Thoughtful and Mindful: Slower Thinking for Complex Problems
This article is part of a series of articles exploring enduring leadership behaviours and what they look like for virtual teams in particular.
It’s hard for us humans to make clear-eyed decisions in moments of stress and crisis. Fear, bias, optimism and intuition all get in the way of measured decision-making. Disciplined and consistent practice encourages us to slow down our thinking and invite deliberate, critical thinking and dissent. Slow thinking — famously described in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow — is an effective way to guardrail against cognitive potholes like bias, impatience and overconfidence. It’s also a great way to create space to interrogate new ideas.
Predictable problems are readily solved by individual experts or small, homogenous teams: I’ve seen this before, and I know how to fix it. Complex problems, however, are not single-person challenges. In a disrupted global landscape, problem-solving requires team solutions that reach beyond traditional boundaries and invite fresh, diverse perspectives.
Slower Thinking, Slower Feeling
Dissent, creativity and innovation are only achievable in teams that have high levels of trust, generosity and benevolent collaboration. Building trust is relatively easy in homogenous teams with a similar culture, history and background: I’ve worked with people like this before, and I know how to behave. But it’s considerably more difficult to achieve trust and understanding in cross-sector or cross-cultural teams where common ground is not always obvious.
Culture plays a critical but often overlooked role in shaping our judgement and decisions. Hasty emotional judgements — fast feelings — can derail any team, leading to confusion, interpersonal conflict, frustration and disconnection. Bringing together groups from different sectors and cultures requires us to sense-check our emotional reactions and swap fast feeling for a more reflective and deliberate approach. When it comes to diverse teams, thinking slow is important, but feeling slow is essential.
Thoughtful, Mindful Teams
It’s an incredibly rewarding experience to be part of a diverse team. Cross-cultural, cross-sector or cross-departmental teams will, like any team, almost certainly stumble from time to time. But even under pressure, a team that draws on a shared culture of trust and goodwill is more resilient and recovers faster.
We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing — what we see is all there is.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
There are many tools and practices we can use to help leverage the power of diverse teams and work better together. To anyone with a mindset of curiosity and an interest in ideas, these practices are low effort but very high reward:
- Get Curious, Make Connections
· Step outside your industry and actively seek new ideas, insights and lessons. Travel, read, strike up a conversation with someone new.
· Build a wide and diverse network of expert contacts from whom you can seek advice. But don’t wait for crunch time to make connections: build and nurture close relationships long before you need them.
· Proactively look for opportunities to share, learn and bring people together. This can be at work, or can be in the community or online.
2. Foster Respect, Trust and Generosity
· Consider your own patterns of thought and behaviour and cultivate self awareness. How do you behave under stress? What inspires you? What scares you?
· Invest in understanding the cultural background and values of your team. Culture plays a huge role in expectations of decision-making velocity and team dynamics, and cannot be underestimated.
· Learn about the powerful role of language and culture in cross-cultural communication and consider ways to adapt your communication style.
· Demonstrate trust through thoughtful and constructive delegation and model generosity by taking time to give honest and constructive feedback.
· When interpersonal conflicts arise — as they always will — slow down, and approach them with an open mind, respect and goodwill.
· Build relationships through genuine human exchange. Gift-giving is important in some cultures, but in any country it’s important to take time, talk and listen to others.
3. Slow Down, Sense Check and Make Decisions Together
· Get the right people ‘in the room’ to make informed decisions. Recognise and mitigate against technical barriers to participation such as technology and time-zones.
· Always send agenda, data and context in advance of discussion. Ensure that everyone has access to the same quality information and ensure that data are clearly and expertly contextualised.
· Take time to specifically define the problem, capture it in writing and keep on track. What’s in scope for this discussion? What’s out of scope?
· Build shared understanding by ditching the jargon and speaking clearly and openly. Gabrielle Dolan has great advice about clear communication in Real Communication.
· Explicitly and clearly define the process for making decisions. Allocate enough time for consideration of both tactical (short term) and strategic (long term) decisions.
· Codify dissent and critical thinking by explicitly inviting consideration of risks and failure. The ‘premortem’ is one example, which asks participants visualize catastrophic failure.
· Explicitly capture commitments in writing and take time to confirm understanding. The definition of ‘decision’ can vary from one culture to another, for instance, so it’s critical to define whether decisions are set-in-stone ‘capital D’ decisions, or a work-in-progress ‘soft d’ decisions.
· Recognise and respect implicit cultural barriers to participation, such as hierarchy, cultural values and personal background.
In a disrupted world, predictability is out the window and challenges are complex and entwined. There are no easy or fast answers. If we want quality solutions, we need to slow down, think deeply and make better decisions together.
