The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter and Live Better in a Fast World. Carl Honore

thing that could have happened to them in the long run – in sparking creativity, for instance – even if it felt like a disaster at the time.’ Failure Week has altered the atmosphere in the school. Instead of mollycoddling pupils, teachers feel more comfortable telling them point-blank when they have given a wrong answer, thus making it easier to search for a better one. The girls are taking greater risks, too, pursuing more daring lines of inquiry in the classroom and entering creative writing competitions in larger numbers. Members of the school debating club are deploying more adventurous arguments and winning more competitions. ‘Maybe the most important thing the Week gave us is a language to talk about failure as something not to avoid but as an essential part of learning, improving and solving problems,’ says Hanbury. ‘If one girl is upset by a poor mark, another might now make a friendly joke about it or say something like, “OK, you failed, but what can you learn from it?”’

      Most workplaces are in dire need of a similar cultural shift. Think of all the lessons that go unlearned, all the problems left to fester, all the bad feelings churned up, all the time, energy and money wasted, thanks to the human instinct to cover up mistakes. Now think of how much more efficient – not to mention agreeable – your workplace would be if every error could be a spur to working smarter. Instead of muddling along, you could revolutionise your office or factory from the bottom up.

      There are steps we can all take to harness the mea culpa and learn from our mistakes. Schedule a daily Clinton moment when you say, ‘I was wrong’ – and then find out why. When you mess up at work, pinpoint one or two lessons to be gleaned from the mishap and then quickly own up. When others mess up, quell the temptation to scoff or gloat and instead help them to spot the silver lining. Start a conversation in your company, school or family about how admitting mistakes can inspire creative leaps. Reinforce that message by using feel-good terms such as ‘gift’ or ‘bonus’ to describe the uncovering of helpful errors and by pinning up quotes such as this from Henry T. Ford: ‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.’

      It also helps to create a shared space, such as a web forum or a suggestions book, for airing mistakes. Borrowing an idea from Toyota, Patounas has put up a Communications Board in his squadron headquarters where any crew member can call attention to a problem – and every case is promptly investigated and addressed. ‘It’s very popular already and you see the engineers and pilots gathered round it,’ says Patounas. ‘It’s tangible and something you can put your arms round.’

      It certainly helps to know that our errors seldom look as bad to others as we imagine. We have a natural tendency to overestimate how much people notice or care about our gaffes. Psychologists call this the ‘spotlight effect’. You may feel mortified to discover you attended a big meeting with laddered tights or egg on your tie, but the chances are hardly anyone else noticed. In one study at Cornell University, students were asked to walk into a room wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt, a social kiss of death for any self-respecting hipster. While the subjects nearly died of embarrassment, only 23 per cent of the people in the room even clocked the cheesy crooner.

      If owning up to a mistake is seldom as bad as we fear, however, it is only the first step towards a Slow Fix. The next is taking the time to work out exactly how and why we erred in the first place.

CHAPTER THREE

      THINK HARD: Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter

       Don’t just do something, stand there.

      White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (Disney version)

      If asked to design an office that could make staff look forward to Monday morning, you might come up with something like the headquarters of Norsafe. Every window looks onto a snapshot of bucolic bliss. Clapboard houses nestle in the forest, small boats bob alongside wooden piers, gulls float across a clear sky. In the late morning, the sunshine turns this narrow waterway in southern Norway into a strip of shimmering silver.

      For many years the company’s balance sheet looked similarly idyllic. Norsafe has been building boats since 1903 in a country where boating is a serious business. With more coastline than the United States, this long, slender nation on the northern edge of Europe has always looked to the sea. Even today, one in seven Norwegians owns some sort of watercraft. But looks can be deceiving. Not so long ago Norsafe was a firm on the verge of a nervous breakdown, where nobody looked forward to coming in to work on Monday morning.

      The company manufactures highly specialised lifeboats for oil rigs and supertankers. Enclosed like a submarine, and painted a vivid, regulation orange, they can drop into the sea, with a full load of passengers, from a height of nearly 40 metres. In the mid-2000s, as the global economy boomed, orders flooded in from around the world, tripling Norsafe’s turnover. Yet behind the top line numbers, the firm, like Toyota, had lost control of its inner workings and was struggling to keep up. Deadlines slipped, design faults passed unnoticed through the production plant, customer complaints went unanswered. With lawsuits piling up and profits plunging, the design, manufacturing and sales teams were at each other’s throats. Everyone knew there was a problem, but no one knew how to fix it.

      The turning point came in 2009, when an organisational consultant named Geir Berthelsen delivered a pitch at the Norsafe headquarters. With his shaven head and watchful eyes, the 48-year-old Norwegian exudes the calm of a Zen monk. Since the early 1990s his consultancy firm, Magma, has been mending broken companies around the world with his version of the Slow Fix. Whatever the country or industry, the first step in his recovery plan is always the same: take time to work out the real reason things are going wrong. ‘Most companies are in a hurry, so they just firefight with quick fixes that only address the symptoms instead of the problem itself,’ he says. ‘To identify what is really going wrong, you first have to get a full picture of a company in slow motion, you have to do like Toyota and ask why, why and why, you have to slow down long enough to analyse and understand.’

      That is a neat summary of the next ingredient of the Slow Fix: taking the time to think hard about the problem to arrive at the right diagnosis. When asked what he would do if given one hour to save the world, Albert Einstein answered: ‘I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.’ Most of us do the exact opposite. Think of your last visit to the GP. Chances are the appointment lasted no more than a few minutes and you struggled to say everything you wanted to. One study found that doctors let patients explain their complaint for 23 seconds before interrupting. Is it any wonder so many illnesses are misdiagnosed?

      By the same token, you seldom uncover the real reason an organisation is failing by reading an email, convening a meeting or skimming the annual report. When things go wrong, as we saw earlier, people usually shift blame and shy away from saying anything that might cause them to lose face or hurt their colleagues’ feelings. In a world that prizes action over reflection, and when the clock is ticking, it takes nerve to spend 55 minutes thinking. Yet, from business to medicine to everything in between, a little inaction can be just what the doctor ordered. Some problems are no more than a bit of passing turbulence, or a red herring. Others will find their own solution if left alone. But even for problems needing intervention, inaction combined with deep thought and shrewd observation can be the first step to a smart fix. That is why doctors treating unusual conditions will often spend days, weeks, even months running tests, watching how the symptoms evolve, ordering more analysis, before finally arriving at a diagnosis and starting treatment. ‘To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world,’ said Oscar Wilde, ‘the most difficult and the most intellectual.’

      That is why the Magma consultancy firm spends a long time in the trenches, working alongside employees, watching, listening, learning, gaining trust, reading between the lines. ‘We always start at the bottom, on the factory floor or wherever the work is done, and live there as long as it takes to understand everything about how all the systems operate and how all the people act within those systems,’ says Berthelsen. ‘We have to discover the right questions before we can figure out the right answers. Only then can we really fix things.’

      After a lengthy tour of duty, the Magma team