The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World

CHAPTER ONE

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 even noticing the church’s delicious baroque façade and green domes.

Stepping through the immense wooden doors is like passing through a wormhole to a time when there were few reasons to rush. Gregorian chants whisper from hidden speakers. Candles cast flickering light on gilded altarpieces and paintings of the Virgin Mary. The smell of burning incense sweetens the air. A stone staircase, winding and weathered, leads down into a crypt dating back a thousand years. With thick walls blocking out mobile phone signals, the silence feels almost metaphysical.

I have come to St Peter’s to discuss the virtues of slowing down. It is a soirée for business people, but some clergy are also present. At the end of the evening, when most of the guests have dispersed into the Viennese night, Monsignor Martin Schlag, resplendent in his purple cassock, comes up to me, a little sheepishly, to make a confession. ‘As I was listening to you, I suddenly realised how easy it is for all of us to get infected by the impatience of the modern world,’ he says. ‘Lately, I must admit, I have been praying too fast.’

We both laugh at the irony of a man of the cloth behaving like a man in a suit, but his transgression underlines just how deep the quick-fix impulse runs. After all, prayer may be the oldest ritual for solving problems. Throughout history and across cultures, our ancestors have turned to gods and spirits in times of need, seeking help in tackling everything from floods and famine to drought and disease. Whether praying can actually solve problems is a matter of debate, but one thing is clear: no god has ever offered succour to those who pray faster. ‘Prayer is not meant to be a shortcut,’ says Monsignor Schlag. ‘The whole point of praying is to slow down, listen, think deeply. If you hurry prayer, it loses its meaning and power. It becomes an empty quick fix.’

If we are going to start solving problems thoroughly, we must first understand our fatal attraction to speedy solutions. We need to know why even people like Monsignor Schlag, who devote their lives to serene contemplation in places like St Peter’s, still fall for the quick fix. Are we somehow hardwired to reach for the duct-tape? Does modern society make it harder to resist peeing on frozen legs?

After my encounter with the monsignor, I turn to a secular expert on the workings of the human brain. Peter Whybrow is a psychiatrist and director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California in Los Angeles. He is also the author of a book called American Mania, which explores how brain machinery that helped early man survive in a world of privation makes us prone to gorging in the modern age of plenty. Along with many in the field of neuroscience, he believes our addiction to the quick fix has physiological roots.

The human brain has two basic mechanisms for solving problems, which are commonly known as System 1 and System 2. The first is fast and intuitive, almost like thinking without thinking. When we see a lion eyeing us from across a watering hole, our brains instantly map out the best escape route and send us hurtling towards it. Quick fix. Problem solved. But System 1 is not just for life-or-death situations. It is the shortcut we use to navigate through daily life. Imagine if you had to reach every decision, from which sandwich to buy at lunch to whether to smile back at that fetching stranger on the subway, through deep analysis and anguished navel-gazing. Life would be unbearable. System 1 saves us the trouble.

By contrast, System 2 is slow and deliberate. It is the conscious thinking we do when asked to calculate 23 times 16 or analyse the possible side effects of a new social policy. It involves planning, critical analysis and rational thought, and is driven by parts of the brain that continue to develop after birth and into adolescence, which is why children are all about instant gratification. Not surprisingly, System 2 consumes more energy.

System 1 was a good match for life in the distant past. Our early ancestors had less need to ruminate deeply or take the long view. They ate when hungry, drank when thirsty and slept when tired. ‘There was no tomorrow when living on the savannah, and survival depended on what you did each day,’ says Whybrow. ‘So the physiological systems that we inherited in the brain and body focused on finding short-term solutions and rewarding us for pursuing them.’ After farming began to take hold 10,000 years ago, planning for the future became an asset. Now, in a complex, post-industrial world, System 2 should be king.

Only it is not. Why? One reason is that, inside our 21st-century heads, we are still roaming the savannah. System 1 holds sway because it takes a lot less time and effort. When it kicks in, the brain floods with reward chemicals like dopamine, which deliver the kind of feel-good jolt that keeps us coming back for more. That’s why you get a little thrill every time you graduate to the next level in Angry Birds or cross an item off your To-Do list: job done, reward delivered, move on to the next thrill. In the cost–benefit calculus of neuroscience, System 1 offers maximum return for minimum effort. The rush it delivers can even become an end in itself. Like coffee addicts itching for a shot of caffeine, or smokers dashing outside for a cigarette, we get hooked on the quick fix of the quick fix. By comparison, System 2 can seem a dour taskmaster, demanding toil and sacrifice today in return for the promise of some vague pay-off in the future, like a personal trainer barking at us to eschew that chocolate éclair in favour of another 20 push-ups, or a parent nagging us to hit the books instead of running outside to play. Henry T. Ford was referring to System 2 when he said, ‘Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.’

