The ‘slow food’ movement is a healthy reaction to modern patterns of food production and consumption. Its philosophy asserts a right to pleasure, as well as acknowledging the connections between ‘plate and planet’. While there are benefits where production processes can be standardized, fragmented and sped up, the human losses are subtle, even invisible.
What is ‘slow work? It is the opposite of ‘busy work’. It is a manifesto against fads and fashions in management, and against outsourcing your organisation’s thinking. Working with the brain and heart chopped out, is not nourishing.
The heart of ‘slow work’ is creating time and place for open, extended conversations about issues of significance for your work. Slow work tests assumptions, looks for new ways of doing things, explores purposes, asks for engagement.
Slow work gets bigger, more meaningful results, and gets them faster “You’ve done in six hours what we have been struggling to do in two years. ” Maggie McFee Manager, Youth Connections, Central Coast.
“We never get time to think”….
This kind of thinking is at the heart of good design, good planning. Designers and planners understand the importance of upfront thinking. The rest of us forget or discount its importance. We leave good designs, ideas and plans dangling in the breeze. We get anxious and impatient, then jump into the first solution.
The Slow Food movement proponents consider themselves “co-producers, not consumers”. “By being informed about how our food is produced and actively supporting those who produce it, we become a part of and a partner in the production process”.
make stuff happen is about encouraging organisations to ‘insource’ their thinking. We are interested in processes that support our sense of purpose, and our senses.
Slow work is a paradigm for connectedness and creativity. Slow work harnesses resourcefulness, it invites people to bring more and give more to the project, it aligns assumptions.