The temptation to get on with it

In high school, I had a biology teacher called Sister Kath. She was a lovely, loud nun with a knack for making it VERY CLEAR when something mattered.

As we worked through our biology textbooks, Sister Kath would have us mark particular passages with a yellow highlighter, signalling the subject matter most likely to turn up in our exams.

During practical classes, she would project her instructions from the front of the lab as we dissected rats and tried to persuade baby chicks to imprint themselves on us (mine died, but that is a whole other story).

When a room full of teenage girls became impatient and wanted to rush through whatever assignment or project was in front of us, Sister Kath would say: “Girls, if you want to do something quickly, do it slowly.”

My high school biology teacher, Sister Kath Nolan.

She usually said it when we were keen to blow through something without properly understanding the problem. Sometimes we were impatient or lazy, reaching for the easiest, lowest-bar response. Mainly, though, we just wanted to finish the damn work and move on.

What she wanted us to do was pause and read the instructions, sit with the problem and think about it, work out the best way forward, and talk it through or even argue about it with each other.

We didn’t have instant answers within reach, so we had to spend a little longer turning the question over, talking through the possibilities and finding our own way forward.

Nobody in high school would have called that strategic or critical thinking, but that’s exactly what it was.

Somewhere between leaving school and starting my career, Sister Kath’s advice fell out of my head. Like many people starting out in comms, I thought being good at my job meant doing everything quickly. Being super responsive and getting the work out the door mattered, as did proving that I could keep up. This was, after all, the period when I had work couriered home so I could do it while dying of the flu.

There’s always pressure in organisations to produce something quickly, whether it’s a plan, an announcement, a presentation, a response or a decision.

Eventually, I came back around to Sister Kath’s way of thinking. Charging ahead can feel productive, even when you’re charging in the wrong direction.

The time spent up front getting clear on the problem, questioning the premise, talking to the right people and working out what might be missing usually pays for itself later.

There’s less rework, fewer assumptions left untested and a better chance of anticipating the consequences before they land. Everyone also has a clearer sense of where they’re going and why.

I’ve been thinking about Sister Kath’s advice again lately. In communication, the pressure to get something out the door can mean we start producing before we’ve done enough thinking, and AI makes it possible to do that much faster.

We’ve all seen plenty of communication that was beautifully written and still wrong. It solved the wrong problem, glossed over something people cared deeply about or created consequences nobody had stopped to consider.

Beyond communication, so much of life now encourages an immediate response: answer the message, make the decision, express the opinion, produce the thing and move on to whatever’s next.

AI is supposed to save us time. I just hope we don’t immediately fill every spare minute with more stuff.

Some of that time could go towards having a proper conversation, hearing from someone who sees things differently, sitting with an uncomfortable question or noticing something we might otherwise have walked straight past.

This blog post is a good example. I bashed out the first draft at the end of August, thought, “Yep, that’s pretty good,” and then ignored it until yesterday. Coming back to it with fresh eyes, I could finally work out what I actually wanted to say.

The same goes for doing the NYT Spelling Bee with my partner. We get frustrated when we can’t reach Genius level quickly, but it’s amazing how many extra words we identify after stepping away from it for a while.

And yes, sometimes moving quickly is exactly what’s needed. The hard part is knowing which kind of situation you’re in.

I reckon Sister Kath would have had something to say about all this.