The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly.
| Jonathan Hari, Stolen Focus
Pause and Patience
In October, I encountered an insightful article by Rahul Bhandari that identified patterns of behavior prevalent in business — almost required for those in C-Suite roles — that are counterproductive, even when being held up as exemplary.
[Bhandari indulges in ‘strategic speak’ which needs to be filtered. He talks about those on ‘the top’ — hierarchy, he overuses ‘strategic’ whenever referring to the decision-making of decision-makers, and a host of other leader-versus-follower distinctions. Leaving that aside, there are some takeaways worth thinking about.]
His thesis:
Many of the behaviors we admire at the top are not, in fact, signs of effectiveness. They are symptoms of over-functioning: a leadership style marked by constant motion, high mental velocity, and a persistent discomfort with stillness. These leaders aren’t modeling peak performance—they’re playing out a high-stakes version of restlessness. They don’t just run hard; they run noisily. And while they often credit their success to this intensity, what actually sustains organizations over time is disciplined clarity, not speed alone.
There’s a great deal of evidence that, for example, making decisions quickly is not the best way to operate.
As I wrote in With Decision-Making, You Have to Go Slow to Go Fast:
A central pillar of behavioral economics: we jump to conclusions, based on our emotions, and then create stories — including facts, figures and other evidence — to justify the decisions we have made. As Daniel Kahneman characterized it, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, jumping to conclusions is efficient if the conclusions are likely to be correct and the costs of an occasional mistake acceptable. Jumping to conclusions is risky when the situation is unfamiliar, the stakes are high and there is no time to collect more information.”
So, for the class of problems that are low stakes, sure, go with your gut. Picking eggshell paint instead of sage for your office is not a big risk. But the decision to buy one house instead of a different one in the next town, well, that’s high stakes. It is important to warrant gathering more information.
And here we get to the first barrier: our biased brains want to make the necessary decision as quickly as possible. As Pronita Mehrotra, Anu Arora and Sandeep Krishnamurthy lay it out, in the context of innovation: “Trying to resolve things too quickly, especially for complex problems, is detrimental to innovation because you fall prey to premature closure. Resistance to premature closure — a key aspect of creativity — is our ability to keep an open mind when we already have a potential solution. Some of the best solutions don’t come in the initial meeting or two, but after a longer incubation period.”
To fool our foolish brains, we need to actively say -- and act -- that the process of deciding is open as long as more information, more ‘incubation’ of ideas, and more looking at alternatives is possible.
They continue: “Instead: To avoid premature closure, teams should arrive at an ‘almost final’ decision and then intentionally delay action in favor of additional incubation time. During this time, everyone should commit to thinking about the problem and sharing their ideas. If the team can’t find a better approach during the incubation period, they should proceed with their original solution.”
Returning to Bhandari: he cites several ways in which executives act like ‘caffeinated squirrels’, and companies that follow their lead, often suffer — not benefit — from that [emphasis mine]:
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