By Jonathan Cook

Chances are, whether you’re a freelancer or embedded in corporate life, you’ve been working long, hard days. Business culture has become harried and thin, with unrealistically tightened budgets and narrowing deadlines becoming the norm rather than the exception.

So, you’ve been doing more with less… at least that’s the image you try to project. You want to show that you’re keeping your chin up, relentlessly positive no matter how many times you’re told that your team has to become even more lean and even more agile.

The truth, of course, is that less is not more. After two or three sprints in a row, you stopped feeling lean and started to feel emaciated. As you look at your haggard team members, you can see that the relentless drive for efficiency has gone beyond cutting the fat, and is now consuming the muscle.

Far too often, the pathological drive for optimization leads not to enhanced financial performance, but to organizational anorexia.

When you’re exhausted and under pressure, a little stress eating is only natural. When you’re pushed simultaneously to cut corners and put in extra hours, it means that sitting down for a full meal with family and friends just isn’t possible. More often than not, you can’t even afford to make a trip down to the corporate cafeteria. In any work, there are days when a microwave meal at the desk will have to do.

For years, we’ve been making excuses. We tell ourselves that the extra effort is a temporary sacrifice, but in moments of clarity, we realize that the long nights of shortcuts that we were asked to endure “just this once” are now a standard part of the process. Late nights at the office and long weeks on the road mean a home kitchen gone cold.

Those of us who have been in the world of work for a while also understand that the consequences of this kind of rushed lifestyle, in which eating is only an afterthought crammed into the corners of a packed professional schedule, will eventually catch up to us. When that happens, we won’t be able to get any work done, no matter how much we might want to. We lurch, rather than sprint, from deadline to deadline, as what seemed expedient in the short term is revealed as inefficient in the long run.

Optimization plans in business usually end up working about as well as frozen meals. They claim to honor the original company culture, in the same way that store-bought frozen foods claim to be “authentic” and “traditional.”

With a great deal of effort, and a liberal dose of artificial additives, a manufacturer can make a frozen product that simulates truly authentic, traditional meals, but everyone knows it’s not going to be as good as the real thing. If eating food were just a rational process for gaining physical nutrition, it might be possible to recreate home-cooked meals with mass-produced alternatives. Food isn’t just a means to an end, however. It’s an end in itself, and the process of preparing and eating food is a cultural practice that’s as psychologically rejuvenating as it is physically nourishing.

We can’t be fully sustained by food that’s been prepared for us by strangers, because food preparation is an essential part of our sustenance. When we reduce our meals to minimally viable products, we deprive ourselves of the experiences we need to make life worth living.

Entering Slow Time

In my work, I conduct ethnographic research to reveal the untapped ritual practices that rest hidden within commercial culture. Not long ago, I found my own research questions reflected back in my direction. During a panel discussion at the House of Beautiful Business, I was asked what kinds of ritual practices give meaning to my own life.

After a moment’s reflection, the answer was obvious: 2017 was the year I learned to cook slowly. Spending the day cooking a pot full of carnitas has become a ritual of self-restoration for me.

Practically speaking, I don’t really need to go through my ritual of slow cooking to get delicious carnitas. I could just go to my favorite local Mexican restaurant. Even more conveniently, Trader Joe’s offers pre-cooked carnitas that, according to the packaging, can be ready to eat in just three minutes.

The thing is, when I make carnitas saving time is not my goal. Instead, I go through the trouble of spending an entire day making slow roasted crispy pork in order to reclaim the psychological nourishment that’s missing from my daily diet of lean business culture.

On a functional level, the authentic, traditional process of making carnitas yields an end product that’s highly superior to anything I can grab in the frozen food aisle at the grocery store. A more significant distinction is that the experience of making carnitas the old-fashioned way offers pleasures in itself that will always be missing from a quick, efficient microwaved version, no matter how tasty the microwave mimic becomes.

