Practically Slow
I posted an article on rushing to failure on my business blog yesterday. Why are so few businesses able to step back and consider action before rushing forward?
Failing fast and failing often has its merits. What we call failure can be just part of a natural learning process. Slowing down lets us consider and incubate ideas. Many of us are more interested in action that can be measured. We learn to do things fast, but creativity has its own agenda with regard to time.
Failure is, of course, a judgment. It assumes there is a defined goal and there is only one right answer. It’s worth reexamining the notion of failure as a negative.
I think it was Peter Cook who said, I learned from my mistakes. I learned that I can repeat every one of them.
There are those wise people who suggest that they can learn from other people’s mistakes. But situations do have a way of being more complex than they at first seem. Oversimplification is a sort of blindness.
I recently attended the summer institute for somatic psychology in Berkeley with Stanley Keleman. I won’t go into details here, but he said that the formative approach has no failure quotient. This is useful notion for me. It is about growth.
Failure is a necessary part of learning. A child learning to walk doesn’t just give up after a few tries. In the same way, those of us who operate micro-businesses have to constantly learn. The ability to slow down, step back, and consider our situation is valuable. It gives us perspective.
I write for a living and help small businesses get clear about what they are doing. I often encounter those who are driven by anxiety and fear. This always shows up as rushing. It’s hard sometimes to get those I serve to slow down. But many do get it; and they benefit.
Doing less, slowly, seems like a joke, but it is of immense practical value. Slow may be counterintuitive but it is wonderful to work with those that, “get it.”
It’s funny that we are even in a position to say that “slow is counterintuitive.” It’s true, but it’s perhaps worth examining why it’s true. It’s based on the premise that more is better than less. And what is the root of this? Does it go back to a biological imperative or is it a more recent (evolutionarily speaking) Capitalist construct?
I can’t say I know more than half a diddly about business, but I have read a little around the topic of evolution/natural selection. I would say therefore that I know perhaps three-quarters of a diddly about this topic. Within that three-quarters, I have learnt the vastly oversimplified generalisation that different species do things in very different ways. Species A might have “decided” that it makes sense (in terms of the passing on of one’s genes and so forth) to have as many babies as possible, thus increasing the likelihood that, however fragile each individual progeny may be, at least a few of them will survive long enough to reproduce. Species B, on the other hand, might have “decided” that it makes sense (for the same reasons) to put less energy into reproducing, but to create a small number of relatively strong babies, or, on account of their smaller numbers, to be able to look after them for as long as possible until they are able to go out into the world and look after themselves. Species A might be a frog. Species B might be… ooh, I dunno… that little known mammal known as Homo sapiens.
And another thing…
Humans are not leopards. Nor are they swifts or sharks. They aren’t sloths either, but they are certainly not the speediest animals on the block. We, and our ancestors, have however made up for this fact by putting our brains and our opposable thumbs to use on making axes, spears, houses and iPods.
So is slow counterintuitive? Is it an instinct buried deep in our genes that we must move faster, produce more, create huge quantities of babies, knowing that it doesn’t matter if most of them die? I would say not! We were never meant to be this fast or to do so much! Our very genes are crying out for us to slow down, do less and think before we act! It’s about time we listened to the wisdom of our tree-dwelling predecessors…
Christopher,
I followed the link to Stanley Keleman’s Formative Approach. I tried to understand it but I had no luck. Do you know of any clear English explanation of the concepts?
It looks like a very useful thing to understand and maybe it would be a good thing if you do go into some detail about it. Though not as much detail as Stanley Keleman.
Gerhi Janse van Vuuren
Gerhi:
Stanley Keleman’s work doesn’t lend itself to immediate understanding, because it is a different way of being in the world. If you want to understand more, I suggest starting with Embodying Experience, The USA Body Psychotherapy Journal Volume 6 Number 1 2007, and Myth & the Body, with Joseph Campbell. All three can be purchased through http://www.CenterPress.com and you can purchase the first two on Amazon.
I am currently talking to a group that are using these ideas as a way of managing that unknown terrain called the future. So I may well be writing about these ideas myself soon.
Christopher,
Thanks for the reply. I won’t be able to go book buying at the moment so I will wait to see if you write anything on it in future. In the meantime I have found the following article that does shed a lot of light on Keleman’s work:
http://www.alexander-technique-london.co.uk/alexander_technique_articles.php?article=16
I especially find this quote interesting:
‘The basic adventure of life is how a person organises the form of his own existence, disorganises what is no longer relevant, and generates new experiences to become the person that he lives and not the person that he imagines he has to be.’ (Keleman, 1989, p. i)
I find that to be quite a powerful statement as is. Reading it I realise that that is what I have been unconsciously busy with my whole life. Bringing that back to your article about failure - failure would be one way to generate new experiences and to ‘disorganise’ irrelevant experiences.
Gerhi Janse van Vuuren
Gerhi,
Thank you for this link. If this interests you, I would recommend the books. I don’t pretend to be able to explain this stuff without a great deal of effort. And VMCE (voluntary muscular cortical effort) is required to organize a somatic shape.