Mind Wandering Your Way to a Client Deal

This book excerpt is from a chapter titled "Daydreaming and Mind-wandering as Creative Tools" of?my award winning?book "IN/ACTION: Rethinking the Path to Results", available to buy online where you buy books. You can read more about me?here?and more about the book?here.

Herre van Kaam is an entrepreneur and a Dutch native. He is the co-owner of a consultancy that advises health care businesses on transformation and innovation. Pitching to clients for new business is part and parcel of his life; it’s where the rubber meets the road. He accidentally discovered mind-wandering as a technique back in 2012. This technique now forms a part of his and his team’s approach to work.

Van Kaam was scheduled to make a pitch to the board of a potential client along with three other team members. The meeting was at the client site. They were to be the first of three competing teams making the pitch. The meeting was in Kampen, Netherlands, a two-hour train ride from his hometown. Because of the train schedules, he arrived an hour early and decided to go for a walk and take in the new city. He didn’t practice or rehearse the pitch. He just walked around letting his mind wander.

By the time he got to the meeting, he was relaxed and feeling good. As was typical, the meeting opened with everyone sit- ting around the table, clients on one side, pitching team on the other. After introductions were over, van Kaam noticed the coffee pot was empty. He got up to make himself coffee and asked others if they wanted some. A few took him up on his offer. Normally, he would be tense in a client meet- ing, deliver a rehearsed pitch, and limit his interaction to answering questions from the client. A consultant getting up to make coffee for everyone, including the host, was unusual behavior. The pitch was on how to encourage autonomy among the rank and file of that organization. He wanted to demonstrate what that might look like, so he took up the “job” of making much-needed coffee for everyone instead of waiting for the host to do so. In the meeting, instead of rush- ing into answers, he chose to answer many of the questions with additional clarifying questions. In engaging with him, the clients started answering their own queries. He would then wrap up the discussion with a summary. He thought the walk relaxed him and influenced his way of engaging with others in the meeting.

Van Kaam’s team didn’t win the pitch. But the board of the client team asked if he would consider joining the winning team. They didn’t want his team; they wanted him. This was a highly unusual suggestion. He was part of an ad hoc team of individual consultants who had been put together to make the pitch. While he was a free agent, he didn’t think it appropriate to jump ship. He floated the client’s suggestion to his current team as well the winning team. They all agreed van Kaam should join the team who won, which he did.

Taking a walk and doing nothing is now part of his meet- ing prep. He doesn’t mentally rehearse or prep during these walks. He lets his mind wander between things going on at home or work. Of course, a walk is not always possible. “Sometimes I don’t have time. And I always regret it.” He has an interesting way of describing his experience of a meeting when he is relaxed versus not.

“When I am relaxed [in a meeting], I feel like we are sitting at a roundtable. Everyone is in their chair. But I can virtually sit in their chair. I can feel what they are feeling. I can guess what they are going to say. When I am not relaxed, I feel like I am in the center of the meeting, as if I am in the eye of the hurricane. I become attached to what I am saying, not what others are saying. It becomes about me against them. Sometimes these meetings get tense. And [if I am also tense] I can no longer take control of the meeting. I only know this is happening because my body constricts and my heart rate jumps. I know it’s happening because my body tells me that; my mind doesn’t tell me that.”

What does he do when that happens? “I call it out. I say that something is wrong in the way we are discussing and that it doesn’t feel good. Maybe we should take a break. When I say it out loud, others usually acknowledge it. Everyone can feel the tension, but someone has to call it out.” Being relaxed makes him more connected and empathetic to everyone else in the meeting. Taking a walk and allowing his mind to wander before critical meetings allows him to be more relaxed.

Van Kaam’s wife is a friend of mine and describes him as someone who is “very good at doing nothing.” I had previously read about a Dutch concept called “niksen,” which sounded similar to how his wife described him. I asked van Kaam about it.

“Niksen is a funny word. It’s a verb, which means doing nothing. It’s as if you are doing something but that something is nothing. When someone asks, ‘What are you doing this afternoon?’ I say, ‘Ik ga niksen,’ which means I don’t have any plans. And I don’t want to make any plans.” He laughed as he said, “It makes it clear that you are not invited to my plans of doing nothing.”

I was reminded of a word that was part of my vocabulary growing up: “timepass.” It is a slang in Mumbai indicating hanging around doing nothing of consequence. It would go something like this. A friend calls, “What are you doing today?” Me: “Nothing, just doing timepass.”

By the time I grew up, timepass had become a thing of the past. Hanging around doing nothing, especially when there was a laundry list of things to do, often led to a guilt trip. Turns out I am not alone in feeling the guilt.

Even though he knows a walk helps him engage much better in meetings, van Kaam also experiences feelings of guilt. “I always felt guilty about walking in the park for an hour before a meeting. My co-owner used to ask me, ‘Herre, you are taking a walk in the park. Who are you billing that to?’ But I felt like I needed to do that; it’s part of how I work. I told my co-owner I would take a walk on my own time. But now I notice others are starting to do it. It’s becoming a habit in my company. We have also switched to fee-based billing away from hourly billing.”

Whether we call it mind-wandering, timepass, or niksen, neuroscience research explains how and why these non-activities can often lead to creative and breakthrough ideas.?

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