When I spend ten hours cooking pulled pork, the pleasure of the meal isn’t confined to the time I sit down to eat with my family. The aroma of the combined ingredients spreads wonderfully throughout the entire first floor of my home. Spending time in the the kitchen, I meet my children as they inevitably make their way toward the refrigerator for a snack. We have conversations there that could never take place when I’m in my upstairs office, urgently focused on deadlines. The cooking I do becomes an invitation to re-establish domestic connections that have become stretched during long weeks of work and school.

Consultant and food writer Chrissie Bettencourt explains, “When food is cooked slowly like this its natural flavours and aromas tend to be released in a way that will make it feel like it is the best meal you have ever tasted. The food isn’t being rushed and is being given the time to introduce its authentic self. It is beautiful, and life too is like this. By experiencing life slowly we are allowing ourselves to savour every moment, to breathe deeply of the beauty and wonder around us and most importantly, let it seep into our soul.”

Slow cooking demands that I slow down to match the pace of the food preparation. The slowness of the process isn’t a design flaw, an inefficiency that could be eliminated through prototyping and A/B testing. It’s a fundamental benefit that can’t be replaced with a quick alternative.

A Slow Alternative To Lean And Hungry

The benefits of slow cooking can be brought into our practice of business as well. There is often a need for fast-paced work, but fast-paced work isn’t all that a business needs.

As CEO of the Caffeine Partnership, Sophie Devonshire is a big fan of moving fast, but in her book, Superfast (due out in August), she explains that the accelerated pace of business cannot be unrelenting. An essential of the proper rhythm of business is the inclusion of moments of pause. These slow moments allow team members to rest and recuperate from their hurried work, but even more importantly, the pause provides opportunity for deep reflection, to ensure that, when a business races off at top speed, it’s heading in the right direction.

Just as cooking slowly brings flavors together to create a more luxurious result, it’s the slow moments in business that enable teams to create products and services of higher quality that stand apart from the mass of commoditized offerings. As economist John Kay points out, the direct pursuit of results is often not the most successful strategy. Ironically, it’s in the moments when project teams stop hurrying to reach their goals that they find the key insights that enable them to achieve their goals most effectively.

In their book, Shakti Leadership, Nilima Bhat and Raj Sisodia identify presence as a vital component of success in business. Presence, as they describe it, is a special form of consciousness that includes heightened awareness of the present moment. In business, the experience of presence enables leaders to become aware of subtle patterns and opportunities that others, in too much of a hurry to pay attention, miss.

The advantage of presence can’t be obtained quickly, Bhat and Sisodia explain. Instead, it can only be developed by investing time in the practice of purposeful presence. This practice doesn’t require taking time away from work, but it does require approaching work in a different way. Authentic presence can only be accomplished with special care taken to slow down and attend to what’s actually taking place.

Recipe for Slow Roasted Research

Market research presents the cultivation of presence at work. The current norm in market research is to do the work as quickly, with as little investment as possible. Too often, market research is cooked and consumed with the same rushed inattention we give to a box of microwaveable carnitas. This glib approach to research has reached a new extreme with the development of automated data mining and analytics, in which human beings are barely involved in the research process at all.

When was the last time your team took a day to slowly marinate in a cauldron of ideas?

A new movement of slow research is taking form in response to the excessive datafication of business. But how can it be accomplished? There are many specific methodologies, such as immersive interviewing and genuine ethnography.

The following is a good general recipe to start with:

Step 1: Take time to organize your ingredients. Deeply contemplate your research objectives. Encourage discussions among members of your team about what it is you are truly trying to understand, considering the larger challenges you face, transcending particular, tactical needs.

Step 2: Encounter the people you want to study at length. Don’t content yourself with one-hour “ethnographic” observations, focus groups in which each respondent has only five minutes to speak, or closed-ended “IDIs” in which your preconceived notions frame the discussion. If you have a few concrete questions to bring to the process, that’s okay, but make sure to spend the bulk of your time listening to the people you’re studying, watching what they do without imposing your structure on them. Keep the interaction open-ended, and let yourself become the one who responds, rather than soliciting responses. Give these research encounters much more time than seems to be efficient, more time than you’re initially comfortable with, and then pay attention to what happens. Ask mind-numbingly stupid questions.

