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

This Slow Fix still has a long way to go. A revolution that began in the sales and contracts department is now wending its way through the rest of the company. Rolling out the changes to operations in China and Greece will take longer. Even at the headquarters in Norway, the new system is still bedding in. The day I visit, Norsafe is testing a prototype lifeboat. Several nervous designers are standing on a dock watching the vessel being scuttled in a controlled experiment. Once it starts taking on water, it fails to right itself within the three minutes stipulated by international law. The designers look perplexed, but Hermansen smiles wryly. ‘They’re scratching their heads, but I told them they needed four centimetres more foam in the sides of the canopy,’ he mutters. ‘It shows that even with the right processes in the company, people don’t always listen to you.’

Even so, Norsafe seems to have turned a corner. Contracts are cycling smoothly through the company, lifeboats are arriving on time and in good condition, and profits are up. No more lawsuits are pending and the gloom in the office has lifted. In 2011, the leading financial newspaper in Norway published an article describing Norsafe as a ‘money-making machine’. Skaala is over the moon. ‘Everything is working now and it’s actually fun coming to the office again,’ he says. ‘It’s not rocket science. It’s not hocus-pocus. It’s not hard to understand. We just needed to slow down and think hard about exactly what was going wrong with our company before we could fix it.’

Others do the same deep, slow thinking without consultants. In the late 1980s, Patagonia, 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 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.’

CHAPTER FOUR

THINK HOLISTIC: Joining the Dots

All is connected … no one thing can change by itself.

Paul Hawken, environmentalist

They call it the ghetto limp. You’ve seen it in episodes of The Wire, in a million hip-hop videos, maybe even on the streets of your own city. It’s that lolloping, loping gait favoured by young men in tough neighbourhoods. It hints at an old gunshot wound, or at packing heat somewhere in those baggy trousers. It’s a gang thing, an affectation of the street, another pose designed to send the same message to everyone around: ‘Don’t mess with me because I am one mean motherfucker.’

When I meet Lewis Price, he is working the ghetto limp like a pro. Hair pulled back in cornrows; trousers on the baggy side; black and red Air Jordans ostentatiously untied; MOB (Money over Bitches) tattooed on his wrist. At 17, he is compact and muscled, with the coiled energy of an athlete on the starting line, or a cat waiting to pounce.

When Price starts talking, however, you realise he is not a mean motherfucker at all. His easy smile and gentle manner belie his appearance. He loves to talk and grabs hold of any conversation, eyes darting round the room as if searching for the next reason to laugh. Unlike many youths caught up in the gang violence that blights South Central Los Angeles, he is not feigning the limp for effect. When he was 14, a rival gang member took a pot-shot at him while he was hanging out on the sidewalk. The bullet sliced through his right leg and wedged so deeply in his left that doctors chose to leave it there. He can no longer play football or basketball and the limp now draws the wrong sort of attention on the street. ‘People think I’m walking like that on purpose, that I’m walking like a gangbanger to make a statement or something,’ he says. ‘But that’s the only way I can walk after I got shot. You know, the way I see it, I’m lucky I can walk at all.’

Price tends to look on the bright side these days. He has turned his back on the street, earned a place on the honour roll and plans to go to university – no mean feat for a kid born and raised in Watts.

This corner of Los Angeles has long been on the front line of black struggle. In 1965 the Watts Riots turned 50 square miles of the city into a war zone of charred buildings and pitched battles with the National Guard. Later, the gangs took hold, with the storied Bloods and Crips carving out violent fiefdoms. Over the last decade Latinos have moved in en masse, yet Watts remains plagued by the same old list of urban despair: poverty, crime, failing schools, ill health, unemployment, broken homes, drugs, teenage pregnancy, malnutrition, deadbeat dads, domestic violence. With gang members numbering in the thousands, fistfights, stabbings and shootings like the one that crippled Price are a part of life. Not many kids from Watts make it to college.

Price is not the first gangbanger to turn over a new leaf. But instead of crediting church, family or a heroic social worker, he puts his conversion down to his alma mater. To the delight, and surprise, of many Watts residents, the local high school now known as Ánimo Locke has gone from basket case to beacon of hope.

