asking what can we add to our roads to make them safer, they began asking, in the counter-intuitive style of IDEO, what would a safer road look like? What they discovered astonished them. It turns out conventional wisdom about traffic is wrong. Often, the less you tell motorists how to behave, the more safely they drive. Think about it. Most accidents occur near school gates and crosswalks or around bus and cycle lanes, which all tend to be regulated by a dense forest of signs, lights and road markings. That is because the barrage of instructions can distract drivers. It can also lull them into a false sense of security, making them more likely to race through without paying attention.
Minimise the lights, the signage, the visual cues, and motorists must think for themselves. They have to make eye contact with pedestrians and cyclists, negotiate their passage through the cityscape, plan their next move. Result: traffic flows more freely and safely. Ripping out the signage along Kensington High Street, one of the busiest shopping strips in London, helped slash the accident rate by 47 per cent.
There are also neurological reasons for taking the time to think slowly and deeply about a problem. Deadlines have a role to play in finding solutions, but racing the clock can lead to sloppy, superficial thinking. Teresa Amabile, professor and Director of Research at the Harvard Business School, has spent the last 30 years studying creativity in the workplace. Her research points to a sobering conclusion: rushing makes us less creative. ‘Although moderate levels of time pressure don’t harm creativity, extreme time pressure can stifle creativity because people can’t deeply engage with the problem,’ says Amabile. ‘Creativity usually requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up.’
We all know this from experience. Our best ideas, those eureka moments that turn everything upside down, seldom come when we’re stuck in fast-forward, juggling emails, straining to make our voices heard in a high-stress meeting, rushing to deliver a piece of work to an impatient boss. They come when we’re walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock. When we are calm, unhurried and free from stress and distractions, the brain slips into a richer, more nuanced mode of thought. Some call this Slow Thinking, and the best minds have always understood its power. Milan Kundera talked about ‘the wisdom of slowness’. Arthur Conan Doyle described Sherlock Holmes entering a quasi-meditative state, ‘with a dreamy vacant expression in his eyes’, when weighing up the evidence from crime scenes. Charles Darwin called himself a ‘slow thinker’.
Slowing down to ponder even makes sense when circumstances do not allow for weeks of patient observation or long, meditative walks in Patagonia. Statistically, police officers become involved in fewer shootings, arrests and assaults working alone than they do with a partner. Why? Because the lone cop is more cautious and circumspect, more likely to take a moment to weigh the options before acting. A slight pause can even make us more ethical. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have shown that, when faced with a clear choice between right and wrong, we are five times more likely to do the right thing if given time to think about it. Other research suggests that just two minutes of reasoned reflection can help us look beyond our biases to accept the merits of a rational argument.
To make space for rich, creative mulling, we need to demolish the taboo against slowness that runs so deep in 21st-century culture. We need to accept that decelerating judiciously, at the right moments, can make us smarter. When tackling a problem in groups, that means paying less attention
