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Success in the Slow Lane - Research Backed
Welcome to The Shift, a weekly newsletter where I provide thought-provoking ideas to help you think differently about your career and money.
The Shift
Change your thinking:
From: Move fast to be successful.
To: A slow and methodic process will yield greater success.
Last Week + This Week = It’s All Connected
Last week I discussed how Indra Nooyi embraced change to reinvent the 100+ year old Pepsi. Read here if you missed it. This week I will explore what we get wrong when it comes to creating change.
In the Fast Lane
Timing is everything.
But that doesn’t mean you should speed.
We’ve all been there. Working on a brutally short deadline. Skipping lunch and working extra hours just to get the thing across the finish line.
We’ve been taught to equate getting things done quickly with success.
Turns out, success is more often found when you are driving in the slow lane.
Less Than 50% Chance of Success
That’s at least true when you are creating change and innovating.
If you’re solving for the future in the fast lane, it’s because you’re skipping a few critical steps1 .
Here’s the issue - most of us would say problem solving looks like this:
Identify the problem/change ➡️ Brainstorm solutions ➡️ Execute on the best solution
You do that and you have a less than 50% chance of success2 .
That’s because you are jumping to solutions based on a preconceived problem, with half-baked assumptions.
Missing Steps
A successful solution can only be found if we truly understand the issue at its core.
According to research by professors from IMD in Switzerland, to do that we need to reframe the problem.
Instead of assuming the problem is caused by one thing, we should open our minds, think outside of the box, and come up with any possibly hypothesis for why the problem occurred.

The next step is to analyze those new scenarios. This step either eliminates a scenario or offers a deeper explanation of what really caused the problem.
The problem may not be what you initially suspect.
Knowing that, different and more successful solutions can be found.
In the Slow Lane
Time is the crucial component.
Solutions should not be rushed. Too often speedy timelines are unnecessary and self-inflicted – not a request of a customer.
The only way to achieve the best outcome is to get in the slow lane.
Change and innovation aren’t supposed to happen fast.
Let’s make The Shift!
Lindsey

Sources:
Based on research by professors at IMD in Switzerland.
An Ohio State University study by Paul Nutt.