Setting the right pace can be the key to creativity in teams
Transcript of this video:
I’m a bit of a fan of the Star Wars TV series and shows. And I love those moments in spacecraft when they come out of hyperspace and you see the blurring of light as they decelerate and the participants come out of a kind of hyper-reality into a gritty reality. Sometimes that takes the form of an exploded planet, they weren’t expecting to encounter.
And in our working lives, I think we sometimes have that experience of deceleration and sometimes find it uncomfortable when we come out of the high speed reality that I think technology often propels us into. And indeed, even in meetings without technology, we will sometimes find ourselves going at the pace of the most impatient person in the room. And we need to decelerate.
I often think of a psychotherapist I worked with 20 years ago called Terry Cooper, who did a lot of work with warring couples. And he observed once that he thought a lot of the problems they encountered were actually differences of pace. So they might think that their argument was about who had left the top off the toothpaste tube or how they were bringing up their child or that controversial incident at last night’s party.
But what they hadn’t noticed was that one was trying to address it at high speed and another wanted to go more slowly. And he felt that if they could kind of work at an agreed pace, they might find the problem became a lot more solvable. And I think the pace at which we’re working in our organizations often goes unquestioned. To give a very very simple example, you know, we’ll have a meeting and someone will be given 30 minutes or 20 minutes to make a PowerPoint presentation as if that’s the appropriate amount of time for everyone in the room. Whereas the truth will be, there’ll probably be some people for whom that isn’t enough time, that they’re very interested in the subject and they want to go into it in great detail and others for whom this is background and not terribly interesting.
I often think it would be better not to use the meeting for that presentation, but to have the presenter, put it on video and send it to people so they can process it at their own pace and speed and use the meeting for conversations where there’s at least a chance of attuning to each other’s pace. So I just want to leave that open as a question.
I often put the word unhurried in front of a problem and ask, would that change how we address it? If you’re having a divorce, what would an unhurried divorce look like? If your challenge is innovation, what would unhurried innovation look like? Because I think that at least gets us to look at the question. Are we trying to solve this thing at the right pace?
Photo by Moritz Kindler on Unsplash
