I remember a few years ago going to a football match at Old Trafford to watch Manchester United play Spurs. We were at the end of the ground where the away fans were in a section of the stadium to our left. Their team scored first - and the fans went into raptures, loudly singing their club’s anthems. Then United equalised and a few minutes later took the lead. The whole of our part of the crowd turned almost as one in the direction of the Tottenham fans chanting “You’re not singing, you’re not singing, you’re not singing anymore!” It was exhilarating to be caught up in the moment giving voice to this shared feeling. It is so easy when you are part of a crowd to go along with them and great fun in the right circumstances. But at the same time that makes it very hard to be objective. I went to another match this time away at Fulham where I and some of my family had seats in the Fulham season ticket stand at Craven Cottage in London. When Manchester United scored, this time I had (for reasons of self preservation) to curb my exhilaration and celebration in the midst of the very disappointed Fulham supporters, which was very hard.

In professional work I suggest that one of our most critical skills is the ability to avoid being caught up in the crowd and the “groupthink” as it were and to form our own independent opinions thinking for ourselves. If a general view has been accepted by the majority of any group we are working with, questioning that can be quite hard. We are caught up in the chanting crowd and stop thinking for ourselves.

There is some science behind this sort of behaviour. See this article  Collective Behavior and Why Some Crowds Get Out of Control in Discover Magazine which cites the Congress invasion “In the months after the Jan. 6 riot in Washington, D.C. in 2021, several defendants claimed that their crimes weren’t their fault. According to their defense teams: The crowd made them do it.” It says such thinking is not new “Back in the late 1800s, French scholar Gustave Le Bon argued that, when in a large crowd, individuals can lose their ability to think rationally. The crowd, he wrote, serves as a hypnotic influence that triggers otherwise rational people to become violent.” Le Bon wrote a book in 1895 “the Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” in which he developed this “contagion theory”.

However another article Explaining Collective Behaviour suggests thinking has moved on from the nineteenth century and there are now more theories:

• Contagion theory assumes that individuals act irrationally as they come under the hypnotic influence of a crowd. 
• Convergence theory assumes that crowd behavior reflects the preexisting values and beliefs and behavioral disposition of the individuals who join a crowd.
• Emergent norm theory assumes that norms emerge after people gather for collective behavior, and that their behavior afterward is largely rational.
• Value-added theory argues that collective behavior results when several conditions exist, including structural strain, generalized beliefs, precipitating factors, and lack of social control. 

See also this Wikipedia article on Herd Mentality which proposes this has its roots in evolution: “animals acquire information to make important decisions (i.e. where to forage and mating potential) by monitoring the interactions of others with their environment.” It also considers the topic from the perspective of neuroscience, psychology and sociology. For example, neuroscience suggests “that our tendency to ‘imitate’ might be due to a system of ‘mirror neurons’ in our brains. In an experiment that recorded electrical activity in the brain of a macaque, it was found that the same neurons fired both when the monkey acted and when the monkey observed the same action performed by the other.”

Whatever the theories or rationale, the challenge for us as professionals is how to avoid going along with the crowd and being able to adopt a fresh and independent perspective – analysing the problem for ourselves and coming to our own conclusion. This may mirror the thinking of the group we are in, but it could also reveal a fundamental flaw that nobody else has spotted – or at least voiced. If I am participating in a meeting and one of the participants is very quiet, I find they are usually worth drawing in as they invariably have a different and valuable viewpoint they have just not felt confident enough to express.

See this Harvard Business Review article How to Steer Clear of Groupthink which observes that “Unfortunately, research shows that consensus-based problem-solving groups are often where innovative ideas go to die. These groups are highly prone to groupthink – quick agreement around status quo solutions with little discussion or deliberation.” One way around this is to challenge the status quo “What we saw in the groups that overcame groupthink is that it began with one member expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo.” This is where the independent thinking comes in.

