The Age of Slow

For a lot of my working career, speed has been the priority.

There’s been a need to react, to deliver, to make sure this lands in Q2, to make sure the invoice is sent this month.

All of those remain valid priorities. But when everything you do must be done at pace, it drives a certain set of behaviours.

The measure – how quick the work is completed – becomes a target. Once the target is set, that’s the priority. Quality, completeness of considerations, stretching beyond the stated remits of the work, they all need to be done, but not at the expense of the speed.

If you put speed first, there is an inevitable risk that the work will suffer.

There are all sorts of ways around those risks. Part of my mitigation has to work hard at project management. Not only: which are the points at which the project might fail? But also: which are the points at which I am going to put my own quality checks in, and when am I going to share thinking with the client? And then, where am I going to have time to make course corrections?

In the system where you can choose two of quick / cheap / good, then if “quick” is fixed, it’s often more palatable to accept that “good” will be sacrificed.

(Interestingly, that’s not always overt, it’s almost always done by omission.)

Position not speed

There aren’t many quantum theory jokes that it’s worth telling in an EVP-related blog. But perhaps this one is:

A traffic officer pulls over the car of Werner Heisenberg

Traffic Officer: “Hello, sir. Are you aware of how fast you were travelling?”

Heisenberg: “No, officer, but I can tell you exactly where I was”

That’s the image I want to preserve. Less focus on speed, more on exactly where – mentally – you are.

The truth is that if you want absolute speed, you’re possibly not going to turn to a human first. You can get an answer, or a digest, even a proposed way forward from AI and tech. That will draw on all manner of sources to arrive there.

It probably won’t be too bad a response. You’ll be able to work with it. And you can work with it right now. You can invest a bit more time in prompting and wrangling and you can be pretty assured of something pretty good.

That means that the role of the human must be to be slow.

Because we cannot compete with that level of speed.

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot as I’ve taken a course on Data Analysis to strengthen my skills there. At each step, the instruction has underlined a thoughtful and methodical process. One that encourages you to slow down. To work through all the possible ways of looking at data, until you arrive at the best and most illuminating one.

Instead of tearing into it for an answer, REALLY looking at the data, understanding it, cleaning it, reprocessing it, getting to know its shape. And then play with it, follow dead ends, double check more interesting avenues of enquiry. And only then, to start to drive answers.

You need to enter a bit of a Zen state, you need to resist your internal pressure to press on. Because accuracy is everything, and without this systemic process, there can be no guarantee of accuracy.

Slowness in employer research and strategy

That’s what needs to come to my world of employer insights. Of employer value propositions, communication assessments, understanding employee engagement, measuring current and desired cultures.

If the human in the process is to have any value it has to be the one that resists speed and instead adds rigour and strategy. That follows every line of enquiry, that thinks about each consequence of what you have heard, and what that might mean. That weighs carefully each future course of action.

Where humans beat the bots

Reasoning and logic are evolving areas for large language models. A human with time will do better.

LLMs too show a veneer of emotional intelligence, or rather, they can often parrot back an empathetic-sounding response. A human’s judgement, putting themselves in others shoes will always give a more nuanced, grounded and useful understanding. Again, this takes time.

And only human experience builds up those synaptic and logical connections. Usefully aggregating ideas or previous work that is seemingly unconnected. Understanding what will and won't land. Balancing competing priorities.

A human will do better here, but only when the pressure to move at breakneck speed is disapplied. When knowing where you are becomes the advantage. 

Getting uncomfortable

Sometimes, it’s not a very comfortable process. You may have been corporately "groomed" to go as fast as feasible, all of the time.

Sometimes it means looking at blank piece of paper for a period of time that feels wasteful. At others it might mean burning a morning on trying to present or link ideas in a way which never comes together. At other times still – and I can almost feel this process – it’s inching along to make the ideas and recommendations that you believe in relatable and palatable to those that aren’t immersed as you are.

Putting this to the test

For the most important projects you have that impact on your employees, you’ll always want to listen – in-depth – to humans. I don’t think anyone would question that.

It stands to reason then that you’ll always want a human to interpret that too, in ways in which machines cannot replicate.

And it therefore follows too, that there is value there that demands more time. And that means more money to cover that time.

I keep banging on about Agile EVP. Because I believe that one hand, an EVP is one of the most important assets an organisation can have, and on the other I think they’re long overdue for overhaul.

If I were to play devil’s advocate to my own idea, wouldn’t I say: “But Sam, isn’t an Agile EVP, all about speed? Haven’t you just spent 800 words contradicting yourself?”

To which I would respectfully disagree. With myself.

Agile EVPs and slowing down

Yes, an Agile EVP is absolutely about being faster to react. It’s about being relevant right now.

Being relevant right now mean understanding with coinfidence what relevant right now looks like. That needs structure, accuracy and a keen eye for unintended consequences.

A lot of thinking can be done upfront in how to approach and that means the time, to be slow, is pre-built-in.

In the day-to-day activation of an Agile EVP, I’m going to compare it to cricket fielding. (possibly because I’m semi-delirious after less than half a night’s sleep watching the action from Perth.)

As a fielder, you need to get to the ball as fast as you possibly can and you need to release the ball as quick as you can too. But in between there must be a moment of still, you need to slow down and very accurately collect the ball. Fast-slow-fast.

That’s the Agile EVP process. Move rapidly towards the insights you need for the current priority. A moment of serenity and calm while you make sue you have the best possible grasp. Then deployment as fast as you can.

It’s still that slow, human intervention, it’s still strategy and precision, it’s just Agile. It’s at the moments its most required.