Step 3: Do the processing yourself. Put away the qualitative analysis software that’s supposed to provide you shortcuts to understanding your material. Instead, work through your notes yourself, and baste yourself in the process of figuring out the themes that emerge from you. Make transcripts of your recordings, and print them out on paper. Get out a pencil and write in the margins. Circle things. Note strange turns of phrase. Reconsider the deeper meaning, the etymology of the words. Scribble. Draw. Play with metaphors.

Step 4: Sit and stew. Don’t just take the easy answers that are immediately obvious to you. Take long breaks, and let your subconscious mind, truly the most intelligent part of you, do its work.

Step 5: Compose at length. Revolutionary ideas are rarely crafted in the form of bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation. If you can fit your findings on post-it notes, you’re not thinking big enough. Write in complete sentences, forcing your mind to articulate concepts in their full structure, uncovering new implications along the way.

Step 6: Explore and challenge the ideas that research has uncovered. Discuss and question them, more in the mode of a salon than of a business presentation. Your task is not to sell the research findings, but to expand them to their full potential, and uncover opportunities to put them into action. Yes, these slow-cooked qualitative ideas are actionable, but you’ve got to do the work to find out how. This is not paint-by-numbers business.

Recipe for Slow Cooked Carnitas

By this point, you may find yourself hungry to go out and try some slow-cooked research… or you may just find yourself hungry, perhaps for some slow-cooked carnitas. If so, the following recipe will get you started.

You’ll notice that there are no exact quantitative measurements in this recipe. Precision isn’t what slow-cooking is about. Instead of following an algorithm, you’ll need to take the time to contemplate what it is that you’re putting together. Consider what feels right to you. Think about how the flavors will combine, and then go for it. As you make adjustments each time you cook this meal, eventually you’ll come up with a good intuitive sense for what the proportions should look like. Slow cooking is a holistic process, in which we learn to manage without measurement.

Get out a crock pot and put in several pounds of boneless pork shoulder, cut into pieces just a few inches across. Don’t fill the crock pot up to the rim with meat, as you’ll need room for other ingredients, but the pork is the bulk of the dish.

Cut up some onions and garlic, and throw them in.

Turn on the crock pot to a low setting, to cook for 10 hours or so.

Add salt — more salt than you think you’ll need. Use spices, too, in generous amounts. Consider things like paprika and different kinds of powdered peppers. Some like it hot.

Don’t forget the herbs. Standards such as oregano, basil, and thyme work well, but try something a bit different, if you’ve got it available. I like to include a tangerine-scented southerwood, a more friendly relative of the bitter wormwood that’s used in absinthe. Put in a few bay leaves, too.

Pour in citrus juices. If you can cut up some fresh fruit and hand-squeeze them over the pot, allowing some of the pulp to fall in (but not the seeds) that’s a bonus.

If you’re not on a severe diet, toss in a bit of sugar, too.

Got other ideas for ingredients? Go for it. It might work.

Come back to the pot a few times to stir the contents, so that everything gets cooked and flavored relatively evenly.

Take the meat out of the pot, removing the bay leaves, and pull it apart using two forks, one in each hand. Put the shredded results into shallow pans, along with a good amount of the liquid that remains in the crock pot, and broil the contents in the oven for a few minutes, until the meat is crispy, but not burnt, turning the meat once during this time.

Serve it up! My wife has discovered that this pulled pork is really tasty served on top of lightly roasted cauliflower, chopped into small, rice-sized bits. You could also have it in a quesadilla, in a sandwich, or just eat it straight… slowly.

Jonathan Cook is an ethnographer, contributing writer to the Journal of Beautiful Business, and speaker at The Great Wave, a global-local, virtual-physical happening from October 16–19, 2020.

For more detail about the disorientation of business culture under the COVID-19 pandemic, and to hear the voices of participants in the Business in the Time of Coronavirus research, listen to the episode on disorientation of the Beyond Back to Normal podcast.