Living at the Speed of Life

I remember my father coming home from work and telling us about a course he had attended on time management. He showed us something resembling a Filofax and mentioned that such things were very expensive and that he was hesitant to buy them for everyone else in the company. Fortunately, my father was rather tech-savvy, and eventually he built a software program to help the law firm manage its time instead.

I am not sure he got time management quite right, though, because in his world it was merely a matter of working as much as possible. I think most of us have tried this approach. The more time I spend working, the better I do. Then at some point you can add another dimension. The harder you work, the better you are.

Have we ever really developed a conscious sense of what it means to work hard? I understand it as a measure of effort. The level of your effort is recognised by the strain you put on yourself. If you feel comfortable and maybe even joyful throughout your working day, the perception will be that your effort is low, and if you have an air of suffering or are constantly short of time, you can be perceived as a hard worker.

In the Nordic Lutheran culture, we sometimes feel that we must suffer now to receive bliss in the future. I work hard so I can retire early. The catch is that ultimately this means we will always be working hard in the present, pushing the blessed future ahead of us.

And then at some point we added the dimension of working fast. It was no longer only about how much we worked or how hard we worked, but also how quickly we could make things happen. Scaling companies and correcting society through politics had to be done at a pace that could outrun competitors, crises, and the very problems we were trying to solve. Maybe this was a natural response to a world that seemed to be moving faster around us, or to our increased ability to register and measure development in the era of KPIs. But did we unintentionally start a race before we had a chance to learn whether accelerating execution was actually solving our problems?

And how would we even know if the chosen pace was right? To get a sense of how fast we are moving, we look at our surroundings and notice the way our position changes in relation to them. It is simple physics: measuring speed ultimately must be done by comparing two different systems and the way they change position in relation to each other. But in a world where we are all moving and even accelerating, this is a complex, if not impossible, task, and most of the time we end up measuring our own acceleration in response to feedback about our inadequacies. We move faster because we do not feel content with our current position. Yet at times I wonder if we risk confusing acceleration with problem solving.

I see this most clearly when advising on collaborations. I can sometimes identify a difference between the internal and external pace of certain individuals, compared to each other and to the group they form. What interests me most is how we respond to that difference.

For instance, the fast movers can become very stressed by slower movers, which can lead the slow movers to tap out. They do what the fast movers require but stop participating in the debate about what to do and how to do it. The fast movers are then confirmed by the actions that they are in fact right, and they maintain the pace, with a risk of superficial problem solving and of destabilising the team. It leaves us working hard and even fast, but that doesn’t mean we are getting closer to what we want or need.

What disappears in this sequence is information and collaboration. The fast movers often see connections and directions early. The slow movers, given time for reflection, compare a given solution with several alternative scenarios, both past and present. When they work well together, one can set direction for the reflections of the other, but when one pace sets the terms for the whole group, the group loses part of what it already knows.

Knowledge and experience consist of more than what occurs in our minds instantaneously. They also emerge from memory, senses, intuition, and instincts, and these sources in each individual cannot be expected to arrive fast and on demand. In my experience, quite a lot of them arrive in my morning shower, during my coffee break looking out the window, or in evening conversations with my loved ones. These are the moments when I ask nothing of my busy mind.

This leaves us with the question of how we recognise what pace is suitable and sustainable for us as individuals, as organisations, and for the task at hand. Perhaps it is a skill we can cultivate: the skill of differentiating between paces, of getting a sense of what needs to grow organically and evolve at its own pace, and what needs to be pushed forward through efforts of control and measurement.

The same is true beyond the single individual. An organisation rarely moves at one pace. Daily operations may need speed and precision, while a strategic decision needs time to mature, and the culture of the organisation moves at a pace of its own, sometimes without anyone even noticing it.

When a leader notices the pace a system is already moving at, the questions become different. They are less often about how to make things happen faster and more often about what is already moving in the organisation, at what pace, and how to stimulate that movement without obstructing another. Sometimes the answer is to accelerate. Just as often, it is to let a decision mature, to slow down long enough to see what is happening, or to follow a movement that has already begun.

Markets, legislation, and the people who make up a community all move at different speeds as well, and they respond to each other in ways that are hard to see from inside any one of them. At present, we tell ourselves that we are navigating new and unknown problems and that we cannot solve them as we used to. Maybe this is the case, or maybe they ultimately resemble the same life cycles of destruction before construction that we see in any system: in nature, in the cells of our bodies, in communities, in societies, and in industries. We have probably always received these signs of change with anxiety, mistrust, and a sense of urgency, and that urgency may be part of why we reach for acceleration, but does this urge for action disturb a progression we have not yet had the time to notice? Sometimes culture finds its own solutions, and I should think that the most useful effort of leadership, politics, the law, and the market is to follow the momentum of the current culture rather than to construct solutions at a designed pace.

Children, people, organisations, and societies all grow and evolve at their own pace, and navigating and stimulating this evolution is rarely about manipulating pace. In my experience as a mother, a leader, and an advisor, it usually works much better if you respect the pace that is already there and let things grow, remaining curious about the direction they take.

When I feel that correction is needed, I am usually proved wrong. I try to remember that dissolving obstructions and nurturing my surroundings work better than setting the pace, and that the satisfaction of being the problem solver can tempt me to solve problems that are already on their way to solving themselves.

I have changed pace myself, trusting that a slower pace stimulates my judgement as I navigate this life and believing that I will ultimately achieve more by doing less. In the final years of my high-speed life, my father, who is thirty years older than me, kept asking me the same question: What is it all for? I think he was speaking to both of us. He was asking his former self and my present self why we were running so fast. I always answered him with the explanation that I needed to maintain that pace to provide for my loved ones. It took me years to understand that his question was a reminder that I can always choose my own effort and pace.

Perhaps living at the speed of life begins, when we stop pushing the blessed future ahead of us and start reading the pace of what is actually unfolding, in the people we work with, in the communities we belong to, and in our own lives, so that we can choose when to move and at what pace.

— Mia