The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World. Carl Honore
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 to the fast thinkers who hog the stage and more to the shrinking violets who sit back and ponder. Tim Perkins, a coach at Odyssey of the Mind, sees this all the time. ‘Last year, we had one kid who sat so silently through the brainstorming sessions you could almost forget she was there,’ he says. ‘But she was actually taking time to process what was being said, and then 10 or 15 minutes later she would speak up. Often the team ended up taking her solution to the problem.’
We can all take steps to think harder. Even when nothing needs fixing, build time into your schedule to unplug from technology and let your mind wander. When tackling a new problem, make it a rule to sleep on it for at least one night before proposing any solutions. Ask why, why and why until you uncover the root cause. Keep an object on your desk – a piece of sculpture, a wooden snail, a photo of your favourite holiday spot – that reminds you to slow down and think before you act. Above all, test your solutions again and again, no matter how foolproof they seem.
Betting the farm on a quick fix that shows early promise is an easy mistake to make, even when we design systems to stop it from happening. The investigators at RAF Coningsby, freshly trained in the art of parsing ‘human factors’ and homing in on the root causes of problems, have fallen into the trap. Not long ago, during routine maintenance work, an engineer opened the undercarriage door of a Typhoon jet. It slammed down onto a heavy jack standing beneath it, ripping open a gash that looked like it could have been caused by enemy fire. In the past, the young corporal would have been punished and probably ridiculed by his peers. He might even have tampered with the evidence to deflect blame. Either way, his crew would have replaced the door without really probing why the accident occurred in the first place.
Under the new regime, the engineer filed a report on the spot, triggering a full investigation. Group Captain Simpson’s team quickly found that the safety pin that would have prevented the undercarriage door from lowering at the fateful moment was missing. So far, so good. Further digging then unearthed a startling oversight: though the safety pins are plainly listed in all the Typhoon manuals, three out of the four RAF squadrons had never even fitted them.
Simpson was stunned. ‘Everyone’s following the list. Everyone’s trained in accordance with the list. Everyone can see the pictures of the pin in place. And still no one had noticed that we’d never even bought any of these pins,’ she says. It felt like a home-run endorsement of the new safety regime. The RAF bought a load of safety pins and then closed the file on the Case of the Damaged Undercarriage Door.
‘Everyone said, “Crikey, isn’t this new system brilliant? We would never have picked this up before,”’ says Simpson. ‘We thought, “That’s all sorted now, problem solved.”’ Only it wasn’t. A few weeks later another Typhoon door was wrecked in an almost identical accident.
The safety pin was a red herring. When investigators took the time to think harder and dig deeper, they found a host of other factors leading to the mishap with the door: engineers distracted by changing shifts; poor lighting in the hangar; an illustration in the instruction manual suggesting the wrong angle for the jack.
‘We were so pleased to find the safety pin, which seemed like such an obvious answer to the problem, that we were completely blinded by it and just stopped looking for other causes,’ says Simpson, wincing slightly at the memory. ‘But the upside is we learned a very valuable lesson from this: just because you find one factor that seems to offer an almost perfect solution, you don’t stop. You have to carry on investigating, digging, asking questions until you have the full picture of what happened and how to fix it properly.’
In other words, if your first fix seems too good to be true, it probably is.
When I ask Simpson if all that hard thinking ever leads to a moment of perfect clarity, she falls silent for a few seconds before answering. ‘You do reach a point when you know what has to be done, but it’s rarely as simple as firing a magic bullet,’ she says. ‘There are always multiple factors you have to connect up.’
THINK HOLISTIC: Joining the