How a pause can get you further, faster

This is (with some redactions) a blog I wrote for the intranet at my office (Competition and Markets Authority)  - less about running and more about pausing, then writing, some running... but maybe it would be of interest to fellow bloggers ... plus I have had such a long pause now since Budapest I am hoping it will indeed get me "further, faster" in the long run!!

 How a pause can get you further, faster

In this post, I’ll explore how creating some headspace helps you identify insights.   Insights that will improve your work, our decisions, and increase pace. 

1. Pause, Deliberately                         Hanging in a common room in Pembroke College, Oxford there’s a painting called “We Pause for a Reply”.   It’s of a doctoral viva.    

   The candidate has just been asked a tricky question, perhaps by the smug young don on the right, who may just be point-scoring to impress his seniors on the panel (a trait not confined to academe, as we know).   The room awaits the answer.   

The pause is so poignant.   I like to think the candidate’s years of research, of focussing on one exquisite problem for so long, have given him the confidence to pause deliberately, to let the question hang.   Hopefully he’s letting the question hang fire, so the wisdom he’s developed can sift through his acquired knowledge and extract the relevant insight.   At least that’s what I like to think is going on.    He could also easily descend into despair.    But the painting has another title, which is the motto of the University - Dominus Illuminatio Mea – and which opens Psalm 27:  The Lord is My Light.   So, one gets the sense that in that pause something will indeed inspire this student to reply well, and proceed to his degree.  

Of course, the image would be less effective - as would the student - if it was a modern gif of him flipping pages in a panic, or stabbing frantically at some gadget.  He’s only brought a little notebook along, which he is just staring at.   You get the impression he is taking the time to think and from his calm expression just being open to connections and insights.  

Just stare at the machine

This takes me to a scene in the book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ that has been a guiding principle of my work for the last three decades.   At least when dealing with complicated problems.

 The narrator’s motorcycle has a worrying vibration, and he commits hours and hours to breaking the bike down and examining every part, cleaning them, rebuilding it, getting out the manual and hurling science and reason and logic to identify the problem.   He recognises that this approach – of working the problem, of grinding it down -  serves him well in 99% of cases.   But this time it doesn’t.   He is stuck.   And he knows why:

“Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20–20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go, unless where you ought to go is a continuation of where you were going in the past. Creativity, originality, inventiveness, intuition, imagination— “unstuckness” in other words—are completely outside its domain.”

And here’s the quote I like.   The narrator sits back and realises you must

“slow down deliberately and go over ground that you’ve been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to . . . well . . . just stare at the machine. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it. That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.”

Victoria House (home of the CMA)  isn’t an ivory tower, and our work isn’t all mechanical.   In our most interesting cases, we often find almost intractable intellectual problems and policy clashes.   And yet our ‘science’, our legal and economic skills serve us well, and we examine the evidence, we ‘work the problem’, and reach the right result.   And despite our best efforts, no one would deny that challenging work takes time as well.   And it needs to, given the stakes involved.   

But things are getting harder.   Markets are more complicated, data is richer, political voices are clamouring, and we’re taking on novel cases.   We’ll go through some changes and growth to address many challenges, and we’ll have to make more of what are effectively policy choices.  In doing all this, my quiet plea is that sometimes we should ‘slow down deliberately’ so we can be more open to innovative ways of building insights. 

Yes, I have long argued that most of the problems we face can be addressed by keeping calm, and carrying on with our tried and tested theories of harm, evolving at the margin.  Yes, our teams of lawyers and economists, our approach of separated and collective decision-making, and even judicious use of the ‘object’ approach, will suit most situations.   Yes, we are improving our data science capabilities.    But making sure we create the space and the time to reflect on what we are learning, and to allow new insights and connections to be built deliberately, will suit us even better so we actually evolve faster.  

I’m not suggesting we work slower, or that our floors become even quieter.    Our work should not primarily be mulling, thinking laterally, or awaiting inspiration.   But we can create better conditions for hard work to work well, and for inspiration to arise.  Just as economic and legal analysis, and our procedures, can take us most of the way, I think to go that extra mile, to rise to the new challenges, we should invest in opportunities where we can have a better chance at finding new insights.  

So, what does that mean?   I’d focus on getting out of the way of ourselves, and then make more room to pause and reflect.  

We could start by removing some obvious impediments.   My favourite TED lecture is “Why Work Doesn’t Happen at Work”.   Its premise is that when you ask people – particularly those in open plan offices – where they do their best work, they say they come in early or stay late, wear headphones, take the problem or reading home, or even go to a noisy Costa – anywhere but the office.   Why?  Because an office is built for people to come together, to spark off one another, finding insights and making decisions … but it is a distracting place as well.  

For many, an office is a difficult place to get any actual thinking done; our schedules and meetings chop our day up, and there’s always being time for ‘just a quick question’.   If we are to stand back after a case, or during a project, and reflect on what the key issues are, let alone learn some insights, we must insert the space and time for that, deliberately.   It helps to have a physical infrastructure and managerial acceptance that allows those more spaces to exist and encourage their use, as well as flexi-working.   But individually we each need the self-discipline and confidence to work how, when and where we can be at our best for the task at hand.  

‘Slow the slide’ to speed up

How can this make us faster though?    There’s a terrific rowing book called “Will it make the boat faster?”.     It identifies problems and solutions that apply off the water as well.    (Most of these were picked up by the Team Sky cycling team too.)   It’s all about eliminating what slows you down; what checks your pace and flow.   So, you make boats and crews more streamlined, you lose the deadweight, and you have a burning focus on marginal improvements, for big gains.  

