Publish at November 29 2022 Updated November 29 2022
"The world with slowness walks towards wisdom"
Voltaire
Management is a technoscience that has been around for two centuries; it has risen to prominence with the industrialization and massive bureaucratization of the developed world. Faced with this organizational success, new variations and practices have been put in place to measure and manage ever more forward. Nothing escapes managerial attention, which is expressed in an infinite number of nuances. Managerial fashions can be noticed by their English-speaking adjectives, for example: Nudge management, Soft skills, Lean management, Sustainable development.
As is often the case when an English syntagm is taken up in full in French, it is an ideology and beliefs that are embarked upon, not just a described practice. For the collaborator, whether he or she is managed in small bites, in a light, gentle way or with a lasting aim does not change anything. The work, the colleagues, the products and the customers always remain in the equation, and above all, they are at the service and benefit of those who put all this into practice.
Maybe a contemporary awareness of the fragility that runs through us makes us want to taste life a little more and to do less repetitive tasks, weak of meaning. The "slow management" would proceed from an effort to slow down our restlessness without respite. It comes as a counterpoint to a Taylorian and Fordist logic banking on the continuous acceleration of manufacturing cycles and increasing yields to find the most efficient practice.
For Roche (2011), slow management takes managers out of their offices to meet those who make the company. He states, "This slow management allows the construction of legitimacy and trust, the inclusion of each person in a collective project and the return of the meaning of work." He identifies the origins of this concept in the practices advocated by Hewlett and Packard, founder of the HP company, a "management on the move", which takes time out of meetings and the incessant flow of activity, to get to know each other between managers and employees. This management values the presence of the manager with the teams and promotes deep listening.
As for the term "Slow management", it first appeared in 2004, in the book "A Bias for Action", by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal. Its challenge is to put men and women back at the heart of companies, by favoring human collaboration over performance at all costs. This objective makes us realize that until now, employees have remained peripheral, on the margins.
What if slow management participated in one more normative ideal that prescribes the behaviors to be adopted? This one would be an alternative to unrestrained growth. By focusing on meaning and recognition, it would aim to stop the hemorrhaging of human motivation at work.
If the expression slow management is taken at its word, it is then a matter of declining a humanization of training. And consequently putting learners back at the heart of the system. All too often, learners are enrolled in courses where time limits for learning are the rule. From the perspective of the prescribers, everything happens as if the times financed and the times for learning coincide. This is not the case, because the rhythms of learning depend to a large extent on individual dispositions and trajectories unknown to program designers.
So, does the mediator of knowledge, whether he or she is an educator or trainer, take enough time to get to know each learner, his or her motivations, desires, and difficulties in detail? Nothing is less certain, since it is often necessary to fit into a constrained time frame. Taking the time to get to know personally the one we are supposed to guide is rarely part of the educational routines when we are faced with flow management.
In the same way as for management, it is essential to ask the question of the goals, especially individual ones, rather than to rush into an additional pedagogical mode, for example, that of education by small bites. Are these bites, whether they are video extracts, downloadable podcasts or synthetic texts, a complete and balanced meal? If slow management progresses let's hope that it makes more room for atypical profiles, singular talents, those who do not grow straight and go slowly.
Let's remember this proverb saying that twisted trees do not end up as straight boards. They live longer. Atypical knowledge that takes time to develop is also the knowledge that could bring more resilience to the enterprise.
A saying I just made up states "Fast food, hard digestion". Just as "fast food" sits on our stomachs making us fat without filling us up, rushed management that is disrespectful of everyone's rhythms ends up exhausting the organisms. The situation is similar for learning: the transformation of synaptic circuits marks the necessary slowness of modification of the paths of thought and action, sometimes repetitions and a variety of situations are needed to ensure the deployment of new knowledge.
Illustration: DepositPhotos - AllaSerebrina
Sources
Robert Half. What is slow management? https://www.roberthalf.fr/blog/quest-ce-que-le-slow-management#
Bruch, Heike & Ghoshal, Sumantra: A bias for action: how effective managers harness their willpower, achieve results, and stop wasting their time. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004
Rosa, H. (2010). Acceleration. A social critique of time. Readings, books.
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/acceleration-9782707154828.html
Thot cursus. Slowing Down to Learn https://cursus.edu/fr/13212/ralentir-pour-apprendre
Thot cursus. Toward slowed and deep learning https://cursus.edu/fr/24180/vers-des-apprentissages-ralentis-et-profonds
Roche, L. (2011). Slow management, an antidote to stress. The Expansion Management Review, 141, 42-49. https://doi.org/10.3917/emr.141.0042
You might also like:
Group longevity and the effect on learning
The duration and depth of learning could well be linked to the friendly qualities that develop in a group, and learning and living together could also increase our life expectancy.
This article looks at the desire to learn alone or together. It describes the conditions favorable to the birth of such a desire
Excitement: understanding, anticipating, managing....
When it comes to excitement, understanding its natural character is a prerequisite. When it comes to crowds, the best way to manage a situation is tricky. How to manage excitement...
Effortless learning... Can we believe it?
Many training methods promise us tricks and devices for effortless learning. But what kind of effort are we talking about? There are big differences between the effort of a sportsman or woman, a player trying to reach a new level on his or her application, or a student learning vocabulary lists!
And in some cases, effort and the pleasure of learning are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The ambiguity of mass data in ecology
For over a decade now, technologies have been able to probe everything, including the environment, rapidly and in real time. Many believe in the potential of this data to reduce pollution. Yet data centers account for at least 4% of the world's energy consumption. How can we reconcile the two?