System 2 can also act like a spin doctor, rationalising our preference for short-term rewards. After yielding to temptation and wolfing down that éclair, we convince ourselves that we deserved a treat, needed the energy boost or will burn off the extra calories in the gym. ‘The bottom line is that the primitive brain is wired for the quick fix; it always has been,’ says Whybrow. ‘The delayed gratification that comes with taking the long view is hard work. The quick fix comes more naturally to us. That’s where we get our pleasure. We enjoy it and soon we want it quicker and quicker.’

That is why our ancestors warned against quick fixes long before Toyota invented the Andon rope. In the Bible, Peter urges Christians to be patient: ‘The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.’ Translation: God is not in the business of supplying real-time solutions. Nor was it just religious authorities that fretted over man’s soft spot for the siren call of short-termism. John Locke, a leading thinker of the Enlightenment, warned that quick-fix merchants were on the road to ruin. ‘He that has not mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry, and is in danger never to be good at anything,’ he wrote. A century later, Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America, restated the danger: ‘Momentary passions and immediate interests have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility or justice.’ A distrust of snap decisions lingers even in the modern era. In the face of a dire medical diagnosis, the conventional advice is to seek a second opinion. Governments, businesses and other organisations spend billions gathering the data, research and analysis to help them solve problems thoroughly.

So, why, despite all these warnings and exhortations, do we still fall for the quick fix? The lure of System 1 is only part of the explanation. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the human brain has evolved a whole array of quirks and mechanisms that distort our thinking and nudge us in the same direction.

Consider our natural penchant for optimism. Across cultures and ages, research has shown that most of us expect the future to be better than it ends up being. We significantly underestimate our chances of being laid off, divorced or diagnosed with a fatal illness. We expect to sire gifted children, outperform our peers and live longer than we actually do. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, we let hope triumph over experience. This tendency may have an evolutionary purpose, spurring us to strive and push forward, rather than retreat to a dark corner to brood on the unfairness of it all. In The Optimism Bias, Tali Sharot argues that belief in a better future fosters healthier minds in healthier bodies. Yet she warns that too much optimism can backfire. After all, who needs regular health check-ups or a retirement savings plan if everything is going to pan out in the end? ‘“Smoking kills” messages don’t work because people think their chances of cancer are low,’ says Sharot. ‘The divorce rate is 50 per cent, but people don’t think it’s the same for them. There is a very fundamental bias in the brain.’ And that bias affects the way we tackle problems. When you slip on the rose-tinted spectacles, the easy quick fix suddenly looks a whole lot more plausible.

The human brain also has a natural fondness for familiar solutions. Instead of taking the time to understand a problem on its own merits, our habit is to reach for fixes that have worked on similar problems in the past, even when better options are staring us in the face. This bias, uncovered in study after study, is known as the Einstellung effect. It was useful back in the days when mankind faced a limited set of urgent and straightforward problems such as how to avoid being eaten by a lion; it is less helpful in a modern world of spiralling complexity. The Einstellung effect is one reason we often make the same mistakes over and over again in politics, relationships and careers.

Another is our aversion to change. Conservatives do not have a monopoly on wanting to keep things as they are. Even when confronted with compelling arguments for a fresh start, the human instinct is to stay put. That’s why we can read a self-help book, nod in agreement all the way through, and then fail to put any of the advice into practice. Psychologists call this inertia the ‘status-quo bias’. It explains why we always sit in the same place in a classroom when there is no seating plan or stick with the same bank, pension provider and utility company when rivals offer better deals. This resistance to change is woven into our vernacular. ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ we say, or, ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ Along with the Einstellung effect, the status-quo bias makes it harder for us to break out of a quick-fix rut.

Combine that with our reluctance to admit mistakes and you end up with another obstacle to the Slow Fix: the so-called ‘legacy problem’. The more we invest in a solution – staff, technology, marketing, reputation – the less inclined we are to question it or search for something better. That means we would rather stand by a fix that is not working than start looking for one that does. Even the nimblest problem-solvers can fall into this trap. In the early 2000s a trio of software whizzes in Estonia wrote some code that made it easy to make telephone calls over the Internet. Result: the birth of one of the fastest-growing companies of the 21st century. A decade later the Skype headquarters in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, remains a shrine to start-up chic, with bare brick walls, bean bags and funky art. Everywhere you look, multinational hipsters are sipping mineral water or fiddling with iPads. On a landing near the room where I meet Andres Kütt, Skype’s young, goateed business evangelist, stands a whiteboard covered in squiggles from the last brainstorming session.

Even in this iconoclastic bear pit, the wrong fix can win stubborn defenders. At 36, Kütt is already a seasoned problem-solver. He helped pioneer Internet banking and spearheaded efforts to get Estonians to file their tax returns online. He worries that, by growing old enough and big enough to have vested interests, Skype has lost some of its problem-solving mojo. ‘Legacy is now a big problem for us, too,’ he says. ‘You make a massive investment to solve a problem and suddenly the problem is surrounded by a huge number of people and systems that want to justify their existence. You end up with a scenario where the original source of the problem is hidden and hard to reach.’ Rather than change tack, people in those circumstances usually plough on with the prevailing fix. ‘It is scary to step back and deal with the idea that your old solutions may not even work, and to contemplate investing time, money and energy in finding better ones,’ says Kütt. ‘It’s so much easier and safer to stay in your comfort zone.’