This World Economic Forum article Here are 5 ways to become an independent thinker and a successful leader suggests “Independent thinkers are refreshing. They use their own lens to filter information and inform their thoughts. Independent thinkers don’t allow other people’s thinking to become their thinking. They don’t adopt information “as is.”” It proposes 5 ways to promote such thinking including:

• Read. Reading other people’s words exposes you to their thoughts.
• Identify the other argument. Play devil’s advocate, and challenge your views.
• Interact with people who are different than you.

While this Northeastern University article aimed at science undergraduates Working Independently suggests three key characteristics:

• Self-Awareness - your knowledge and understanding of yourself – your emotions, beliefs, assumptions, biases, knowledge base, abilities, motivations, interests, etc.
• Self-Motivation - your ability to identify effective methods of getting yourself to move from thought to action.
• Self-Regulation - your ability to affect personal and professional growth based on your self-awareness and motivation.

This challenge of not going with the crowd is I suggest being compounded in education and business by the increasing use of AI as a mechanism to provide so called independent and creative thinking – which it truly is not. I spoke recently to a colleague who cited a US scholar who used AI to write a paper, then to make it look like it was not written by AI and thirdly to check if it met the required college criteria. Creative – yes. Promoting independent thinking – no. This approach  is not I suggest the creative, well researched independent thinking of a human author.

Albert Einstein was alleged to have said (the derivation is not clear and he probably did not, but anyway this seems very relevant) "The one who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find themselves in places no one has ever been before”.

What he definitely did say was “Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.”
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As Confucius observed “The superior person is in harmony, but does not follow the crowd. The lesser person follows the crowd, but is not in harmony.” 

One of the domestic chores I have always found challenging over many years is changing a duvet cover especially on a king size bed. You are forever trying to stuff the duvet into its cover, aligning the corners and avoiding large lumps in the middle. Then I recently discovered I was not alone in this frustration and heard there is an easier way which involves laying the cover out on the bed inside out and then rolling it around the duvet. See this YouTube video for a fuller explanation. It really works, is quicker and avoids the usual frustration. This made me think about how easy it is to get into a habit in our professional working life and not even consider whether there is a better way. This is related to trying something new – see my blog from June last year Walk the Week - The Sigmoid Curve - Do Something New– but is different. This is about taking a way we have done something before repeatedly – a habit – and rethinking it to see if there is a better more effective or efficient way of carrying out the same task.

To some extent this is a road that technology drives us down, email replacing letters and AI changing the way we interface with knowledge and use this in our practices. But that is change that is in a sense ultimately forced upon us as a necessity to maintain our practice in an effective and competitive manner. Sure, it may be the vehicle we can use for change, but being willing to look for continuous improvement in how we work – to change and improve practices we have carried out for years in an ingrained manner (like the mundane task of changing bed linen) - requires I suggest a willingness in the first place to relook at how we do things.

See this Harvard Business Review article Two Techniques for Helping Employees Change Ingrained Habits which suggests that “Far too little time and focus is devoted to how to change existing habits and behaviors, which are often the greatest barriers to personal growth.” It proposes that there are two critical steps to achieving this:
“1 The first step is considering your ideal future state and the obstacles you expect to face on the way to achieving that state
2 The second step builds on mental contrasting and involves framing your goal as an “if-then” statement. The “if” is a goal-relevant situational cue, and the “then” is your goal behavior.”
It concludes “Think through what will get in your way, and make a plan for overcoming it.”

That really resonates with me. I attended Harvard Business School for a short course on managing professional firms some time ago. I and a colleague came back to the UK with an almost evangelical mission to change and improve our law firm. However actually doing this in practice turned out to be extremely difficult, not least because despite the enthusiasm and zeal we returned with, our less enlightened partners simply did not see the need to change their existing ways.

So, this is by no means as easy as it sounds. As the Roman poet Ovid observed “Nothing is stronger than habit.” This blog  These are the habits to avoid if you want to make a behaviour change proposes “It’s difficult to change an ingrained behavior. Even for the most productive and disciplined among us, undoing something that has become an automatic part of who we are takes more than an overnight effort”. It quotes a psychology professor who says “Your brain wants to find routines that have succeeded in the past and allow you to repeat those actions again in the future without having to think about them explicitly.” It broadly recommends that we don’t try to eliminate a habit but try adopting a new routine instead.

