Leadership Is the Counterintuitive Wisdom of Slowing Down

Resist the Urge to Rush In

It’s intuitive to think that urgency is important for important things: work fast to design a product, sign a contract, develop a process, launch a marketing campaign.  So here is the most counterintuitive saying in the Spanish language: “Vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa” (”Take your time dressing me, I’m in a hurry”), this is important, slow down!

It’s counterintuitive to anyone who’s ever experienced impatience about something important.  In my world of higher education, it’s impatience about experimental results, impatience about student learning, impatience about the adoption of a new academic policy or the creation of an innovative curriculum, impatience about key performance indicators like student retention.  Add some fear—for instance, a drop in enrollment threatening to shrink the budget—and we are at a crossroads: do we act now, or do we step back and analyze the situation, so we can take data-informed action?

In the extraordinary book Factfulness, Hans Rosling devotes an entire chapter to “the urgency instinct”.  The chapter opens with anecdotes from Rosling’s work in remote areas of Africa, where he initially served as a district doctor.  Rosling eventually turned his attention to research, becoming health adviser to agencies including the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and later leading the Division of International Health of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, one of the world’s most important medical universities.  I urge you to read the book, so I won’t provide the details, but the gist of the anecdotes in the “urgency instinct” chapter is this: facing imminent danger, in the context of a potentially highly contagious disease, decisions made without sufficient information have tragic consequences.  “Fear plus urgency make for stupid, drastic decisions with unpredictable side effects”, warns Rosling.

What’s the right approach, then?  If it’s really important: slow down, step back, analyze the situation, take your time getting ready for action.  The next time the urgency instinct hits you, consider these tactics, adapted from Rosling’s wise words:

Don’t “Cry Wolf”

Overly dramatic presentations of a problem could stress out your team and lead to feelings of hopelessness.  If you are facing a severe threat (I vividly remember the onset of the pandemic as such a time), you need your team to be focused, not fearful.  Present the problem faithfully, but don’t exaggerate.  Maybe discuss the worst-case scenario, but don’t forget to also describe the best-case scenario.

Step Back to Describe the Situation Clearly

Can you improve on the information you have available?  Sometimes light is shed on a problem when you join two datasets you haven’t looked at together.  Their relationship will likely be complex, but you will gain new insights to help you identify a path forward.  Sometimes you don’t even need to add new data: flip the axes, visualize what data you have in a different way, exclude the outliers and recalculate the mean.  This has helped me countless times in my research and in my administrative work.

Consult with All the Relevant Parties

Have you tapped the expertise around you?  This includes people you may not normally interact with.  Their complementary expertise could be instrumental in helping you identify solutions you couldn’t come up with on your own.  Be careful, however, with parties whose own interests may be in conflict with the right course of action.  For example, a third party who stands to profit from your using their services to address an anticipated problem may not be an impartial adviser.

Think Long-Term

Thinking long-term is not something that we are good at, especially when it’s so much easier to direct our attention to the constant alerts about short-term urgencies.  Rosling (who, before his death in 2017, named a global pandemic as number one of five global risks to really worry about) implores us to worry about the really important things, and his advice is to approach these “with cool heads and robust, independent data”.  I have been successful when I have managed to focus on the big picture and the long-term outcomes.  This doesn’t mean that you completely ignore the constant noise, but you need to make a conscious effort to limit your attention to those short-term interruptions, and you need to learn to not be afraid of them, so you can focus on the big picture, on what is really important.

Slow Down the Next Time You’re in a Hurry

As we start 2025 (it’s the beginning of the second quarter of the 21st century!), let’s consider being more patient.  When you feel that sense of urgency, take a moment and breathe, remembering the wisdom of that saying, “Vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa”.  Resist the urge to rush in, step back to analyze, consult with others, and focus on the long term.  

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