Читать книгу The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World - Carl Honore, Carl Honore - Страница 9

Don’t just do something, stand there.

White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (Disney version)

If asked to design an office that could make staff look forward to Monday morning, you might come up with something like the headquarters of Norsafe. Every window looks onto a snapshot of bucolic bliss. Clapboard houses nestle in the forest, small boats bob alongside wooden piers, gulls float across a clear sky. In the late morning, the sunshine turns this narrow waterway in southern Norway into a strip of shimmering silver.

For many years the company’s balance sheet looked similarly idyllic. Norsafe has been building boats since 1903 in a country where boating is a serious business. With more coastline than the United States, this long, slender nation on the northern edge of Europe has always looked to the sea. Even today, one in seven Norwegians owns some sort of watercraft. But looks can be deceiving. Not so long ago Norsafe was a firm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, where nobody looked forward to coming in to work on Monday morning.

The company manufactures highly specialised lifeboats for oil rigs and supertankers. Enclosed like a submarine, and painted a vivid, regulation orange, they can drop into the sea, with a full load of passengers, from a height of nearly 40 metres. In the mid-2000s, as the global economy boomed, orders flooded in from around the world, tripling Norsafe’s turnover. Yet behind the top line numbers, the firm, like Toyota, had lost control of its inner workings and was struggling to keep up. Deadlines slipped, design faults passed unnoticed through the production plant, customer complaints went unanswered. With lawsuits piling up and profits plunging, the design, manufacturing and sales teams were at each other’s throats. Everyone knew there was a problem, but no one knew how to fix it.

The turning point came in 2009, when an organisational consultant named Geir Berthelsen delivered a pitch at the Norsafe headquarters. With his shaven head and watchful eyes, the 48-year-old Norwegian exudes the calm of a Zen monk. Since the early 1990s his consultancy firm, Magma, has been mending broken companies around the world with his version of the Slow Fix. Whatever the country or industry, the first step in his recovery plan is always the same: take time to work out the real reason things are going wrong. ‘Most companies are in a hurry, so they just firefight with quick fixes that only address the symptoms instead of the problem itself,’ he says. ‘To identify what is really going wrong, you first have to get a full picture of a company in slow motion, you have to do like Toyota and ask why, why and why, you have to slow down long enough to analyse and understand.’

That is a neat summary of the next ingredient of the Slow Fix: taking the time to think hard about the problem to arrive at the right diagnosis. When asked what he would do if given one hour to save the world, Albert Einstein answered: ‘I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.’ Most of us do the exact opposite. Think of your last visit to the GP. Chances are the appointment lasted no more than a few minutes and you struggled to say everything you wanted to. One study found that doctors let patients explain their complaint for 23 seconds before interrupting. Is it any wonder so many illnesses are misdiagnosed?

By the same token, you seldom uncover the real reason an organisation is failing by reading an email, convening a meeting or skimming the annual report. When things go wrong, as we saw earlier, people usually shift blame and shy away from saying anything that might cause them to lose face or hurt their colleagues’ feelings. In a world that prizes action over reflection, and when the clock is ticking, it takes nerve to spend 55 minutes thinking. Yet, from business to medicine to everything in between, a little inaction can be just what the doctor ordered. Some problems are no more than a bit of passing turbulence, or a red herring. Others will find their own solution if left alone. But even for problems needing intervention, inaction combined with deep thought and shrewd observation can be the first step to a smart fix. That is why doctors treating unusual conditions will often spend days, weeks, even months running tests, watching how the symptoms evolve, ordering more analysis, before finally arriving at a diagnosis and starting treatment. ‘To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world,’ said Oscar Wilde, ‘the most difficult and the most intellectual.’

That is why the Magma consultancy firm spends a long time in the trenches, working alongside employees, watching, listening, learning, gaining trust, reading between the lines. ‘We always start at the bottom, on the factory floor or wherever the work is done, and live there as long as it takes to understand everything about how all the systems operate and how all the people act within those systems,’ says Berthelsen. ‘We have to discover the right questions before we can figure out the right answers. Only then can we really fix things.’

After a lengthy tour of duty, the Magma team pinpointed why Norsafe was floundering: it had become a big company that still operated like a small one. As orders had grown more complex, staff had stopped paying attention to the details – a fatal mistake when the most sophisticated lifeboats contain 1,500 parts and are subject to a thicket of rules and regulations. The designers would churn out drawings with scant regard for budgets or the laws of physics. The sales team would green-light jobs without fully understanding the small print. Housed in a separate building beside the headquarters, the manufacturing side of the business scrambled to make ends meet. As recriminations flew, the company degenerated into a rabble of rival fiefdoms. ‘We used to struggle to get Sales to show us their upcoming orders or to get any information out of them at all, and no one could break the peaceful silence of the Design people over in their own corner,’ says Geir Skaala, the owner and CEO. ‘I used to feel like I was the only one in the Head Office who took any interest in what was going on in Production.’

