Pace. Speed. Velocity…
In Top Gun, Maverick and Goose’s mantra was “the need for speed”…
In rugby, as my life as a fairly average winger testified, there’s no substitute for it…
So what about pace in business? On projects? What is the pace of purpose?
As the world moves faster, and the pace of change accelerates, we’re looking for new ways to design projects that help teams to discover their purpose through collaborative creativity – overcoming inertia and generating momentum. Projects like our social mission and innovation experiment Good for Nothing
Last week I was inspired by a post by Ruth Carruthers over at the Do Village called Is Thinking still Doing? Ruth was battling with the tension between thinking and doing. She tells the lovely story of an artist called Jeremyville who’d taken a long afternoon off over an unplanned lunch. An unexpected pause that helped him to step back, think and really focus on what he wanted to do. He slowed down. To speed up. He thought, then did. And made this ace print to tell the story.
It reminded me of snowboarding. Snowboarding (and indeed many extreme sports) are a great metaphor for pacing on projects. The slow/fast rhythm. The intense adrenalin rush of dropping in, picking your line, pushing your boundaries, the noise, your heartbeat racing, body and mind in sync. And then you stop. A brief lull, a quiet calm, a time to reflect – sat on a lift, surrounded by the most awe-inspiring natural environment you can imagine – regathering your breath and your energy. And so it continues. As you go higher, you look for your next line, you start to mentally prepare, and then you focus and go. You slow down to speed up.
It reminded me of a half-marathon I ran in Marlow. Only my second one ever. There were 3 hills, each really very steep. I was trying to run at an even-pace. Pushing for a new personal best. I kept finding myself going too fast up the hill, ahead of others and tiring myself out. And then going too slowly down them, being overtaken by the experienced runners who knew better. They kept their energy in reserve, slowing down on the way up. And using it to push themselves faster on the way down – when conditions favoured speed. Clever stuff – adapting, slowing down to speed up. Again.
It reminded me of the rhythm of great conversations. With my wife, friends, family. The ups and downs of storytelling, the emotional highs and the lows, the energy peaks and troughs. The slow meandering and rising crescendo as you stumble across something funny that builds and develops. Bringing back themes and recombining ideas to reach new places, improvising in original and fresh ways. Again, the pace – fast – slow then fast again.
In fact, above all, each of these reminded me of nature. The day/night cycle. How a good sleep completely refreshes your perspective. The constant evolution of a finely balanced and tuned ecosystem. How all of a sudden, from nowhere, the seasons change. The leaves all start to fall, or the cold wind blows in, or the bulbs break through heralding spring. It made me think about how nature affects our mood, our productivity, our behaviour and indeed our outlook on life….we’re not constant, we’re just constantly adapting.
Which made me wonder why we plan our work lives to be so constant. And our projects to be evenly paced. It seems life doesn’t work like that. Purpose seemingly doesn’t march to the same drumbeat as a Gantt chart.
Most businesses work to a quarterly rhythm. Numbers and projects revolve around it. We tend to assume results will happen in a linear fashion driven by efforts that are evenly distributed time over a set number of days/weeks/months. The milestones are board meetings.
Yet nature and human endeavor seem to work to a different pattern – we’re influenced by the seasons, we’re adaptive, we can sense, we move fast and slow, we’re designed to be in touch with the environment.
Don’t get me wrong – to make things happen, we need plans, we need targets, we need deadlines. 100 days or 3 months is not a bad target to get stuff done but what does the 1 minute, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 month version look like? Most good projects we’ve ever worked on make the big breakthroughs in the early days.
What’s abundantly clear is that we shouldn’t let our desire to achieve goals be rigidly dictated by the plans we make – they’re a guide, not a straight-jacket. It’s more important to think about how we can create environments and a project rhythm that encourages genuine insight and breakthrough.
So we ask ourselves as set of critical questions at the outset of any project:
Have we built in enough time for reflection? And inspiration? Can we get immersed in more natural environments at some stage to help people think more freely? What kind of different experiences will let our sub-conscious kick-in and enable new ideas to form ? How can we create the space and connections that will encourage serendipity and obliquity? Can we enable teams to be guided by what needs to happen next based on the idea, not just by what’s on the project plan?
Think agile planning which Neil Perkin and businesses like 37 Signals and Made By Many use to great effect – bumping up against the immersive experience of being connected with nature. Snowboarding meets innovation. Sprint finishes and scrums meet hill walks and reflection. Helping teams to think better and do more.
As we embrace the urgency of finding creative solutions to global resource constraints, we’re hopeful that this kind of non-linear, adaptive and ultimately more human way of working will be a key strand in establishing a different kind of pace and a deeper purpose in business. A new pace of purpose.
nice post. nature as mentor. messy and emergent ways of working is the way forward imho.
I think workplaces and 9 to 5 culture are a big part of the problem, people are so removed from the impacts of their actions and the interconnectedness of everything that the plan dominates and the energy is quashed. Pura Vida!
Comment by dan burgess — February 16, 2011 @ 1:33 am