With busyness declared the enemy of success, Jan Hills asks: could unconscious thinking be the next business trend?
Most people I know wear their busyness as a badge of honour. But in 2014 a number of high profile people declared busyness as the enemy. Celebrities were vocal in their support for taking time out for your own wellbeing. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington felt so strongly she published her own testament to slowing down, managing wellbeing and achieving success in her book Thrive.
Huffington says we wrongly equate long hours and hard work with success. As a result she argues people are actually less productive, burned out, and disengaged. Ironically, we are less creative, and innovative because of our busyness.
Neuroscience can add weight to this argument. For example, think about the impact a busy mind has on problem solving?
Solving problems is something most of us are paid to do. Now step back and think about what we are actually employed to achieve. For most of us in senior HR roles I doubt it's about running around fire-fighting or holding the hand of managers who want your help.
When I work with HR professionals on what their purpose is at work, the answer is always a high level strategic contribution that moves the organisation towards its goals. It's never about fire-fighting. One of the features of a clear purpose is it directs what not to do as much as what to spend time on. The 'what not to do' is often what keeps people busy. If you are clear about your purpose you are probably employed to do quite a bit of thinking and it's really hard to do good quality thinking when you are overwhelmed just doing stuff. Our continual state of busyness prevents us from entering the loose, associative mental state in which unexpected connections and insights occur. Research by neuroscientist, Mark Beeman shows the best way to make connections and to create insight is with a quiet mind and a happy state.
Beeman found that although we may appear idle while daydreaming or mind wandering, the brain is actually working hard, tapping greater mental resources than are used during more analytical or conscious thinking. This unfocused “default mode” allows us to make connections in new areas of the brain. When activated these new connections enable us to see an old problem in a new light.
If we never allow this kind of downtime - because we’re always running from one meeting to another, making calls and checking email - connections and insights don't materialise.
“At work we expect people to pay attention, to focus,” Beeman says. “To focus on one thing, you have to suppress a lot of other things. Sometimes that’s good. But sometimes a solution to a problem can only come from allowing in apparently unrelated information, from giving time to the quieter ideas in the background.”
His research suggests we need to make room for two distinctly different kinds of mental activity: the directed, focused attention usually expected of us at work but which is actually only sustainable for short periods, and a more diffused and unfocused state in which we’re thinking about nothing in particular usually described as mind-wandering. Shifting between these two modes is the best way to quality problem solving.
Ask anyone, where they get their best ideas and my guess is it won't be sitting at their desk thinking. It will be when their mind is unfocused; in the shower, walking, or at the gym.
But the really powerful idea behind this science is that this apparently unfocused time is not wasted time. It is in fact when the unconscious parts of the mind are solving your most challenging problems. Maybe the next trend in business will be using your unconscious mind more. After all it is much more powerful than your conscious resources. I wonder how long it will be before performance management systems record the amount of down time employees are taking to be better thinkers and problem solvers.
In the meantime you can see a short animated video on Beeman's research which will put you in a good mood; another essential component of being a better thinker.