We need a slow thought revolution

In 1989 Carlo Petrini founded the Slow Food movement to counteract the fast food and fast life culture that is becoming all too pervasive today. Expounding the principle that pleasure and responsibility should be inseparable and that each should serve to inform the other, Slow Food is a working example of the "less is more" philosophy that would rather leisurely sip a full-bodied demitasse of espresso than gulp down a "bottomless" (sic) cup of bland, watery liquid.

When the interweb first began to pervade our daily lives the first thing I noticed was that the culture of immediacy embraced this new form of communication without thinking, which is symptomatic of the microwave generation, who desire immediate gratification and are constantly unsatisfied as a consequence. I myself fell victim to this; in a series of email exchanges with my publisher of the time, we both become more and more agitated as each successive missive from the other party failed to address the queries we had raised, only aggravating each of us with the terse comments whose intent, if not their very meaning, was often unclear and wide open to misinterpretation. We both became increasingly angered by these exchanges, firing off responses ever more rapidly in a spiral of fulmination. Eventually we recovered our equilibrium when the realisation struck us both that firing off shots in haste was causing the problem, neither of us was taking the time to read the other's email messages properly, nor pausing long enough to compose a considered reply.

It seems ironic that a medium that removes the requirement to respond immediately to a query engendered by a face-to-face dialogue, by inserting both space and time between the correspondents, should itself breed more impatience rather than less: to the point where that very impatience seems to permeate real-time discussions as well in a not-so-perfect example of a negative feedback loop.

Several years ago I was involved in a global project to build an intranet for a large automotive manufacturer who had centres in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Paris. The group running the project held huge workshops, where all the stakeholders were assembled to thrash out the requirements. The consultancy group running these had assembled a series of intranet "experts", myself amongst them, who were supposed to be there to "add value" by contributing advice on the topic under discussion. Adding value seemed to consist of adding complication in the form of immediate and convoluted responses to questions and topics that frequently baffled both me and the client by their obtuseness. My tactic was only to speak when I had something to say and could offer advice based on the benefit of my own experience. This approach seemed to be the right one to me as my interjections frequently led to the resolution of a conundrum or the adoption of an approach based on my input.

Part way through the project, which was beginning to take very much longer than planned and to frustrate me due to the amount of time wasted wandering up the blind alleys of the obtuse advice proffered with increasing frequency by the battery of experts, I was called aside by the lead executive of the consultancy group and criticised for not adding enough value. When I responded that the quality of my input was such that it had contributed positively to the dialogue every time, the response was that I didn't offer enough input.

"I've been told you sometimes don't speak at all during a workshop." reported the executive. It was true, as the quantity of pointless comment had increased, the level of debate had strayed so far from the task at hand and was so wearying I increasingly found the only value I could add was to try and pull the workshops back on track. This became an increasingly futile exercise as the frequency and level of noise became both bewildering and wearying in equal measure. The executive's upbraiding of my efforts made me realise it wasn't the quality of advice offered that was seen as adding value, it was the quantity and so I asked to be removed from the project. The project rattled on for another year after I left, three times as long as originally estimated, and failed to deliver to such an extent that the client successfully sued the consultancy firm for this failure to meet the terms and conditions of their own contract.

While this episode is emblematic of the modus operandi of many consultancy firms, whose business model is to sell time while paying lip service to providing advice, it is also endemic in a society that values immediacy and profligacy of response over measured and thoughtful advice.

Texting, email and social media, from forums to Twitter, have proven to be very popular in the Nordic countries. I have heard the opinion expressed that this is because the people in these counties are socially challenged and prefer indirect communication rather than face-to-face dialogue. Nothing could be further from the truth. People in the Nordics as just socially gregarious as the inhabitants of other countries. The difference is that a thoughtful, measured response is valued more than an immediate, ill-considered one there. The first time I encountered this it was slightly disconcerting. I hosted a workshop in Copenhagen, with members from Finland, Sweden and Denmark. Every question I put to this audience seemed to meet with a blank response and I wondered if they were having problems following my English or simply found my content of little worth or interest. I retired to my hotel room tired and dispirited.

The group assembled the next day and began to vigourously respond to my questions of the day before. Questioning this delay in response I was informed that they considered my questions very good indeed, such that they all wanted to take time to think about the issues before responding. The quality of their responses was outstanding and we resolved most of the issues in that follow-up meeting. What a contrast to the LA summits, where continual knee-jerk responses only led to days, months and years of fruitless meetings.
This, I realised was why social media was a valued form of communication in the Nordics, because it allowed time for consideration before replying. Seen thus it became an important adjunct to human dialogue, not a replacement for it.

As well as the Slow Food movement there is also the Long Now movement, dedicated to building a 1,000,000 year clock, like the Slow Food movement, focusing on a longer term view of life. If we could bring the perspective embodied by these movements to consulting and the use of IT perhaps we could begin to really add value.