There is what looks like an interesting book on this topic I have just downloaded, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change which “examines why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight.” and “uncovers how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr.”

I also like the recommendations in this Forbes article Nine Effective Ways To Replace Bad Work Habits With More Useful Ones which commences “Professionals are sometimes acutely aware of how their bad habits impact their work”  and goes on to offer some good tips on replacing bad work habits with productive ones including:

• Check Your Motivation And Set Attainable Goals - What do you want to achieve? What’s the purpose? What’s in it for you? What is a relatively easy action that you can take to move toward the desired behavior?
• Use A Four-Step Modeling Process –to start conduct better meetings, find a person who already conducts awesome meetings. Watch them conduct meetings Shadow them and co-host meetings with them. Finally, get them to watch you conduct meetings and give you feedback.
• Take Time To Become Self-Aware - Changing a habit is intentional work that strengthens one’s ability to be courageous, humble and focused. Begin by taking time to become self-aware.

James Clear who wrote the book Atomic Habits (about transforming your life with tiny changes) discusses some interesting ideas in a blog How to Use Military Strategy to Build Better Habits citing Sun Tzu the legendary military strategist in China who was “a master of “soft power” and the father of “agile warfare.”” He suggests that “We fight our battles directly and attack the enemy — in this case, our bad habits — at the point where they are strongest.” Instead “we should make easy improvements to our habits first, build our strength, and establish a better position from which to attack the most difficult changes.”

Here are some interesting quotes on this topic from very different sources and ages.

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” Samuel Johnson.

“When you change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes and the hearts will be changed.” Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

“The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new.” Socrates.
“The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.” Winfrey Oprah.
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“You cannot change your future, but you can change your habits, and surely your habits will change your future.”Abdul Kalam the former president of India.

With apologies for starting with another music quote, these words from Simon and Garfunkel in a song released back in 1966 sum up my theme for this week. How can we manage time to deal with all of the urgent matters demanded of us as professionals, especially if we have a management role. The challenge we face is that when matters are moving so fast on so many different fronts making effective, intelligent and sensible decisions is incredibly difficult. This is especially so as the business world is moving so quickly with relevant new information on any given situation arriving rapidly in a plethora of forms from Teams to IM to emails. 

It could be said, rather bizarrely, that road signs warning of potential hazards are particularly relevant if you are driving too fast. Of course, whatever speed we drive at they always provide warnings and help prevent accidents. But, for example a sharp bend sign is far more important and vital to your safety if you approach the corner at high speed. So how can we heed warning signs and in effect slow down enough to make the best decision and not cut corners.

See this Forbes article Make Better Decisions: Slow Down If The Lion Isn’t Coming which proposes that “the crucial first question in any decision-making process: Should I speed up, or should I slow down?” It suggests “we have near-innate propensity toward snap judgments” citing two hunter-gatherers of the Neolithic era. Both hear rustling sounds in the underbrush. One thinks “lion” and immediately flees. The other deliberates, “Hmm…maybe it’s a friendly forager and not a prowling lion; I’ll hang around and see.” The one who decided impulsively was more likely to survive and pass on his genes but “That impulsive instinct helps the race car driver, but can undermine the myriad personal and organizational deliberations that benefit from deeper reflective thought.”

Building on this in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman “showed that there are two ways we make choices: fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. His book reveals how our minds are tripped up by error, bias and prejudice (even when we think we are being logical) and gives practical techniques that enable us all to improve our decision-making.”

In a project management context see also this article Why Slow Decision-Making Can Improve Outcomes which says “while speedy decision-making may seem like the best course of action in many situations, there are times when a slower, more deliberate approach can be more effective.” It cites several reasons including:

• Careful Consideration of Options
• Enhanced Collaboration and Stakeholder Input
• Greater Team Buy-In and Support

It concludes “Ultimately, it is the thoughtful and deliberate approach to decision-making that paves the way for long-term success in management.”