After doing its homework, Magma devised a system that would allow Norsafe to operate like a big company. The first step was to set aside more time for vetting contracts. The sales team now goes through every order with a fine-toothed comb, and Skaala reads every contract himself, marking points he disagrees with in red and those that need clarifying in yellow. Each design drawing now comes with a complete list of all the relevant specifications. Everyone’s role in the business has been clearly defined, with staff keeping regular action logs.

Magma also started breaking down the barriers between departments. Employees from design, sales and production now meet regularly, with their phones switched off, to talk about contracts, new plans and what is happening in the factory. Like crews at RAF Coningsby and staff at ExxonMobil, everyone is urged to report even the smallest problems and propose solutions. To reinforce the new spirit of openness, Skaala started eating lunch in the canteen rather than alone in his office.

This Slow Fix did not happen overnight, or without pain. It involved months of explaining, hand-holding and retraining. Egos were bruised and friendships tested. Though dismayed by the status quo, many employees found it hard to embrace the new way of working. ‘They felt, “This is how I do it, how my father did it, how my grandfather did it, why should I change?”’ says Skaala. ‘It wasn’t ill will; it’s just that it’s easier to carry on as before.’ The status-quo bias, in other words. But eventually most Norsafe employees embraced the new regime, and the two who did not left.

Staff seem pleased with the change. Hans Petter Hermansen has been the production manager at Norsafe for more than 20 years. With his deep tan, white hair and piercing blue eyes, he looks like a cross between Giorgio Armani and the hero of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. ‘Magma have taught us to complain, even to stop production, if something is wrong in an order instead of just trying to make it work,’ he says. ‘Now we all talk and work together as a team, which means we actually do things right the first time, which is way more efficient than fixing mistakes farther down the line.’

This Slow Fix still has a long way to go. A revolution that began in the sales and contracts department is now wending its way through the rest of the company. Rolling out the changes to operations in China and Greece will take longer. Even at the headquarters in Norway, the new system is still bedding in. The day I visit, Norsafe is testing a prototype lifeboat. Several nervous designers are standing on a dock watching the vessel being scuttled in a controlled experiment. Once it starts taking on water, it fails to right itself within the three minutes stipulated by international law. The designers look perplexed, but Hermansen smiles wryly. ‘They’re scratching their heads, but I told them they needed four centimetres more foam in the sides of the canopy,’ he mutters. ‘It shows that even with the right processes in the company, people don’t always listen to you.’

Even so, Norsafe seems to have turned a corner. Contracts are cycling smoothly through the company, lifeboats are arriving on time and in good condition, and profits are up. No more lawsuits are pending and the gloom in the office has lifted. In 2011, the leading financial newspaper in Norway published an article describing Norsafe as a ‘money-making machine’. Skaala is over the moon. ‘Everything is working now and it’s actually fun coming to the office again,’ he says. ‘It’s not rocket science. It’s not hocus-pocus. It’s not hard to understand. We just needed to slow down and think hard about exactly what was going wrong with our company before we could fix it.’

Others do the same deep, slow thinking without consultants. In the late 1980s, Patagonia, the California-based maker of smart, eco-friendly outdoor gear, grew so fast that it stopped training new managers properly and lost control of its ballooning network of product divisions and distribution channels. In response, Yvon Chouinard, the founder and owner, went into quick-fix mode, restructuring the company five times in five years. ‘I was driving everyone crazy by constantly trying new ideas without a clear direction for where we were trying to go,’ he wrote later. To find that direction, Chouinard eventually pulled the Andon rope. In 1991 he took a dozen of his top managers to southern Argentina for a walkabout in the real Patagonia. Like biblical prophets seeking truth in the desert, the company brass spent two weeks rambling through the harsh, windy landscape, chewing over the Big Question: what sort of company do we want to build? They returned from Argentina with a bundle of ideas that eventually crystallised into a mission statement: ‘Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.’ To embed that creed in the chain of command, Chouinard took lower-level managers on week-long retreats in US national parks. Having taken the time to answer the Big Question, Patagonia was finally able to put its house in order, cutting out superfluous layers of management, streamlining inventories and taming its sales channels. Today the company racks up annual sales over $540 million while continuing the policy it started in 1985 of donating 1 per cent of those sales to environmental causes.

