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Last week, I stumbled on a LinkedIn post by Stanford management professor and author Bob Sutton predicting that the next big trend for 2024 would be “strategic slowness.” His post was quick, just a paragraph, but it immediately caught my attention. Sutton’s argument lined up perfectly with some of my frustrations with my own little corner of the entrepreneurial world.
As someone who writes online for a living, I’ve long noticed a tension between speed and quality (measured both by how good I think my writing is and how readers respond). Conventional wisdom says that you can’t afford to sacrifice speed to tinker and optimize online, but I — and many others in my niche — had begun to question the long-term wisdom of this standard advice. Would strategic slowness serve me better this year?
What does “strategic slowness” look like in practice?
I wrote up my observations, linking Sutton’s work with the musings of writer Henrik Karlsson, and the resulting article was itself posted to LinkedIn. It immediately started racking up comments. It seems I am far, far from alone in both longing for a slower pace to work and suspecting that the results might actually be better in the longer run.
But commenters also had questions, good ones. How would this work for business development teams who are racing competitors to market? Is this potential trend more about self-care or business outcomes? How can you slow down as an individual if the company culture around you is hustle-obsessed?
Sutton’s brief post didn’t provide the answers (though his forthcoming book with co-author Huggy Rao, The Friction Project, looks like it will). But in the meantime, I was happy to discover that Sutton just took to the Wall Street Journal to provide more details on his thinking around the strategic value of slowness.
In an article for the paper, Sutton walks through eight situations that benefit from a slower approach. His list provides a much more detailed picture of what “strategic slowness” looks like in practice, and how curious entrepreneurs and other leaders might think about starting to implement it. Here are quick sketches of each of his suggestions. In particular, he believes we should slow down when:
1. Making big, irreversible decisions
Sutton acknowledges he’s not the first business thinker to urge leaders to go slower when it comes to making big, irreversible decisions. In his 2015 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos made a distinction between “one way” and “two way” doors.
“One-way doors are ‘consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible’ — things where ‘if you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before,’ ” writes Sutton, quoting Bezos. If you’ve got a one-way door decision to make, take your time, Bezos urged. Sutton agrees.
2. Solving complicated problems
Sutton backs up this recommendation with a fascinating study: “The researchers found that people with higher scores in general intelligence and deep-thinking ability did solve easy tasks faster. But they also found that these people solved difficult problems more slowly — and, significantly, with greater accuracy. The reason for the greater accuracy, they discovered, was that the longer decision times prevented them from prematurely leaping to flawed conclusions.”
3. Doing creative work
As someone who has written many an article on the need for slack, slowness, and empty hours in breakthrough creativity (and the many geniuses who understood this intuitively), I was pleased to see Sutton make the same argument. “Skilled leaders know that ‘efficient creativity’ can sometimes be an oxymoron,” he writes. “There is no quick and easy path to creativity.” Amen.
4. Encouraging ethical actions
“Convincing people to slow down and fix things — rather than move fast and break things — reduces the odds they will engage in unethical acts,” insists Sutton.
5. Mitigating biases and stereotypes
Biases and stereotypes are basically our brains’ cheat codes to assess people and situations more quickly. Unfortunately, they often lead us horribly astray. Forcing people to slow down their thinking can help. Sutton illustrates this with a fascinating story about how community social network Nextdoor reduced racial profiling by 75 percent by prompting users to reflect on why they felt a person’s behavior was “suspicious” before posting a report.
6. Reducing destructive friction
“Sometimes you have to slow things down to keep employees from doing things that slow things down even more. The way to do that is to make people pause, think, and jump through annoying hoops before they can heap additional burdens on others,” says Sutton. Managers have used this technique to reduce time-wasting meetings, for instance.
7. Connecting with customers
Sutton points out that, when it comes to building relationships with customers (or anyone, really), speed and satisfaction are often inversely related. He points to a Dutch supermarket that created “slow lanes” for elderly customers who wanted to take their time and chat as a standout example of this principle.
8. Enjoying the good things in life
Must every minute not used in grinding through your immediate to-do list be justified through some business logic? No. Going slower can help you think more clearly, be more creative, and build stronger relationships, but sometimes going slow just makes life more enjoyable. That’s great too.
Sutton cites the work of psychologist Fred Bryant, which “shows that slowing down to extend, enjoy and ‘swish around’ positive experiences in your mind is linked to better relationships, mental and physical health, and creative problem-solving.” There are “savoring rituals” you can add to your days to encourage the slow enjoyment of simple pleasures.
These are of course only sketches of each of Sutton’s suggestions. You can check out the complete WSJ article for more details. Or here is a link to Sutton and Rao’s forthcoming book, if you’re thinking of picking it up. But even this abbreviated list should be enough to get entrepreneurs thinking about where and why they might want to add a more “strategic slowness” into their lives in 2024.
Where do customers fit in this “strategic slowness” theory
For years we have all been focused on speed of service. It is one of the key elements the mystery shopping industry typically measures. But making a connection with customers typically invokes the most favorable comments from our independent contractors (mystery shoppers). Is your team creating positivity and empathy with your customers while also offering speed of service? Are they overcoming challenges with resilience when working with customers?
Eliminating points of friction is another element of service that customers like and in many cases generate additional revenue. Whenever you can make it easier for customers to pay usually results in customers selecting additional items or services. The best example is Disney’s micro chip bracelet which gets you into your room along with the ability to pay for food and merchandise. Eliminating the friction of removing your wallet pays off big time for Disney.
Monitoring your customer’s experience on a consistent basis is vital to your success. Give us a call, we’d love to become a partner in growing your service culture.
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BY JESSICA STILLMAN AND CARL PHILLIPS |
