Sure, Slow Management is about maintaining sanity. It is also about speed. And no, this isn’t a contradiction.
Obviously, it is amazing what you can do when you focus on work and not the dizzing dance of distractions flying about like incontinent dung beetles. I won’t rant and rave about the impact of rampant multitasking–this article should do the trick.
Lean ways of working are understandably getting a lot of play. When you look at the principles, they are just good management.
- Make sure people are focused on value-adding activities;
- share learning and best practices;
- make the right decisions and the right time;
- engage and empower the team;
- act with integrity; and
- stitch it all together.
You can’t do any of the above if you are thinking about how to justify your worth with email volume and calling for status presentations. You can only do this if you engage with the people and problems at hand without the filter of your own perception. That takes effort, focus, concentration, and empathy.
That’s why in my day job, the Slow Management experiment is coupled with the mantra of You Ship or You Suck and a focus on the details of the design that would make Charles Eames proud.
If you slow down and focus on on the art of management, you can go faster with better quality. Sounds like a good deal.
“There’s never time to do it right, and always time to do it over.”
“Better, faster, cheaper; pick two.”
I learned these 2 phrases, and their variations, when I got into the creative business more than 25 years ago, and they’d already been around a while before that. Whether in planning or production stages, whether concepting or executing, the ability to stop and assess is critical for any forward momentum. Sometimes teams hate it, especially folks newer to the business, but I’d rather take 2 days to plan than 2 weeks to re-do.