Comments on: Making Slow Decisions

By: They cannot be able cool to cause… you? | Trent Dalton's Blog

They cannot be able cool to cause… you? | Trent Dalton's Blog — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:04:22 +0000

[…] Decisions by committee […]

By: You Can’t Create Cool…can you?

You Can’t Create Cool…can you? — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:49:39 +0000

[…] Decisions by committee […]

By: You Can’t Create Cool…can you? | Trent Dalton's Blog

You Can’t Create Cool…can you? | Trent Dalton's Blog — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:58:49 +0000

[…] Decisions by committee […]

By: You Can’t Create Cool…can you? | Money Making Business

You Can’t Create Cool…can you? | Money Making Business — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 07:01:19 +0000

[…] Decisions by committee […]

By: You Can’t Create Cool…can you? - Small Business Branding

You Can’t Create Cool…can you? - Small Business Branding — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:57:03 +0000

[…] Decisions by committee […]

By: " Positive Work Environments: How One Company is Putting Theory into Practice " on Positive Psychology News Daily

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 02:05:58 +0000

[…] The Physical Location My first interview was with the Human Resource Manager, Francesca Voltarel. I began by asking her what made H-Farm so special. Although she said Italy has a lot of technology incubator companies, what makes H-Farm unique is “we have created an environment that is very human and informal. Our CEO, Riccardo Donadon, chose this place in the middle of the countryside because he wanted to link high tech thinking with the slow life of the country. In the city it is rush, rush, rush. Everything is grey and you lose contact with the human aspect. [Here] we don’t have the stress and we believe there is a link to innovation. To be creative you need time to relax and work around beauty and nature.” (See Emma Judge’s May article on how “providing distractions at work in terms of the physical environment” can actually facilitate better decision making, too.) […]

By: Emma Judge

Emma Judge — Thu, 24 May 2007 12:46:29 +0000

Hi Gigi,

These are all great things to do - distractions which also encourage physical health, creativity and freindships are all good for productivity and well-being.

I’d hope, though, that organisations could do even more - in order for people to make better quality decisions the way decisions are made needs to change. Rather than getting faster with blackberries and email ensuring immediate responses, they may need to get slower !

By: Gigi

Gigi — Wed, 23 May 2007 21:53:20 +0000

Emma, you made me think about my good friend who works at Google. They provide many ‘distractions’ that I believe help transform the work environment and prove fruitful for creative thinking due to enabling the unconcsious mind to play. They include: Massages, free healthy food, colorful atmosphere (e.g. lava lamps, blue walls, red panels, bouncy balls as chairs), open floor plan so you’re exposed to numerous people in a very flat modeled organization. And, then there’s a game room with tvs, ping pong, fooze ball and a lego room where you can design and keep your lego creations. Plus there are the physical aspects, basketball court, swiming pool, gym, etc.

By: Emma Judge

Emma Judge — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:50:19 +0000

I think you make a really important point - the unconscious almost becomes devalued, certainly in business circles as it seen as ‘non-rational’, not following rules, acting on instinct or intuition - Dijksterhuis’s work helps to redress that balance.

By: Dave Shearon

Dave Shearon — Fri, 18 May 2007 11:12:17 +0000

Nice post, Emma! Recently I gave a presentation with Bill Robertson to a group of school superintendents. Bill had a wonderful visual of a rider and an elephant swimming, and he used it to talk about Haidt’s metaphor. As he was doing it, I realized that most of the participants were seeing the rider as “reason” or “thinking” and the elephant as “emotion” or “feeling.” I checked and that was what they were thinking. So, I used Dijksterhuis’ work to explain that the elephant also does a great deal of our analytical work also. And, as always, the elephant is fast, powerful, virtually effortless, and mostly invisible to the rider!