Businesses aren’t the only ones to benefit from thinking hard about problems. Under its new safety regime, the RAF uses psychologists to drill down through the so-called ‘human factors’ that play a part in every accident. ‘Each piece of the puzzle has a story, and behind that story is another story and another – whether it’s a man who left home early in the morning because he was out late last night, had an argument with his wife or partner, or got to work and the books he was meant to reference weren’t there,’ says Group Captain Brailsford. ‘We’re talking about pulling the Andon rope to get to the very bottom of each problem. It means we take longer to think before acting, but when we do act we are able to apply the right solutions to the right problems.’

The same goes for matters of the heart. To mend a broken relationship, you must take time to work out what is really going wrong before seeking the right fix. When counselling couples in Toronto, Dave Perry places a small, ceramic tortoise on the table between him and his clients. ‘It’s just a little visual reminder that you need to take the slow and patient approach to get to the heart of the matter,’ he says. ‘At first, people struggle with it because they want a quick fix, but once they feel they have permission to slow down, it comes as a huge relief.’

Taking time to identify and frame the problem is very much the modus operandi of IDEO, a global design firm famous for the deep, probing research it does before prescribing a fix. When the Memorial Hospital and Health System of South Bend, Indiana, asked for help in making plans for its new Heart and Vascular centre, the IDEO staffers spent weeks on the wards, observing, listening, asking questions. They interviewed and ran workshops with patients, families, doctors, nurses, administrators, technicians and volunteers. They even recreated the experience of arriving at the hospital for everything from a simple consultation to open-heart surgery from the point of view of the patient and family members. Many of their suggestions went into the final design of the new wing. ‘Instead of just investigating people’s needs by asking directly, “What would you like?” we take a more meditative, experiential approach that involves immersion and percolation,’ says Jane Fulton Suri, Managing Partner and Creative Director of IDEO. ‘When you spend more time getting deeply familiar with a problem, that creates space for new and surprising insights.’

It can even lead to a complete recasting of the original problem. If a client requests a new, improved toaster, IDEO might flip the question round to ask: is there a better way to make toast? Or how could breakfast be different? IDEO took a similar tack when helping Apple develop its revolutionary computer mouse in 1980. ‘Right from the start we ask, “What is the real problem we need to address?” says Fulton Suri. ‘There is always a danger that the solution is already embedded in the way we frame our original problem. If we take the time to reframe it, we can open up alternative, and often better, ways to address the real need.’

That principle is even paying off in the staid world of traffic management. When accidents occur persistently along a stretch of road, the traditional fix is to tweak the street furniture – install new lights or speed bumps, say, or put up signs urging caution. Why? Because the more guidance you give motorists, the better they drive.

Or do they? After years of watching this golden rule fail to deliver safer roads, some engineers began to wonder if they were posing the wrong question. Instead of asking what can we add to our roads to make them safer, they began asking, in the counter-intuitive style of IDEO, what would a safer road look like? What they discovered astonished them. It turns out conventional wisdom about traffic is wrong. Often, the less you tell motorists how to behave, the more safely they drive. Think about it. Most accidents occur near school gates and crosswalks or around bus and cycle lanes, which all tend to be regulated by a dense forest of signs, lights and road markings. That is because the barrage of instructions can distract drivers. It can also lull them into a false sense of security, making them more likely to race through without paying attention.

Minimise the lights, the signage, the visual cues, and motorists must think for themselves. They have to make eye contact with pedestrians and cyclists, negotiate their passage through the cityscape, plan their next move. Result: traffic flows more freely and safely. Ripping out the signage along Kensington High Street, one of the busiest shopping strips in London, helped slash the accident rate by 47 per cent.

There are also neurological reasons for taking the time to think slowly and deeply about a problem. Deadlines have a role to play in finding solutions, but racing the clock can lead to sloppy, superficial thinking. Teresa Amabile, professor and Director of Research at the Harvard Business School, has spent the last 30 years studying creativity in the workplace. Her research points to a sobering conclusion: rushing makes us less creative. ‘Although moderate levels of time pressure don’t harm creativity, extreme time pressure can stifle creativity because people can’t deeply engage with the problem,’ says Amabile. ‘Creativity usually requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up.’

We all know this from experience. Our best ideas, those eureka moments that turn everything upside down, seldom come when we’re stuck in fast-forward, juggling emails, straining to make our voices heard in a high-stress meeting, rushing to deliver a piece of work to an impatient boss. They come when we’re walking the dog, soaking in the bath or swinging in a hammock. When we are calm, unhurried and free from stress and distractions, the brain slips into a richer, more nuanced mode of thought. Some call this Slow Thinking, and the best minds have always understood its power. Milan Kundera talked about ‘the wisdom of slowness’. Arthur Conan Doyle described Sherlock Holmes entering a quasi-meditative state, ‘with a dreamy vacant expression in his eyes’, when weighing up the evidence from crime scenes. Charles Darwin called himself a ‘slow thinker’.

