No Time to Think

My observation, throughout my career, has been that as businesses become more ‘efficient’ (i.e. they lay more people off and load the work onto fewer and fewer workers), there is less and less time to think. Most of the CEOs I have known openly lament that they have no time to think at all. I suspect that’s why they like mission statements and strategic planning sessions — they are forced, briefly, to get above the day-to-day crises of operation and think about what they are doing and should be doing and how and why to do it. Unfortunately, these often turn into rushed, uninformed, sterile exercises that are totally disconnected from what’s actually happening in the organizations — because the people who participate in these exercises don’t have time to find out what’s really going on (and generally, no one on the front lines is foolish enough to tell them).

The result is that these organizations become completely dysfunctional. A few overpaid people make uninformed, thoughtless decisions and impose them on front-line people who must then find workarounds so they can continue to do their jobs reasonably effectively despite what they are told to do by management (usually ignorantly), told to achieve by management (usually unrealistically), and told to provide to management (usually pointlessly).

This isn’t unique to organizations. Most of us fill our days so full (or have them filled for us) that we have no time to think, until we’re too tired to think.

Thinking is a skill, and like any skill it takes considerable and continuous practice. My sense is that those of us who are paid to think are mostly pretty rusty at doing it. It’s a holistic skill in many senses: it entails both deductive and inductive reasoning. It synthesizes conscious and subconscious knowledge. It requires recalling and drawing on a lot of ideas and information from many different sources. It entails imagining, opening oneself up to and carefully considering novel approaches, perspectives and alternatives. It requires digestion, perception, provocation, attention, and avoiding preconception.

Many of us do puzzles or play games of intellectual skill to try to exercise our brains so we can continue to think effectively. But that’s not really thinking practice — these exercises are generally pretty prescriptive. Real practice involves using everything you know and everything you can do well, and sometimes things you do not so well. It requires stretching, challenging yourself. It’s hard work. And it takes time. There’s a reason why some of our best thinking comes after we’ve ‘slept on it’ — consciously or subconsciously we are finally investing time in thinking.

Not only are too many of us becoming too unpracticed at thinking, I believe many of us no longer have the breadth of useful information, or the generalist experiences and competencies of our ancestors, or the diversity of experiences, or the introspective, meditative, peaceful, uneventful moments, or the unhurried and pensive conversations to draw on, all of which comprise the raw material that effective thinking depends on.

I’m not sure how we can change this — it’s pretty naive to think we can just slow down and take the time it needs to re-learn and practice to think effectively. It requires a completely different management mindset — setting realistic goals, assigning sensible roles, establishing useful processes by consensus and where necessary, and otherwise staying out of the way.

By listening to and observing staff instead of telling them, we empower them to learn more about what works and how it fits with what others do and need. And it frees up management time for thinking. One person can’t do this alone — it requires an entire workforce that can self-manage and function in a flat and largely unsupervised environment. Do this with the wrong staff and you’re a goner — the power vacuum will be filled by the (probably unqualified) person with the biggest ego, as others willingly allow him/her to take the fall for all the incompetent decisions that ensue.

But in the right organization, self-management can produce amazing results. An organization whose people all have the time and capacity to think effectively, and the authority to act on that thought, will trounce their competitors. Who knows, they might even create a model for a better workplace, and go onto change the world. Aha!