Cool Down (11 page)

These are examples of opportunities for interpersonal contact that have been eroded due to ambient momentum and the walls of the cubicle environment. In all of the cases above, solutions or resolutions could have been found and resolved faster if the people involved had known a little more about the value of human connection within the business process.

The stories above might appear to be isolated examples. But they are analogies for many hundreds of other types of situations in which people miss out on faster, more productive opportunities due to personal blur. It's as destructive to individual efficiency as intellectual isolation is to groups. By being consciously aware of its presence, you will be able to identify blur as a threat and then strategize how best to
cool down
in order to achieve your goals more quickly and efficiently.

To demonstrate, let's make a parable out of two travelers in an airport departure lounge. This again is a situation-specific scenario whose lessons extend to many other areas of life.

It's hard not to be caught up by the tension of travel. It's a rootless existence where people stand halfway between home and their new destination, unable to access either. They battle jetlag, fatigue, and exasperation, while having to keep their wits about them to avoid missing important announcements. It may seem that boredom or frustration is the theme of the airport departure lounge, not personal blur. But let's observe how, when the moment hits, it's the cool, clear thinker who wins out.

Two travelers, Frank and Ernest, are sitting in the departure lounge. The PA system announces that due to a last-minute equipment change, the plane for their flight has been changed to a smaller one, and hence the flight is oversold.

Frank succumbs to the urgency of the moment. He leaps up and joins the other passengers, who all storm the agent at the gate. They demand answers, they vent their frustrations, and they demand to know how this situation will be resolved.

Ernest, however, does not. He knows there's no need to rush over and join his irate traveling companions in line. There's a cooler, more effective way. He takes out his wireless PDA and goes online to the airline's website. There, isolated from the contagious confusion of the departure lounge, he rebooks his flight online, with no extra cost or inconvenience.

Having circumvented the chaos, Ernest takes advantage of the privacy that the departure lounge offers. He intentionally left his office an hour early in order to negotiate city traffic and airport security with ease. He arrived unstressed at the terminal and now proceeds to get an hour of focused work done.

Frank, the unseasoned traveler and caught in the vortex of speed, did not see any value in planning ahead. Instead, he worked to the absolute last minute at the office, grabbed a taxi, and paid the driver double to drive as fast as possible. He saw no point in arriving early just to sit in an airport. And now the vortex continues. He still hasn't got a flight, and his blood pressure is dangerously high.

Ernest, on the other hand, works away on his laptop until his new flight is called. He takes his time, and strides toward the gate.

Which person would you rather be? Which one of these people reflects your current approach to crisis?

What can we learn from these cases? When people are forced, through the stress of speed and momentum, to gloss over the parts that complete the process, relationships remain incomplete and success becomes elusive. Such is the price of personal blur.

We've now spent enough time looking at damage. In the next chapter, we'll pause and see how situations like Frank's above gave rise to the actual global
Slow
movement. After that we will be in a better and cooler position to observe how we can accept and practice the techniques espoused by this movement in our busy lives.

Could you influence the timing of meetings or your arrival and departure?

 

 

So, does the
Slow
movement hold the answer to our current and future productivity woes? Is it truly a social force to be reckoned with? Is it a legitimate tactic for refining a person's ambitions and skills, or is it merely a refuge for those who cannot handle the pace of business?

My belief is that the concepts behind the
Slow
movement do offer promise, but as long as they continue to run smack into the collective high-speed mentality of most North American business people, there will be no progress, and worse, no perceived need for its philosophy. The mindset that embraces speed and advancement has been fueled in the United States by over two centuries' worth of the pursuit of independence, progress, and personal freedom. Slightly younger countries (constitutionally speaking) such as Canada and Australia hold similar collective desires. Nor is the “old world” immune to the pressures of speed. Some companies and organizations in Spain, for example, have actually tried to eliminate the centuries-old tradition of
siesta,
replacing it, in some instances, with fast-food lunch vouchers in order to a) remain more accessible to the 24/7 marketplace and b) fit into the new commuting schedules of households with two working parents.

As the global economy continues to both advance and diversify, the pressure on working professionals to do more with fewer resources, to remain accountable to their worldwide customer base, while simultaneously staying ahead of their competitors, will only become more intense. The collective reaction to all this will be to want to hurry up, not slow down.

Negative stress that accompanies such pressure is what causes the damage, both for individuals and the companies for which they work. As I described in Chapter 1, it's the difference between walking fast because you like to and walking fast because you have to. When people or companies react and increase their pace because they have to, they move into the emotional territory where fear and anger live.

When a person feels fear, he experiences an increase in energy brought about by the release of adrenalin into the bloodstream. This also increases his blood pressure, and both together are intended to help him either avoid trouble or get out of its way quickly. However, these reactions are soon tempered by a separate branch of the autonomic nervous system called the parasympathetic system, which seeks to bring the state of hyper-arousal back down to more normal values. People are not built to stay in this heightened state for long periods, just as we're not built to sprint marathons every day. We just can't.