 My
current contract entails a lot of hours at 'the office', something I
have become unused to. As I build new relationships with my client I am
finding myself being given more and more responsibility mainly because,
being new on the job, I am not yet inundated with routine tasks and
regular emergencies to cope with. I still have time to think about things.
My
observation, throughout my career, has been that as businesses become
more 'efficient' (i.e. they lay more people off and load the work onto
fewer and fewer workers), there is less and less time to think. Most of
the CEOs I have known openly lament that they have no time to think at
all. I suspect that's why they like mission statements and strategic
planning sessions -- they are forced, briefly, to get above the
day-to-day crises of operation and think about what they are doing and
should be doing and how and why to do it. Unfortunately, these often
turn into rushed, uninformed, sterile exercises that are totally
disconnected from what's actually happening in the organizations --
because the people who participate in these exercises don't have time
to find out what's really going on (and generally, no one on the front
lines is foolish enough to tell them).
The result is that these
organizations become completely dysfunctional. A few overpaid people
make uninformed, thoughtless decisions and impose them on front-line
people who must then find workarounds so they can continue to do their
jobs reasonably effectively despite what they are told to do by
management (usually ignorantly), told to achieve by management (usually unrealistically), and told to provide to management (usually pointlessly).
This
isn't unique to organizations. Most of us fill our days so full (or
have them filled for us) that we have no time to think, until we're too
tired to think.
Thinking
is a skill, and like any skill it takes considerable and continuous
practice. My sense is that those of us who are paid to think are mostly
pretty rusty at doing it. It's a holistic skill in many senses: it
entails both deductive and inductive reasoning. It synthesizes
conscious and subconscious knowledge. It requires recalling and drawing
on a lot of ideas and information from many different sources. It
entails imagining, opening oneself up to and carefully considering
novel approaches, perspectives and alternatives. It requires digestion,
perception, provocation, attention, and avoiding preconception.
Many
of us do puzzles or play games of intellectual skill to try to exercise
our brains so we can continue to think effectively. But that's not
really thinking practice -- these exercises are generally pretty
prescriptive. Real practice involves using everything you know and
everything you can do well, and sometimes things you do not so well. It
requires stretching, challenging yourself. It's hard work.
And it takes time. There's a reason why some of our best thinking comes
after we've 'slept on it' -- consciously or subconsciously we are
finally investing time in thinking.
Not only are too many of us becoming too unpracticed at thinking, I believe many of us no longer have the breadth of useful information, or the generalist experiences and competencies of our ancestors, or the diversity of experiences, or the introspective, meditative, peaceful, uneventful moments, or the unhurried and pensive conversations to draw on, all of which comprise the raw material that effective thinking depends on.
I'm
not sure how we can change this -- it's pretty naive to think we can
just slow down and take the time it needs to re-learn and practice to
think effectively. It requires a completely different management
mindset -- setting realistic goals, assigning sensible roles,
establishing useful processes by consensus and where necessary, and
otherwise staying out of the way.
By listening to and observing
staff instead of telling them, we empower them to learn more about what
works and how it fits with what others do and need. And it frees up
management time for thinking. One person can't do this alone -- it
requires an entire workforce that can self-manage and function in a
flat and largely unsupervised environment. Do this with the wrong staff
and you're a goner -- the power vacuum will be filled by the (probably
unqualified) person with the biggest ego, as others willingly allow
him/her to take the fall for all the incompetent decisions that ensue.
But in the right organization,
self-management can produce amazing results. An organization whose
people all have the time and capacity to think effectively, and the
authority to act on that thought, will trounce their competitors. Who
knows, they might even create a model for a better workplace, and go on
to change the world. Aha!
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
