“Slow Work”

Challenge

Through my experience in consulting with organizations on the future of the workplace, I witness an alarming (but hardly surprising) trend. Many of today’s “knowledge workers” are over-scheduled and find it difficult to focus at work. The continuous drive for higher levels productivity pushes people to work faster and in a more fragmented way. That is, work pushes people to continuously subdivide their mental capabilities across a wider range of tasks. In other words, it necessitates greater levels of ineffective multitasking. “Knowledge work” is the creation of value from ideas. It requires people to continuously perform a variety of cognitive tasks:

Access raw information
Absorb and understand information
Process and derive meaning from information
Express and communicate meaning as new knowledge

In today’s workplace, information floods peoples’ minds and commands their ever-shortened attention spans. Ubiquitous information has become a commodity. Immediate access displaces generative richness. The increasing speed at which people are expected to access and absorb information does not always align with the pace at which their minds are equipped to process it and express meaningful insight from it. Organizations benefit from balancing short-term and long-term goals and priorities. Yet the ever-increasing expectations for speed reflect a bias toward short-term needs at the expense of the deliberative pursuit of long-term opportunities. The flood of ubiquitous information causes a collective tunnel vision that puts people and organizations in a reactive mode. This comes with risks. People face potential burnout and fatigue from the inability to draw meaning from everything they are expected to process, and organizations sacrifice innovative ideas that create long-term opportunities.

Idea

By aligning with the growing cultural trend known as the Slow Movement, I advocate for a Slow Work Movement. Just as Slow Food creates community among the growers, producers, and consumers of food – Slow Work is a call to rediscover a path to value creation through work environments that nurture a deeper connection between people and their ideas. 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 life has ended.