Working, Fast And Slow

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive and fast. The second is rational, deliberative and slow. As humans we evolved to make split-second decisions in life-or-death situations. Our slow-moving rational minds don’t automatically engage unless we deliberately focus.

Cal Newport, in his new book Slow Productivity, makes a similar point about work. In our hectic modern lives, we need to optimize tasks, such as returning emails, dropping off kids and managing schedules, to keep things moving. We need to do this quickly, because there are other people depending on us to get things done.

Yet there is also a different mode of working. Often, this type of activity is not pursued with a specific goal in mind, but rather as an exploration. There are stops and starts, dead ends and blind alleys, as well as long fallow periods that can span months or even years. This, however, is the kind of work that makes significant impacts on the world. Not all who wander are lost.

The Eureka Moment Myth

The story of Archimedes shouting “Eureka!”—though likely embellished—continues to shape how we imagine breakthroughs: a sudden flash of insight that solves a major problem. It’s the moment in a Hollywood film when the protagonist freezes mid-step, spins around, and races back with the answer that saves the day.

That’s the Eureka moment myth and it is incredibly misleading. There are, to be sure, flashes of insight and we’ve all had them, but they don’t lead directly to a breakthrough. What they lead to is another path with its own stops and starts, dead ends and blind alleys, epiphanies and disappointments. Often it takes years—or even decades—for an idea to make an impact.

Consider the discovery of penicillin. It is true that Alexander Fleming, returning from a summer vacation, noticed that a strange mold had killed his bacteria cultures and, studying the matter further, discovered the famous antibiotic. What is rarely mentioned is that what Fleming discovered had no practical value and couldn’t have cured anyone.

It was just a mold secretion—unstable, unusable, with no way to produce it at scale. So it was largely ignored, buried in a medical journal for over a decade. Then a different team, led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, picked it up. Collaborating with American labs, they turned it into a viable treatment, and in 1945—more than 15 years after Fleming’s “Eureka moment”—penicillin became commercially available.

This isn’t the exception. It’s the rule. Creating something new and meaningful is slow, often tedious work. And for long stretches, it’s not clear whether you’re making progress at all.

Executing The Mundane

When you look back at the story of penicillin, the “discovery” was, in fact, a series of breakthroughs. Alexander Fleming discovered the mold in 1928. In 1940, Norman Heatley, working in Florey’s lab, developed a method to purify it. Later, after traveling to the U.S., the team—now collaborating with American labs—found a more potent strain and pioneered production methods using corn steep liquor and deep-tank fermentation.

Each of these breakthroughs was necessary, but none was sufficient on its own. Apart from Fleming’s initial accident, every step required teams of people performing mundane, repetitive tasks: maintaining lab equipment, preparing cultures, and logging data. Despite the historical impact, that’s what most days looked like.

Even people who do exclusively creative work devote only a few hours a day to it. Hemingway, quite famously, wrote each morning and stopped by noon. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport notes that this pattern is common. I’ve found the same to be true in my own work. The rest of the day is spent handling more routine tasks.

In fact, your ability to do deep, creative work is going to be somewhat dependent on your ability to manage the everyday. If you aren’t getting emails answered, attending to your customers’ needs and getting errands done, you’ll struggle to create the time and mental clarity that meaningful thinking requires.

Being goal and task oriented isn’t in conflict with deep creativity. It supports it.

Mode Shifting

In his essay Borges and I, the famous Argentine writer reflects on the tension between his public persona, which the world knows from his work, and the man who experienced life every day and liked “hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson.”

“I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary,” he wrote and then went on to say:

It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition.

Few of us are world-famous, but anyone who has created something lasting that exists outside themselves has likely felt something akin to what Borges describes. People read your work or use your product and they take possession of that experience in a way that doesn’t hold true after a meeting, phone call, email or customer interaction.

That’s why producing work of lasting value requires learning to mode shift —from reactive execution to reflective creation, and back again. The story of penicillin shows why. Each breakthrough led to a flurry of activity, with tasks that needed to be performed with efficiency and skill in the moment. Yet inevitably, that progress led to unsolved problems, which needed much slower, more reflective modes of work and thought to overcome.

Producing For Impact

I think you can learn something about a person through their relationship with books. Some read a lot of books, knocking off one a week, but never tackle anything challenging. Others will read a single book over the course of months. The truth is that there are different books for different purposes and, in the end, the reader takes possession of the experience.

I write my books to be read somewhat slowly and put a lot of work and thought into creating an experience crafted for that pace. My friend Alex Osterwalder, on the other hand, has little interest in books like mine. He creates his books to be used rather than read, and puts a lot of thought and effort into developing that experience.

But Alex and I don’t write for different people—we write for different modes of work. Alex’s books are designed for conference tables and sticky notes, my work is more likely to sit on night tables and beside couches. Alex’s work can be used by groups to collaborate, while the experience I work to create is intended to be more personal, experienced alone.

To become productive, you need to master multiple modes of work, both fast and slow. To get things done we need to be efficient, creating OODA loops through observing, orienting, deciding and acting. At the same time, we need to take time to explore and reflect, so that we can recognize when the need arises to step out of the loop and go off in a new direction.

As I wrote years ago in Harvard Business Review, everyone can be creative. Despite decades of searching, researchers have never identified a “creative personality” or any such thing. What the evidence does show is this: to create work that is meaningful and original, we need to protect the time and mental space where meaningful, original work actually happens.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

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