Being busy does not mean being more productive. Dr Holly Andrews looks at the common temptation to think fast and examines the benefits, for individuals and organisations, of slow thinking in the workplace.
Picture the scene: you walk into your colleague’s office and they are staring out of the window, fiddling with some paper clips on their desk. What is your immediate thought?
If it is along the lines of “Why aren’t they getting on with some work?” then you are probably not alone. These days, taking time to think is not typically seen as ‘work’.
Slow thinking
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People are expected to be doing things such as writing reports, entering data and holding endless online meetings.
If you’re not doing something, then you’re not working, right?
From busyness to burnout
This approach to work has so many issues – including the impact it has on employees’ mental health and wellbeing. Pressure to constantly be engaged in physically doing and producing ‘things’ in the workplace can lead to feelings of overwhelm, exhaustion and burnout.
In its 2024 annual burnout report, Mental Health UK states that nine out of 10 UK adults experienced high or extreme stress in the past year, almost a quarter feel unable to manage this stress and one in five needed to take time off work due to mental health issues caused by stress or burnout. High or increased workload and volume of tasks were cited by 54% as having contributed to their stress and burnout.
This is not only detrimental for the individuals, but also their organisations who lose good workers and shoulder some of the financial costs of people being off work.
Fast versus slow thinking
Constantly busy people also demonstrate a reduced quality of outputs and decision-making. In his Nobel Prize-winning work, Daniel Kahneman introduced the idea of fast and slow thinking. Fast thinking happens automatically, it enables us to make quick decisions based on our previous experiences and requires limited effort. In contrast, slow thinking requires us to consciously and effortfully process information to draw reasoned conclusions based on the available data.
When we are constantly engaged in doing things and under pressure, we rely much more on fast thinking than slow thinking.
While fast thinking is vital to our existence – we couldn’t survive if we had to consciously think about everything presented to us – it has several limitations. It is prone to bias based on what we have experienced before. This is compounded by how our brains work, as we tend to be more likely to perceive and retain information that fits with our worldview. This gives rise to potentially flawed decisions.
Fast thinking happens automatically, it enables us to make quick decisions based on our previous experiences and requires limited effort. Slow thinking requires us to consciously and effortfully process information to draw reasoned conclusions based on the available data”
Fast thinking also limits creativity and innovation. When we make decisions based on our previous experiences, we are necessarily constrained in the variety of options available to us because we can only draw upon things that we have already done. This can prevent us from considering novel alternatives.
If you have to make a decision under pressure about how to proceed with something, you are more likely to choose a strategy that you have previously used and not consider if there is a better way to approach the problem.
In contrast, slow thinking allows us to evaluate information beyond our experiences and expectations and opens us up to new approaches. By taking time to think critically about information, we can make decisions that are based on the full range of knowledge available to us, rather than the limited range our fast-thinking system draws upon.
While this requires a lot more effort, it can lead to better and less biased decision-making. We can also move beyond the ways that we typically do things to explore possibilities that are more creative and novel.
Creating space for slow thinking
So how do we allow employees to engage in more slow thinking? The answer is to stop expecting our employees to be doing something all the time. When every minute of an employee’s day is accounted for and scheduled, their mental energy bank is depleted and this makes slow thinking – which requires much more effort than fast thinking – less likely to occur.
Making slow thinking possible is especially important when people are faced with complex and uncertain situations, which characterise many organisational environments today. When people are busy ‘doing’ they are much less likely to think things through properly.
We must make it acceptable for people to take time out to think, and this culture shift needs to be endorsed and led from the top.
There are many ways that this can be achieved. I have heard of an executive who regularly schedules time in their diary just to walk and think and expects their team to do the same. I also worked with an organisation engaging in training and development for their staff to help them shift their mindset from being ‘busy’ as a priority to a focus on doing the right things at the right time.
Benefits of a slower pace
When Sir Jim Ratcliffe earlier this year cited a lack of email traffic when imposing a remote working ban at Manchester United, he epitomised the resistance to slow thinking and potentially is missing out on productivity benefits.
Research conducted by Henley Business School found that organisations that offer a four-day week, where workers work four days at regular hours whilst still receiving a full-time salary, see increased performance leading to financial savings. One possible reason for this is that employees have the luxury of just thinking about things on that fifth day without the need to be engaged in work tasks.
If everyone did less, if we had more space and time to think at work, we would likely see better wellbeing for employees, more effective decision-making, heightened creativity and ultimately better performance. So why isn’t this happening already? Perhaps there’s too much reliance on fast thinking.
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