But as an individual, a rower must also make sure they’re not their own worst enemy.   Banging back and forth is not the way to go forward.   To prevent that in rowing, we call this ‘slowing the slide’.   After each powerful stroke, you must glide slowly on your seat back to the footplate, and let the boat run, rather than rushing back and checking its momentum.   This takes a lot of discipline, and seems counter-intuitive as you increase the stroke rate.   But if you don’t do it, you are just jerking about, and not moving forward as quick as you could.  

So, how can we ‘slow the slide’ deliberately in our own workplaces?   Perhaps we could focus a bit less on turning documents around rapidly and copying the planet.   Could we do more to let an argument run, and allow teams the space and time to get their work done and for decision-makers to consider their points?   Are ten drafts of a paper circulated widely always the way forward?   Wide cc lists cover backsides.  Bashing drafts back and forth shows ‘activity’.  Comments show involvement.  But does this always move us along?    And comments without direction or focus or specific suggestion are a drag at best.   Worse still is when someone insists on signing off on every iteration of near-identical drafts, showing authority and ‘taking responsibility’, but becoming a bottleneck.  Do we always need weekly catch-up meetings?  They take time, involve an opportunity cost, and if the senior staff aren’t read-in can result in snap judgements, or needless extra work. 

And managers, like good coxes, should remember that inducing panic doesn’t improve pace.   Exaggerating problems when speaking upstream -  to then look like a saviour when they don’t arise - is just plain irritating, demoralises staff and rocks the boat.  

Fortunately, the above behaviour is rare at the CMA, but it happens and can be disruptive.   And obviously, we can tweak my suggestions depending on the difficulty of the work, quality of the team, and urgency of the issue at hand.   But big improvements might well result from the marginal changes of slowing down, focussing on what needs to be done and said, or what comment is necessary and helpful, and trusting teams more.   Let the work run – likely faster as well - and with a lost less frustration.

Further, space is where the strength is built.    When runners do an ‘interval workout’, they run hard for a short distance, take a break, and hit repeat multiple times.   But we don’t call these ‘sprint workouts’, or ‘hard runs’.   That is not where the benefit comes from.   That comes in the ‘intervals’, in the rest periods.   That is where the work is consolidated.   And it is the same with training at anything, you only get stronger and faster and better if you rest between pushes and let the muscle, brain, or sinew recover, consolidate and get stronger.  

Our work doesn’t involve a lot of heavy breathing and it shouldn’t.   None of us are assured by colleagues who clomp about, hair flying, flipping pages, trying to catch up, but just creating more work for everyone else.  And when they try to multi-task in meetings, head-down stabbing at gadgets, they’re not really on the same page and so unable to exercise restraint or judgment.  If something on their screen is so important, do they even need to be at the meeting; what are they contributing?   A one hour meeting of ten people, after all, is a ten-hour meeting (and can feel like it too).   And such multi-tasking attempts are disrespectful (and even demoralising) to colleagues.   Show some respect.   Make sure your presence is necessary and then be present.   Pay attention.   Focus.   Add value.   

Insights groups

We could also encourage ‘intervals’ where related work is discussed by very focussed knowledgeable groups.   I don’t mean End of Project Reviews.   I mean focussing deliberately on consolidating insights from related cases or projects.   Small groups from similar workstreams, all read-in, could come together to identify analytical connections and share insights, and then write it up.  Yes, we do this to some extent, but not enough, and usually we farm it out externally, to ‘let delivery focus on delivery’.  But sometimes we should get our own experts in the room, who have lived all the trials of a related cases, and who can readily identify what can be learned from one another and applied more broadly, or what could just be a helpful warning to others.    It would all be learning from our doing.    It would certainly save time and make us more agile when similar issues arise in later cases.  

And there’s plenty of opportunity – perhaps even low-hanging fruit - where we or others have done a lot of work already.   Think online verticals, think algorithms, think information exchange, think multi-sided platforms, think AEC, think innovation theories of harm in mergers, the list goes on and on.  We could keep such papers internal, or parts could end up in policy papers for external debate.     None of this would bind independent decisionmakers, or create limiting precedent.   It could serve as a guide, it would be informative, it might let us finally notice something just below the surface, ‘a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it’ - that we can almost grasp or agree on but just haven’t allowed the time to yet.   

The irony is: our stakeholders already think we do this; on every difficult topic, they assume there is a ‘CMA view’.   So, businesses and advisors tend to over-interpret what we say or do, and draw odd conclusions about our ‘view’ of a practice.   By collecting our own insights of course, sometimes we may never reach a definitive shared view.   Or such might not be appropriate.   Mostly, we would take the learning, but still proceed case-by-case from the evidence and first principles.  But in the process, we would end up doing less wheel-reinvention, and could stop arguing in circles sooner.   We might even see more actual evolution and then apply it more quickly in our cases.

I’m not trying to turn us into a campus.   I just think we are leaving some opportunities on the table and a little investment in some insights work would reap rewards in better decisions, quicker workstreams, and more job satisfaction too.   We could even (heavens!) take our internal learnings, develop a view, and give more guidance to markets and industry.  In doing so, we would also benefit, by focussing down and narrowing the entrance of our own case and projects pipeline, thus contributing to a virtuous cycle of better targeted, more efficient and more effective intervention.  

So, take a breath once in a while, look up from what you're doing, and let those little thoughts bubble up some times ... and make room and time to follow up on them.