‘If it weren’t for Locke I wouldn’t be the person I am today,’ says Price. ‘Before I came here, I felt like, man, the only way I’m gonna make it is just survive on the street, but I got here and they just woke me up.’ He falls silent for a moment, as if pondering the road not taken, before adding, ‘If it weren’t for Locke, I’d be like all my old friends, I’d be dead or in jail. But now, you know, I got a future. I’m a good student now and I’m gonna make it somewhere.’

Many countries continue to grapple with how to break the cycle of poor children stumbling through lousy schools en route to a life at the bottom of the barrel. The problem is especially acute in the US, where 10 per cent of the nation’s high schools, most of them in tough, urban neighbourhoods, produce nearly half its drop-outs. One solution is to build new and better academies in the same areas. This is the approach taken by the non-profit Charter Management Organisations (CMOs), which have used public money to open and manage hundreds of free schools across the US since the 1990s. The Obama administration took a different tack, sending in star principals with the money and the mandate to rebuild failing schools from the ground up. The two strategies have delivered mixed results. Locke stands out because it blends both approaches to good effect.

In 2007 the Los Angeles Unified School District invited a CMO called Green Dot to engineer a turnaround at Locke. It was the first time a US charter group agreed to take on a failing school, and Locke was failing on a grand scale. Opened in 1967 as a symbol of renewal after the Watts Riots, the school was named after Alain Leroy Locke, the first African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. But over the years, as jobs and middle-class families drained out of the neighbourhood, the school’s fortunes drained away with them. By the time Green Dot stepped in, Locke, which sprawls over six city blocks and houses 3,100 students, was the sort of drop-out factory you see in the movies: buildings riddled with graffiti, smashed windows and broken lights; paint peeling off the walls in every classroom; litter blowing like tumbleweed across the scruffy campus; cars parked all over the place, even on the handball courts.

Students routinely missed class to wander the halls or sit outside in large groups shooting dice or smoking weed. They set fires inside the school and held parties on the roof. Gang members sold drugs outside the gymnasium. Campus security guards spent most of their time breaking up fights and keeping rival gangs apart. Several pupils were shot in front of the school’s gates.

Some teachers toiled heroically to give proper instruction to the few students willing or able to receive it, but the tide was against them. Many just gave up. Staff screened movies so often that parents dubbed Locke the ‘ghetto cineplex’. Many read newspapers or novels in class while the children horsed around and played cards. Even the Life Skills teacher turned up to class drunk. Locke hit rock bottom in 2007, when the city sent in helicopters and riot police to break up a brawl involving hundreds of students. But while the shootings, rapes and beatings grabbed headlines, the most damning statistic of all was this: of the 1,451 children who started ninth grade in 2004, less than 6 per cent graduated four years later with enough credentials to apply to a California state university.

It is not as if officialdom gave up on Locke. On the contrary, the city hurled initiative after initiative at the school: a new attendance policy here, a fresh reading programme there, a revamped code of discipline some time after that, and so on. The trouble was, the authorities never took the time to look at the big picture. Instead, they churned through one-off initiatives as I churned through cures for back pain. Stephen Minix, the director of athletics, had a front-row seat on this kaleidoscope of quick fixes. ‘Year after year, we had people in suits and ties showing up and sprinkling some of this or some of that on the school, and saying “This’ll fix it,” and then just walking away,’ he says. ‘They were always sweeping policies handed down by District with no thought for what they would really mean for Locke, so they never made a dent. They were just band-aid solutions to much deeper problems.’

Green Dot therefore faced a lot of scepticism from the start. Teachers at Locke, including Minix, suspected the newcomers of being just another band of quick-fix merchants. Many Watts residents distrusted the smooth-talking outsiders. As one parent puts it: ‘For a lot of people, it was like “Here come these white folks, these pilgrims, putting up their tents, their fences, and they’re promising to fix our school and our kids but we don’t have no say in it, and when it don’t work out they’ll ride off into the sunset and leave us with an even bigger mess than before.”’

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