Slowing down to ponder even makes sense when circumstances do not allow for weeks of patient observation or long, meditative walks in Patagonia. Statistically, police officers become involved in fewer shootings, arrests and assaults working alone than they do with a partner. Why? Because the lone cop is more cautious and circumspect, more likely to take a moment to weigh the options before acting. A slight pause can even make us more ethical. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have shown that, when faced with a clear choice between right and wrong, we are five times more likely to do the right thing if given time to think about it. Other research suggests that just two minutes of reasoned reflection can help us look beyond our biases to accept the merits of a rational argument.

To make space for rich, creative mulling, we need to demolish the taboo against slowness that runs so deep in 21st-century culture. We need to accept that decelerating judiciously, at the right moments, can make us smarter. When tackling a problem in groups, that means paying less attention to the fast thinkers who hog the stage and more to the shrinking violets who sit back and ponder. Tim Perkins, a coach at Odyssey of the Mind, sees this all the time. ‘Last year, we had one kid who sat so silently through the brainstorming sessions you could almost forget she was there,’ he says. ‘But she was actually taking time to process what was being said, and then 10 or 15 minutes later she would speak up. Often the team ended up taking her solution to the problem.’

We can all take steps to think harder. Even when nothing needs fixing, build time into your schedule to unplug from technology and let your mind wander. When tackling a new problem, make it a rule to sleep on it for at least one night before proposing any solutions. Ask why, why and why until you uncover the root cause. Keep an object on your desk – a piece of sculpture, a wooden snail, a photo of your favourite holiday spot – that reminds you to slow down and think before you act. Above all, test your solutions again and again, no matter how foolproof they seem.

Betting the farm on a quick fix that shows early promise is an easy mistake to make, even when we design systems to stop it from happening. The investigators at RAF Coningsby, freshly trained in the art of parsing ‘human factors’ and homing in on the root causes of problems, have fallen into the trap. Not long ago, during routine maintenance work, an engineer opened the undercarriage door of a Typhoon jet. It slammed down onto a heavy jack standing beneath it, ripping open a gash that looked like it could have been caused by enemy fire. In the past, the young corporal would have been punished and probably ridiculed by his peers. He might even have tampered with the evidence to deflect blame. Either way, his crew would have replaced the door without really probing why the accident occurred in the first place.

Under the new regime, the engineer filed a report on the spot, triggering a full investigation. Group Captain Simpson’s team quickly found that the safety pin that would have prevented the undercarriage door from lowering at the fateful moment was missing. So far, so good. Further digging then unearthed a startling oversight: though the safety pins are plainly listed in all the Typhoon manuals, three out of the four RAF squadrons had never even fitted them.

Simpson was stunned. ‘Everyone’s following the list. Everyone’s trained in accordance with the list. Everyone can see the pictures of the pin in place. And still no one had noticed that we’d never even bought any of these pins,’ she says. It felt like a home-run endorsement of the new safety regime. The RAF bought a load of safety pins and then closed the file on the Case of the Damaged Undercarriage Door.

‘Everyone said, “Crikey, isn’t this new system brilliant? We would never have picked this up before,”’ says Simpson. ‘We thought, “That’s all sorted now, problem solved.”’ Only it wasn’t. A few weeks later another Typhoon door was wrecked in an almost identical accident.

The safety pin was a red herring. When investigators took the time to think harder and dig deeper, they found a host of other factors leading to the mishap with the door: engineers distracted by changing shifts; poor lighting in the hangar; an illustration in the instruction manual suggesting the wrong angle for the jack.

‘We were so pleased to find the safety pin, which seemed like such an obvious answer to the problem, that we were completely blinded by it and just stopped looking for other causes,’ says Simpson, wincing slightly at the memory. ‘But the upside is we learned a very valuable lesson from this: just because you find one factor that seems to offer an almost perfect solution, you don’t stop. You have to carry on investigating, digging, asking questions until you have the full picture of what happened and how to fix it properly.’

In other words, if your first fix seems too good to be true, it probably is.

When I ask Simpson if all that hard thinking ever leads to a moment of perfect clarity, she falls silent for a few seconds before answering. ‘You do reach a point when you know what has to be done, but it’s rarely as simple as firing a magic bullet,’ she says. ‘There are always multiple factors you have to connect up.’