Are you teaching your team to think more slowly?

The best decisions are made with intention, rather than reaction.

THINK ON IT: ​​Are you teaching your team to think more slowly?

We prize quick thinking in our culture. “Thinking fast on your feet” is considered a compliment; so is being quick-witted. You can pay money to see a show by an improv group, where to act and speak rapidly is the entire point. 

In our “just do it” culture, decisiveness is more valued than deliberation. Even our own confidence in what we know is directly proportional to how long it takes us to retrieve that information from memory: cognitive researchers have shown that the longer it takes us to remember a fact, the less confidence we have that it’s right. 

For most of the thousands of decisions that you’ll make today, decisiveness works pretty well;  what color shirt you wear to work today is unlikely to affect your future two decades from now. But for the more weighty decisions, the best advice is to think slowly — and to encourage your team to do the same. 

We often expect our team to think on the fly, calling a brainstorm meeting without giving any detail ahead of time. We want our people to bring their best thinking to the table. 

But the best thinking is slower thinking. 

When we expect people to come up with instant answers, we aren’t giving their brains a chance to do the deep work of sorting through the options and weighing them against one another. Thinking slowly is about shifting where your brain is processing information; from the quick and reactive amygdala to the slow and more reflective frontal lobe. Allowing people to think about something in advance, to write down their answers, to stress test them a bit in the safety of their own mind can be helpful for everyone, especially the more introverted among us. Allowing everyone to process their thoughts ahead of a group gathering enables them to become more active participants because they are prepared. 

As organizational behaviorist Kerry Patterson puts it, “Once you change where you think, you change how you think, which in turn changes what you think. You’re now able to carefully contemplate, ruminate, and take a longer-term view.”

Encouraging slower thinking not only helps to keep idea factories humming, it helps to make sure your best thinking is fueling them.

“The essence of intelligence would seem to be in knowing when to think and act quickly, and knowing when to think and act slowly.”

— Robert J. Sternberg

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