Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002--an
astonishing accomplishment considering his background is in the field of psychology. In Thinking,
Fast and Slow Kahneman explores the relationship between the many
intuitive, automatic choices we make and the judgments that require a slower
process of thinking. He dubs these two modes of cognition “System 1” and “System
2”, respectively.
For instance, if I ask my teenage son to add 2 and 2, he would quickly
respond: 4. His response would be automatic; he would answer without having to think about it. He
would use System 1.
When he was first learning to add, however, this simple
computation would have required the use of System 2, a slower process that
involves counting—which, at very young ages, requires a great deal of mental
effort.
To simulate the use of System 2 for most adults, I ask you
to try the following exercise that’s taken from Kahneman’s book:
First, think of four non-sequential digits—simple whole numbers.
Got it? My four digits are 3-2-9-5
Now, click on this link: metronomeonline.com.
Seriously, this is no joke. You will use this metronome to
keep time for our exercise.
Select tempo 88.
With the metronome going, we are going to play “Add 1”. This
means that on each beat, you are to add 1 to each digit you originally conjured,
saying it out loud.
So, if my starting point is 3-2-9-5, I would say 4-3-0-6
over the course of 4 consecutive beats.
You are allowed to wait two beats after completing the set
of four new digits, and then you must add one more to your new number. So…after 4-3-0-6 I would wait two beats and then say,
in tempo, 5-4-1-7.
Keep this up for as long as you can. Keeping the tempo is
important. If you break tempo, the game is over. Also, if you break the chain of correct answers, the game is over.
Ready? Go.
Or not. J
I suppose most readers did not even try the exercise because
the instructions themselves serve as an example of “slow System 2 thinking.” In
fact, I would venture to say that 99 percent of the people who read this post
did not even open up metronomeonline as instructed! Too much effort for a silly
game…
For those who did try it, I would wager you were unable to
keep it up for more than 20 seconds. (I asked someone to do this the other day
and they would not even try. Just thinking
about it gave them a headache!) If you
were able to sustain the game for longer than 20 seconds, try the game again as
“Add 3”. Or, better still, try the game with five or six digits. Or, even better: try the game at a faster tempo. That should thoroughly
humiliate you. J
The moral: it is possible to successfully play “Add 1” or “Add
3” for a long duration as long as we are
not rushed in playing it. If we remove the restriction of the metronome, it
becomes easier to think clearly and accurately. In a rushed context—when we are
forced to think quickly—we tend to think wrongly or not at all.
Some things require slower thinking. Play is one of those
things.
Often, play is thought of as a System 1/Quick process. We
correlate it to intuition and spontaneity but a fuller form of play is actually
a slower process.
Some games impose a time limit, however. Rummikub is an
example of this. I find it difficult to manipulate the always-diverse array of
number sequences and sets in creative ways.
Boggle, on the other hand, is
easier to play because I have learned some automatic permutations of certain
letter combinations, which automatically increases my word count. In other
words, playing Boggle for me is mostly a System 1 activity. It requires very
little use of my System 2 reservoir.
For example, I have learned that unless they appear in a straight line, the letters T, A and E can always be
reconfigured in Boggle to produce three words: “tea”, “eat” and “ate”. Rat, art and tar also work this way. Writing those three
words down in the space of 1.5 seconds has become a System 1 function for me. I
don’t even have to think about it. Finding the five and six letter words proves
more difficult for me (whereas my mother always likes to look for those longer
words first—which is why I always beat her!).
At any rate, I point this out to say that play applied in
other contexts usually requires the discipline of patience if we are going to
tap into all it has to offer.
In my experience as a team leader and team builder I am
always struck by how people respond when we try to make arrangements to play
together so as to make it possible to develop truly collaborative ideas.
Most teams do not want to take the time to play, experiment,
imagine. But, when they slow down and take this extra (seemingly “wasteful”) time,
they are always glad they did it!
The problem is, Kahneman argues in his book, we rarely slow down to do this kind of thinking. I happen to agree with him.
We think, “If we take time
to do this and nothing comes of it, we will have wasted a whole bunch of time!” It
takes a certain measure of trust and risk to slow down.
In the case of de Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats, I wonder…
1. What percentage of working teams know the substance of
the 6 Thinking Hats?
and
2. How many teams regularly discipline themselves to
actually use the 6 Hats in a week-in, week-out fashion for sustained periods of
time?
Again, if I were to place a bet on these two questions, I
would wager the numbers would be very low.
This kind of ideological play takes time and as we get older
we access System 2 much less than when we were children. What used to be a
System 2 function now becomes a System 1 function—so as we grow older we end
up using System 2 less and less. How tragic!
The adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” can be
broken if we “old dogs” can learn to take time and remain open to “learning new
tricks”. Basically, we need to be
willing to be kids again: play slowly.
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