Decelerate

This week I’ve invited a handful of collaborators I enjoy and admire to write guest posts that fit the scope of this space: “the art & science of creative action.” Today’s post comes from my friend Kim Scott. Kim is the author of Just Work and Radical Candor and co-founder of companies that help organizations put the ideas in her books into practice. Kim was a CEO coach at Dropbox, Qualtrics, Twitter, and other tech companies. Kim previously held leadership roles at Apple and Google. Earlier in her career Kim managed a pediatric clinic in Kosovo and started a diamond-cutting factory in Moscow.

***

Experience the Thrill of Thinking, Slow.

By far most productive years of my career have been the years I decided to decelerate, or even not to work at all--the years when I let go of my obsessive quest for productivity and efficiency, the years when I decided to decelerate, not accelerate, and just do what I felt like doing, even when it wasn’t clear where that would lead me. So when Jeremy told me he was thinking of starting a decelerator (as opposed to the many accelerators that exist in Silicon Valley), his idea really resonated.

When I left Google and went to Apple, I got my first taste of the innovative potential of the decelerator. I was designing a class called “Managing at Apple.” If I’d designed such a class at Google, I would have spent at most four hours on it before launching it. At Apple, I was given four months to noodle. Four months??? It made me very nervous. I wasn’t launching. I wasn’t iterating. It felt like I wasn’t doing anything. What was I doing, exactly?  It didn’t feel productive. It didn’t feel fast. Would I get fired??? The people around me encouraged me to just relax. Innovation takes time. 

When we launched the class, I was astounded. It really was great. The time had paid off. But I kept noticing ways to make it better, ways that people were misinterpreting what we were teaching. Now, I wanted to iterate. But there were a bunch of people in addition to me teaching the class. Every change I wanted to make was met with resistance.

When I decided to write Radical Candor, I knew that an operating role and the creative process were incompatible. I thought I could write the book in four months. That didn’t seem like too long of a break between jobs. So I quit my job and started writing. Four months became four years.

It seemed like an unimaginable luxury, and I felt guilty indulging in it, but I decided to give myself over to the creative process. The book would take as long as it took. If it hadn’t been for that experience at Apple, I’m not sure I would have had the courage to let my mind wander for thirty hours a week for four years. And if I hadn’t had a couple of lucrative coaching gigs I never could have afforded it.

Those four years didn’t always look productive. I took long, rambling walks in Arastradero Open Space Preserve most afternoons. I spent three months not writing any words but simply experimenting with different words for the Radical Candor 2x2. At this point my husband jokingly offered to build me a random word generator. I was getting a little worried. Some days, what I was doing sure felt like a waste of time. But thinking, really thinking, is exhausting. The mind needs to wander. I let it wander.

The metaphor that kept me going was marination, fermentation. If you try to speed up these processes, you’ll ruin the meat and the wine. I told myself I was thinking — thinking slow, not fast — to borrow Kahneman’s language. I was trying to distill what I’d learned over the course of a twenty year career into a framework that others would find helpful. Sometimes I’d be wrestling with an idea, I’d set it aside, and out of nowhere a few months later, a different way of thinking about that idea would pop into my mind, as I was hanging out at the beach with my family. There was some sort of background processing going on...

The other thing about these deceleration days was that I wasn’t alone. I had over 100 editors in the Google doc I was using to write the book. This allowed me to iterate before I launched. It forced me to think and rethink. Giving myself large expanses of time allowed me to get into my own head, the comments from others helped me get back out.

It was crucial that most of this iteration happened before I’d sold the book to a publisher. Once there was a deadline and the book had to launch, my editor was not thrilled with my rapid iteration, just as my colleagues at Apple were frustrated with my desire to tweak things after the class had launched. 

Slogans like “Launch and Iterate” or “Move Fast and Break Things” sound like great rallying cries for accelerators—for innovating at a breakneck pace. But there’s a lot of mythology here. At Google, after things launched and got big, it became more difficult to iterate, to change things. “The goalies have gotten too good,” was an observation as the company grew. At Facebook, the “Move Fast and Break Things” signs were often erased and replaced with “Slow Down and Fix Your Shit.”

If you really want to do something new, to think in a new way, my advice is to figure out a way to build a decelerator at your company. Give your employees the luxury of time to think and rethink. It takes time to get inside one’s own head, and it’s almost impossible to do with a deadline looming. It takes even more time to get out of one’s own head, to ask other people what they think. Work gets so much better when the person responsible for the work product solicit feedback from a wide range of outsiders. But again when a deadline is looming, it’s really hard to be eager for the opinions of others. Create a situation where people don’t feel it’s a terrible waste of time to write drafts and throw them away to build and trash and rebuild.  

Frank Lloyd Wright said, “The architect’s two most important tools are: the eraser in the drafting room and the wrecking bar on the site.” Clearly, the former is the more elegant option. But it feels so slow, so unproductive to erase, to tear down. Who ever got a promotion or a bonus for having the discipline to throw their work away and start over, for saying to the critic, “Oh, wow, you are right, I should change that”?

Too often, we reward speed. If you want break-through innovation, you need to create a space for thinking, slow.

Related: Allow Time for Incubation

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.