The Long, Hard, Stupid Way

3 min read

We need to talk about Kevin.

When Kevin started working as a plant manager at a medical device manufacturer, the company was 3 months behind production schedule, despite the plant's 60 heavy presses running non-stop. Downstream factories were being forced to shut down due to the lack of supply. Head office was not happy, especially since the solution was, to them, so obvious: buy more presses. Which they did, to the tune of $2 million.

But the machines were going to take 6 months to arrive. 6 months of falling further and further behind customer demand. So Kevin had to come up with his own solution in the meantime. He began studying lean manufacturing principles. He learned that the presses needed to be shut down while the molds were changed. He learned how to speed up the changeover process so there was less downtime. He learned that the machines required more maintenance than they were getting (since they were running non-stop to catch up with demand), so he switched to shorter production runs with more frequent maintenance, which led to improved quality and fewer defects, which saved time and further improved production. By the time the new machines arrived 6 months later, there was no need for them: they had already caught up with the demand.

When we're in a hurry, it's easy to take a wrong turn (and a costly one). Short cuts make long delays.

Rushing gets us nowhere 💨

Whenever I rush into things in my day-to-day I end up getting nowhere fast, spending a ton of energy only to head down a dead-end or tire myself out.

I recently heard 'hurry' described as a frantic reaction to fear, guilt and a feeling of inadequacy. Dan Markovitz (who shares the story above in his book The Conclusion Trap) says that "when our mental gas tank runs low on fuel, we tend to conserve energy by either avoiding decisions or rushing to solutions before we have a chance to fully understand the problem we’re grappling with".

It's like we react to stress by running away or running in circles.

So what if we slow down? 🐢

I heard about a chef who likes to do things "the long, hard, stupid way". So they do things like baking their own bread or making their own pastry. They slow things down to deliver a tastier experience.

That doesn't mean getting stuck in analysis paralysis. It still means saying yes to the mess and testing things in the field. But it also means taking the time to enjoy the work, to think carefully about the dish we want to make, and to deal with any problems that arise with patience and consideration (without rushing to a quick fix).

That way we waste less energy in the long term and whatever we cook up tastes twice as good.

Chew on this 🦴

My last email was in a rush. It was excited and it was trying to say a lot of things at once. So I may have given you more to bite off than you could chew. But each week I’d like to give you something easy to digest: one thing to chew on at a time, so you can savor the flavor and walk away feeling refreshed, not stuffed!

That’s why for the next few emails I'm going to step back and slow down. I'll be taking each point from my last email and serving it up again, but this time in a hopefully tasty dish, one course at a time.

So what's for starters? Next I'm gonna spill the beans on how I ended up designing 50 logo options for a company just for the client to stick with the logo they had, and what I learned from my oopsie!

In the meantime...

Thanks for stopping by 🦥

I’ll be back next monday with some more nom noms for your noodles.

In the meantime, here is…