FAST Is The Only Way Forward

When you think back to your days in high-school, do you remember when your teacher gave you an assignment or an essay? She would provide you a specific task of completing an essay on a defined topic and ask you to complete it by a specific deadline. In practice it would like this: “I want you to write an essay and hand it in on the 30th.”

In the absence of any further information, several questions would immediately arise:

• Where do I begin?
• What do I start with?
• Am I in the right mood?

Given the situation, a disconnect forms between theory and reality. In theory, one can assume that the essay, given the one-month-long delivery time, should take about a month to finish. In reality, as we all know, little will happen until the night before the essay is due.

The initiation of a daunting task without a clearly defined set of steps might seem so overwhelming that thinking about the task is even more exhausting than actually completing it. Naturally, as the deadline looms ever-closer, the urgency increases to the point that eventually, by hook or by crook, the essay is started and then finished in record time and under a great deal of stress. The outcome, as we can all attest to, was rarely ideal.

What if your teacher had set the terms of the essay writing a little differently: “Today is Monday and the essay is due on Wednesday morning. I would start with an hour of research on the subject and expect it should take you no longer than four hours to write the essay.”

By contracting the time to deadline, providing an explanation of the output, and offering a clear starting point, the teacher frames an implicit expectation for both the effort and the outcome. If the teacher is only giving you two days and a time-limit of four hours, the task couldn’t possibly be that complex or difficult. You might even be compelled to start right away. A simple reframe changes the entire perception around the task, along with our actions.

What's the difference?

It’s all in the phrasing. There is a curiosity embedded in human cognition that psychologists call Parkinson’s Law. The law is based on the idea that the perceived complexity of a task expands to fill the time allotted. Or in English, how hard you think a task is increases according to how much time you were given to complete it.

Whilst it should be obvious that length of time and task complexity are totally unrelated, our brains are simply wired to think in this way.

The collective experience of our innovation advisory across the public and private sector has revealed that, left unchecked, Parkinson’s Law plays out every single time. Bold innovation initiatives addressing bold challenges over year-long time scales. And at the end? Little accomplished until weeks or days before the Big Deadline.

The inhibitory force of this counterproductive outcome is unstructured, incorrectly incentivized decision-making.

Without a robust, informed decision-making process, individuals and teams will take a long time to make a decision. A correct decision is more likely due to luck, which may run out in time for the next decision. A wrong decision is punished. Such conditions breed a culture of inaction, with over-thinking and under-doing becoming the unspoken mission statement of the organization.

Across the public sector, overly complex academic frameworks simply do not map to tangible innovation outcomes and systems that reward the number of ‘innovative’ ideas, with no way of measuring their organizational value.

Across the private sector, organisations with legacy business models implemented by employees with little or no skin in the game are disincentivized to act against the external forces of organisation-crushing disruption.

The Genesis of ‘Think Fast, Decide Faster’

In our innovation advisory we have developed a number of practices to address this challenge. For situations requiring immediate results and facing high uncertainty, necessity and urgency led to the creation of a process called Think Fast, Decide Faster. It combines elements of the scientific method, design thinking, and engineering sprints into a battle-tested and repeatable process.

TFDF short-circuits the decision-making process by defining seemingly impossible targets and delivering them successfully with short deadlines. The process temporarily lifts the cortisol level and activating our 'fight or flight' mechanism in a fun, playful surrounding, leading to a measurable increase in effort and output. There is no time to collect more information than what we already have, and there is no time to procrastinate. We simply think, and we decide. And we have fun doing so.

Creating Strategic Urgency

One of the concepts governing TFDF is based on what we call Strategic Urgency. In our work advising and delivering long-term strategic innovation outcomes for organizations, we wanted to circumvent the natural tendency to hold off on making key decisions for fear of being wrong. The antidote is a series of rapid brainstorming and decision-making cycles with an opacity of data.

Strategy Urgency replaces ‘thinking by thinking’ with ‘thinking by doing’

Each decision is based on iterative and incremental learnings gained through cycles of actions taken, leading to an end result that is an order of magnitude better than the conventional practice, as shown in the diagram to the right. As it turns out, when we're solving complex innovation changes and in the absence of best-practices, the only way to solve them is by doing them.

We're Hardwired To Avoid Uncertainty

The limbic system, the oldest and most dominant part of the brain, operates on autopilot. The human brain is hardwired to avoid uncertainty and we procrastinate or put off a decision when we are not in the right mood. The wire-cutter, if you will, is playfulness. As 2010 Nobel Prize winner Andre Geim said in a 2014 Slate interview, “Playfulness lets us withstand enormous uncertainty.”

One might argue that a mental state for effective decision-making can only arise through playfulness. In fact, whether it is a C-level executive strategy alignment session, the latest insights on Big Data and AI in partnership with Dubai Future Academy, or one of our Think Fast Decide Faster sessions for a cross-departmental brainstorming, while on the surface it seems like people are having fun, the output and effort is well beyond the conventional practice.

Where business abhors uncertainty, science embraces it, and TFDF allows organisations to explore their challenges through a new lens. Radically disruptive solutions are simply a welcome by-product in a new way of thinking.

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Thank you to Think Fast Decide Faster program co-creator Cheyenne Kamran for his contributions and edits.

Dr. Petar Stojanov is the Managing Partner of Ebtikaar, a boutique innovation advisory and public policy think-tank with a track record of designing and deploying innovation management systems, transforming cultures, and enabling disruptive thinking and disruptive doing in industries as diverse as mobility and real estate. Ebtikaar currently has offices in Dubai and Melbourne.