under pressure to goose the bottom line or jack up a sagging stock price, the knee-jerk response is often to downsize. But shedding staff in a hurry seldom pays off. It can hollow out a company, demoralise the remaining workforce and spook customers and suppliers. Often it leaves deeper problems untouched. After sifting through 30 years’ worth of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, Franco Gandolfi, a professor of management, came to a stark conclusion: ‘The overall picture of the financial effects of downsizing is negative.’
The rise and fall of Toyota is a cautionary tale. The Japanese car-maker conquered the world by obsessively tackling problems at their source. When something went wrong on the assembly line, even the lowliest worker could pull a cord, known as the Andon rope, which would cause a buzzer to ring and a light bulb to flash overhead (‘andon’ means ‘paper lantern’ in Japanese). Like a toddler, staff would ask ‘Why, why, why?’ over and over again, until they reached the root cause of the problem. If it turned out to be serious, they might stop the entire production line. In every case, they would devise a permanent solution.
But everything changed when Toyota embarked on a headlong dash to become the number one car-maker in the world. Management overreached, lost control of the supply chain and ignored warnings from the factory floor. They started putting out fires without asking why those fires were breaking out in the first place.
Result: a recall of more than 10 million faulty vehicles that shredded the firm’s reputation, wiped out billions of dollars in revenue and unleashed a barrage of lawsuits. In 2010 Akio Toyoda, the company’s chastened president, explained to the US Congress how Toyota fell from grace: ‘We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organisation.’ Translation: we stopped pulling the Andon rope and fell for the quick fix.
You see the same folly in professional sports. When a team hits a slump, and the clamour for a turnaround reaches fever pitch in the stands and the media, owners reach for the oldest fix in the playbook: fire the coach and hire a new one. As the world has grown more impatient, the scramble for results on the field has turned more frantic. Since 1992 the average tenure of a manager in professional football in England has fallen from 3.5 years to 1.5 years. In the lower leagues six months to a year is now the norm. Yet turning management into a revolving door is a bad way to run a team. Academic research shows that most new managers deliver no more than a short honeymoon period of better results. After a dozen games the team’s performance is usually the same, or worse, than it was before the regime change. Just like a weight-watcher piling the pounds back on after a crash diet.
You see the same mistakes in war and diplomacy. The US-led coalition failed to back up the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq in 2003 with proper long-term plans for rebuilding the country. As Western troops amassed on the border, Donald Rumsfeld, then the US Secretary of Defense, put a modern spin on the old chestnut that the soldiers would be ‘home for Christmas’. The war in Iraq, he declared, ‘could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.’ What followed was years of chaos, carnage and insurgency, capped by an ignoble retreat from a job half done. In the salty argot of the US military, the brass ignored the golden rule of the seven Ps: Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance.
Even the technology industry, that great engine of speed, is learning that you cannot solve every problem by simply crunching more data and writing better algorithms. A team of IT specialists recently rode into the World Health Organisation headquarters in Geneva on a mission to eradicate tropical diseases such as malaria and Guinea worm. A culture clash ensued. The Tropical Diseases department is a million miles from the hip working spaces of Silicon Valley. Grey filing cabinets and in-trays piled high with folders line a dimly lit corridor. A yellow, hand-written note saying ‘Hors Service’ (out of order) is taped to the coin slot of the drinks machine. Sandal-wearing academic types work quietly in offices with tropical fans on the ceiling. It feels like the sociology department of an underfunded university, or a bureaucratic outpost in the developing world. Like many of the experts here, Pierre Boucher was stunned and amused by the can-do swagger of the IT interlopers. ‘These tech guys arrived with their laptops and said, “Give us the data and the maps and we’ll fix this for you,” and I just thought, “Will you now?”’ he says, with a wry smile. ‘Tropical diseases are an immensely complex problem that you can never just solve on a keyboard.’
‘Did the uber-nerds make any inroads?’ I ask.
‘No, nothing at all,’ says Boucher. ‘Eventually they left and we never heard from them again.’
Bill Gates, the high priest of high-speed problem-solving, has learned the same lesson. In 2005 he challenged the world’s scientists to come up with solutions to the biggest problems in global health in double-quick time. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $458 million in grants to 45 of the more than 1,500 proposals that flooded in. There was giddy talk of creating, for instance, vaccines that needed no refrigeration within five years. But five years later the mood was sober. Even the most promising projects were still a long way from delivering real solutions. ‘We were naïve when we began,’ Gates conceded.
The bottom line here is clear: the quick fix is the wrong horse to back. On its own, no algorithm has ever solved a global health problem. No impulse buy has ever turned around a life. No drug has ever cured a chronic illness. No box of chocolates has ever mended a broken relationship. No educational DVD has ever transformed a child into a baby Einstein. No TED Talk has ever changed the world. No drone strike has ever killed off a terrorist group. It’s always more complicated than that.
Everywhere you look – health, politics, education, relationships, business, diplomacy, finance, the environment – the problems we face are more complex and more pressing than ever before. Piss-poor performance is no longer an option. The time has come to resist the siren call of half-baked solutions and short-term palliatives and start fixing things properly. We need to find a new and better way to tackle every kind of problem. We need to learn the art of the Slow Fix. Now is the moment to define our terms. Not all problems are created equal. Some can be fixed with a quick and simple solution. Inserting a single line of code can stop a misfiring webpage from inflicting mayhem on a company. When someone is choking on a morsel of food, the Heimlich manoeuvre can dislodge the offending object from the windpipe and save the victim’s life. My focus in this book is on a very different kind of problem, where the parameters are unclear and shifting, where human behaviour comes into play, where there may not even be a right answer. Think climate change, the obesity epidemic, or a company grown too big for its own good.
When dealing with such problems, the quick fix addresses the symptoms rather than the root cause. It puts short-term relief before long-term cure. It makes no provision for unwelcome side effects. Every culture has a tradition of skin-deep fixes. The French call it a ‘solution de fortune’. The Argentines ‘tie it all up with wire’. In English we talk of ‘band-aid cures’ and ‘duct-tape solutions’. The Finns joke about mending a puncture with chewing-gum. The Hindi word ‘jugaad’ means solving problems – from building cars to repairing water pumps – by throwing together whatever scraps are to hand. My favourite metaphor for the folly of the quick fix is the Korean expression ‘peeing on a frozen leg’: warm urine delivers instant relief, followed by worse misery as the liquid freezes solid on the skin.
So what is the Slow Fix? That is the question we will answer in the coming pages. But already it seems clear that it rests on a virtue that is in short supply nowadays: patience.
Sam Micklus knows that better than most. He is the founder of Odyssey of the Mind, the closest thing we have to an Olympics of problem-solving. Every year, pupils in 5,000 schools around the world set out to tackle one of six problems set by Micklus himself. They might have to build a weight-bearing structure from balsa wood, stage a play where a food defends itself in a mock court from charges of being unhealthy, or depict the discovery of archaeological treasures from the past and the future. Teams square off in regional and then national competitions to win a place at the annual World
