“Slow Work”
Challenge
In striving to create environments that inspire people to excel in their pursuits, I take a great interest in the ways in which people work. I am passionate about exploring workplace practices that support the natural human curiosity necessary for creativity and innovation while affording people the time and flexibility to reflect, act, and deliver substantive value. Given the current state of the economy and the consequential anxiety over innovation, growth, and productivity, the speed at which organizations are moving in order to adapt concerns me. I see the world through a lens of trade-offs and tensions that people and organizations make in order to achieve their goals. I argue that the current economic order is biased toward speed, efficiency, and unsustainable value at the expense of deliberate reflection, organic growth, and sustainable value.
Philosophy
By aligning with the growing cultural trend known as the Slow Movement, I advocate for a Slow Work Movement, which argues that long-term substantive value creation requires activities that support deliberative reflection and concentrative work practices. These practices are equally as important as those that embody speed and efficiency. Instead of working on a trajectory that leads to nothing but creative destruction and waste, I argue for work practices that build creative resilience – a sort of cradle-to-cradle philosophy of creating value that can be repurposed after its useful purpose has ended.
Theoretical Basis
As a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, I had the opportunity to study under the guidance of the scholars who developed principles of organizational culture and innovation, which they expressed through the Competing Values Framework. The Financial Times listed this as one of the 60 leading management models that every manager should know. One of the tenets of this model is that truly effective organizations are those that are adept at managing the inherent trade-offs (or “competing values”) exhibited in any given social system. Practically speaking, companies must balance between doing things fast with little variability and doing things slow while accepting much variability. They must also balance between strengthening market position and strengthening internal processes and systems. Organizations find ways to manage these tensions and trade-offs, and in doing so they carve out a unique culture and approach to innovation and value creation that reflects their competencies and capabilities.
Another framework for thinking about how organizations manage trade-offs is Stanford Professor Jim March’s model of Knowledge Exploration and Exploitation. March’s 1991 piece in Organization Science entitled, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” is one of my favorite pieces of management theory. He argues that knowledge intensive organizations must find ways to strategically balance the competing demands of leveraging their resources and “exploiting known certainties” for short-term gains while “exploring new possibilities” for new knowledge that will deliver value over the long term. People in organizations learn and absorb knowledge at various rates – some are much quicker than others. Fast learners quickly learn accepted organizational norms that they can rapidly exploit in the course of doing business – but they sacrifice potentially new ways of doing things. Slow learners deliberately and carefully process knowledge and consider norms and exceptions, which manifest as new opportunities – but they sacrifice understanding of immediate opportunities that could otherwise be quickly leveraged. Thus, organizational learning is the art of negotiating between knowledge that generates quick wins and knowledge that can generate innovation over time.
One line of research explores the concept of organizational slack – or the excess resources available to an organization once its basic needs have been met. Nitin Nohria and Ranjay Gulati published an interesting 1996 paper in Academy of Management Journal in which they address the question of whether slack is good or bad for innovation. They argue that too little slack chokes of fresh ideas in organizations by inhibiting creativity and experimentation, but too much slack encourages people to pursue too many or too risky projects that are not aligned with the interests of the organization thereby compromising its operations. Ultimately, slack promotes innovation, but it must be moderated. Looking at this from the perspective of time resources, organizations that encourage people to slow down and use time to pursue new ideas are strengthening long term organizational health. Yet excess time invested in speculative projects can undermine ongoing activities necessary for an organization’s short-term health. Thus, in managing any resource (especially time), it is important to strike a healthy balance that allows the pursuit of long-term ideas while sustaining the activities and practices that maintain the immediate health of the organization.
What’s Next?
This page is a work-in-progress and is intended to be a forum for discussion and for sharing examples of practices that align with the Slow Work philosophy.