Clinging to a sinking ship may be irrational, but the truth is we are not as rational as we like to imagine. Study after study shows that we assume people with deeper voices (usually men) are cleverer and more trustworthy than those who speak in a higher register (usually women). We also tend to think good-looking folk are smarter and more competent than they really are. Or consider the Side Salad Illusion. In one study carried out at the Kellogg School of Management, people were asked to estimate the number of calories in unhealthy foods, such as bacon-and-cheese waffles. They then guessed the caloric content of those same foods when paired with a healthy side dish, such as a bowl of carrot and celery sticks. Time and again, people concluded that adding a virtuous accompaniment made the whole meal contain fewer calories, as if the healthy food could somehow make the unhealthy food less fattening. And this halo effect was three times more pronounced among avid dieters. The conclusion of Alexander Chernev, the lead researcher: ‘People often behave in a way that is illogical and ultimately counterproductive to their goals.’

You can say that again. Our gift for tunnel vision can seem limitless. When confronted by awkward facts that challenge our favoured view – proof that our quick fix is not working, for instance – we tend to write them off as a rogue result, or as evidence that ‘the exception proves the rule’. This is known as the confirmation bias. Sigmund Freud called it ‘denial’, and it goes hand in hand with the legacy problem and the status-quo bias. It can generate a powerful reality distortion field. When told by doctors they are going to die, many people block out the news entirely. Sometimes we cling to our beliefs even in the face of slam-dunk evidence to the contrary. Look at the cottage industry in Holocaust denial. Or how, in the late 1990s, Thabo Mbeki, then the president of South Africa, refused to accept the scientific consensus that AIDS was caused by the HIV virus, leading to the death of more than 330,000 people.

Even when we have no vested interest in distorting or filtering out information, we are still prone to tunnel vision. In an experiment repeated dozens of times on YouTube, test subjects are asked to count the number of passes made by one of two teams playing basketball together in a video. Because both sides have a ball, and the players are constantly weaving in and out around one another, this demands real concentration. Often, that sort of focus is useful, allowing us to block out the distractions that militate against deep thinking. But sometimes it can narrow the lens so we miss valuable bits of information and fail to see the forest for the trees. Halfway through the video a man dressed in a gorilla suit wanders into the middle of the basketball game, turns towards the camera, beats his chest, and walks out again. Guess how many people fail to spot the gorilla? More than half.

What all this underlines is an alarming truth: the human brain is chronically unreliable. The optimism, status-quo and confirmation biases; the lure of System 1; the Einstellung effect, denial and the legacy problem – sometimes it seems as if embracing the quick fix is our biological destiny. Yet neurological wiring is only part of the story. We have also built a roadrunner culture that steers us into Quick Fix Avenue.

These days, hurry is our answer to every problem. We walk fast, talk fast, read fast, eat fast, make love fast, think fast. This is the age of speed yoga and one-minute bedtime stories, of ‘just in time’ this and ‘on demand’ that. Surrounded by gadgets that perform minor miracles at the click of a mouse or the tap of a screen, we come to expect everything to happen at the speed of software. Even our most sacred rituals are under pressure to streamline, accelerate, get up to speed. Churches in the United States have experimented with drive-thru funerals. Recently the Vatican was forced to warn Catholics they could not gain absolution by confessing their sins through a smartphone app. Even our recreational drugs of choice nudge us into quick fix mode: alcohol, amphetamines and cocaine all shift the brain into System 1 gear.

The economy ramps up the pressure for quick fixes. Capitalism has rewarded speed since long before high-frequency trading. The faster investors turn a profit, the faster they can reinvest to make even more money. Any fix that keeps the cash flowing, or the share price buoyant, stands a good chance of carrying the day – because there is money to be made right now and someone else can clean up the mess later. That mindset has sharpened over the last two decades. Many companies spend more time fretting over what their stock prices are doing today than over what will make them stronger a year from now. With so many of us working on short-term contracts, and hopping from job to job, the pressure to make an instant impact or tackle problems with little regard for the long term is immense. This is especially true in the boardroom, where the average tenure for a global CEO has fallen sharply in recent years. In 2011, Leo Apotheker was fired as the boss of Hewlett-Packard after less than 11 months in the post. Dominic Barton, the managing director of McKinsey and Company, a leading consulting firm, hears the same lament from chief executives around the world: we no longer have enough time or incentive to look beyond the next quick fix. His verdict: ‘Capitalism has become too short-term.’

Modern office culture tends to reinforce that narrowing of horizons. When did you last have the time to take a long, hard look at a problem at work? Or even just to think deeply for a few minutes? Never mind tackling the big questions, such as where you want to be five years from now or how you might redesign your workplace from the bottom up. Most of us are too distracted by a never-ending blizzard of trivial tasks: a document to sign, a meeting to attend, a phone call to answer. Surveys suggest business professionals now spend half their working hours simply managing their email and social media inboxes. Day after day, week after week, the immediate trumps the important.