and sends staff along to scout for talent.
I catch up with Micklus at the 2010 World Finals in East Lansing, Michigan. A retired professor of industrial design from New Jersey, he now lives in Florida, and looks every inch the American pensioner, with his comfortable shoes, silver hair and light tan. At the World Finals, however, surrounded by the hubbub of children pulling on costumes and fine-tuning their presentations for the judges, he is buzzing like a kid on Christmas morning. Everyone refers to him fondly as Dr Sam.
During 30 years at the helm of Odyssey of the Mind, Micklus has watched the cult of the quick fix tighten its grip on popular culture. ‘The real trouble nowadays is that no one wants to wait for anything any more,’ he says. ‘When I ask people to think about a problem even for just a minute or two, they are already looking at their watches after ten seconds.’
He takes a sip of water from a plastic bottle and looks around the enormous gymnasium where we are chatting. It feels like backstage at a West End musical, with children scurrying to and fro, bellowing instructions, assembling stage props and testing surprisingly elaborate floats. Micklus’s eyes come to rest on a clutch of 11-year-old girls struggling to fix a faulty chain on their homemade camper van.
‘Even here at the World Finals, where you’re talking about the best problem-solvers of the future, a lot of the kids still want to pounce on the first idea that comes along and make it work immediately,’ he says. ‘But your first idea is usually not your best, and it may take weeks or even longer to find the right solution to a problem and then make it come to fruition.’
No one, not even Micklus, believes we have to solve every problem slowly. There are times – patching up a soldier on the battlefield, for instance, or cooling a damaged nuclear reactor in Japan – when sitting back to stroke your chin and ponder the big picture and the long term is not an option. You have to channel MacGyver, reach for the duct tape and cobble together a solution that works right now. When the astronauts on the Apollo 13 radioed Houston about their ‘problem’ back in 1970, the boffins at NASA mission control did not launch a full inquiry into what caused the space craft’s oxygen tanks to explode. Instead, they rolled up their sleeves and toiled round the clock to devise a quick-and-dirty workaround that would modify the carbon dioxide filters so the astronauts could use the lunar module as a lifeboat. Inside 40 hours the crack problem-solvers in Houston came up with an ingenious solution using materials on board the ship: cardboard, suit hoses, plastic stowage bags, even duct tape. It was not a permanent fix, but it brought the Apollo 13 crew home safely. Afterwards NASA pulled the Andon rope, spending thousands of hours working out exactly what went wrong with those oxygen tanks and devising a Slow Fix to make sure they never exploded again.
Yet how many of us follow NASA’s lead? When a quick fix eases the symptoms of a problem, as that acupuncture session did for my back, our appetite for pulling the Andon rope tends to fade. After a tidal wave of bad debt threatened to torpedo the world economy in 2008, governments around the world swiftly put together bail-outs totalling over $5 trillion dollars. That was the necessary quick fix. Once the threat of global meltdown receded, however, so too did the will to follow up with a deeper fix. Everywhere, politicians failed to push through the sort of root and branch reform that would guard against Financial Armageddon 2: The Sequel.
Too often, when a quick fix goes wrong, we wring our hands, promise to turn over a new leaf and then go back to making the same mistakes all over again. ‘Even when a more fundamental change is required, people still go into quick-fix mode,’ says Ranjay Gulati, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. ‘They appear to make the right noises and take the right steps, but ultimately they fail to follow through, so that what starts out as a slow fix ends up being just another quick fix. This is a common problem.’
BP is a textbook example. In 2005 the company’s refinery in Texas exploded, killing 15 workers and injuring 180 more. Less than a year later, oil was twice found to be leaking from a 25-kilometre stretch of corroded BP pipeline off the coast of Alaska. Coming so close together, these two incidents should have been a wake-up call, a warning that years of cutting corners had started to backfire. In 2006 John Browne, then BP’s chief executive, seemed to agree the time for quick fixes was over. ‘We have to get the priorities right,’ he announced. ‘And job one is to get to these things that have happened, get them fixed and get them sorted out. We don’t just sort them out on the surface, we get them fixed deeply.’
Only that never happened. Instead, BP carried on much as before, earning a slew of official reprimands and a hefty fine for failing to live up to Browne’s pledge. In April 2010 the company paid the price for its cavalier approach when an explosion ripped through its Deepwater Horizon rig, killing 11 workers, injuring 17 others and eventually spewing more than 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, making it the worst environmental disaster in US history.
The BP fiasco is a reminder of just how perniciously addictive the quick fix can be. Even when lives and large sums of money are at stake, when everything from our health and relationships to our work and the environment is suffering, even when bombarded by evidence that the road to calamity is paved with band-aid solutions, we still gravitate towards the quick fix, like moths to a flame.
The good news is we can beat this addiction. In every walk of life, more and more of us are starting to accept that when tackling hard problems faster is not always better, that the best solutions take flight when we invest enough time, effort and resources. When we slow down, in other words.
There are many questions to answer in this book. What is the Slow Fix? Is it the same recipe for every problem? How do we know when a problem has been properly solved? Above all, how can we put the Slow Fix into practice in a world addicted to speed?
To answer those questions, I have been travelling the planet, meeting people who are taking a fresh approach to solving tough problems. We will visit the mayor who revolutionised public transport in Bogotá, Colombia; hang out with the warden and inmates at a state-of-the-art prison in Norway; explore how Icelanders are reinventing democracy. Some solutions we encounter may work in your own life, organisation or community, but my goal is to go much deeper. It is to draw some universal lessons about how to find the best solution when anything goes wrong. That means spotting the common ground between problems that on the surface seem completely unrelated. What lessons can peace negotiators in the Middle East, for instance, take from the organ donor system in Spain? How can a community regeneration programme in Vietnam help boost productivity in a company in Canada? What insights can French researchers trying to reinvent the water-bottle take from the rehabilitation of a failing school in Los Angeles? What can we all learn from the troubleshooters at NASA, the young problem-solvers in Odyssey of the Mind, or gamers who spend billions of hours tackling problems online?
This book is also a personal quest. After years of false dawns and half-measures, of shortcuts and red herrings, I want to work out what is wrong with my back. Is it my diet? My posture? My lifestyle? Is there an emotional or psychological root to all this spinal misery? I am finally ready to slow down and do the hard work needed to repair my back once and for all. No more duct tape, band-aid or chewing-gum cures. No more peeing on frozen legs.
The time has come for the Slow Fix.
Why the Quick Fix?
I want it all, and I want it now.
Queen, rock group
St Peter’s Church seems untouched by the impatient swirl of downtown Vienna. It stands in a narrow square, tucked away from the noisy shopping streets that criss-cross the Austrian capital. Buildings lean in from all sides like soldiers closing ranks. Visitors often wander past without