What this is about ultimately is finding ways to make correct decisions under pressure. Some characteristics and approaches I have observed in professional and business colleagues that help achieve this are:
1 don’t multi-task – it is better to spend 30 minutes on one topic, make a decision and then move on to the next one;
2 take charge and stop distractions from others that take the focus off the topic in hand;
3 however listen to colleagues who have a valid view before arriving at a conclusion;
4 delegate less critical tasks to others;
5 take counsel from peers within and outside of your organisation;
6 have a plan B if you have to drop everything and focus on one matter.

It also can really help in an apparently unresolvable situation to take a short time out. On one negotiation when I was in private practice we were in a hotel in Park Lane where we had reached an impasse that threatened the whole deal. The senior business representatives were both present. They stopped proceedings leaving all us lawyers alone twiddling our thumbs and went for a stroll in Hyde Park, during which they came up with a workable solution.

See this Harvard Business Review article How to Make Great Decisions, Quickly which observes that “learning to make good decisions without hesitation or procrastination is a capability that can set you apart from your peers” and proposes a checklist of eight elements or attributes to prospectively evaluate and promote a great decision including:

• consideration of many different viewpoints
• being as close as possible to the action
• address the root cause, not just the symptoms
• consider the holistic impacts of a problem
• balance short-term and long-term value.

It concludes:
“Many leaders …[are] overwhelmed by fear of making a mistake or, even worse, of not being liked. But the extent to which you might labor on any particular facet of the decision-making process should be determined by one thing: risk. Your assessment of risk will dictate whether you should take a more or less cautious approach.”

It really helps (though it is not easy) to keep things in perspective and consciously assess the risk – is this a bet the firm or company decision, or moving an important but not time sensitive negotiation meeting back a week. In many ways slower more effective, but still timely decisions, paradoxically require anticipation and preparation. See this LinkedIn blog How Leaders Can Benefit from Slower Decision Making which proposes “a growing body of research suggests that slower, more deliberate decision making can actually yield remarkable benefits for leaders” and advocates that:
“One of the most significant benefits of slower decision making lies in the foundation of knowledge it helps leaders establish. When leaders take the time to gather information, conduct research, and seek out expert opinions, they create a solid knowledge base. Armed with this comprehensive understanding of the subject matter at hand, leaders can make well-informed choices that consider a broad range of perspectives.”

There is an old saying in martial arts circles “You have to go slow to go fast”. This is echoed by the US Navy Seals mantra is “Slow is smooth; smooth is fast”.

While the English-American author and speaker Simon Sinek shrewdly observed “It is better to go slow in the right direction than to go fast in the wrong direction”.

And as the American writer James Clear commented “If a decision is irreversible, the biggest risk is moving too fast.”
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In any event as Confucius said “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
 

The Bangles back in 1986 (before we all worked online or from home) sang “Have to catch an early train, got to be at work by nine – It’s just another manic Monday – Wish it were Sunday”. These are sentiments we can all empathise with even if we are just moving from one room in our home to another (and moving a reluctant cat from our work chair), but especially if we are going into the office and there is a traffic jam, or the trains are delayed. The best train operator excuse I have encountered on just such a day was “swans on the line”! Seems very British. But the theme I want to develop is not so much the problem as the opportunity. I have written short blogs about problem solving some years ago – see Walk the Week – Effective Problem Resolution and Walk the Week - Think Solutions Not Problems. However, rereading these I think I only scratched the surface of the topic and in particular how to approach the inevitable manic Mondays in our professional working lives, anticipating and actually embracing them.

What triggered this was a potential last minute hitch this week in a deal I have been working on for some months. My initial reaction was frankly some annoyance, especially as we had all put a lot of hours into the transaction and I had little control over what was really a legitimate business issue. But as I calmed down and started to approach the situation more rationally, I began to realise that actually not only is every problem an opportunity to learn, but without them none of us would have professional careers in the first place. There would be no lawyers without complex contract negotiations or disputes, no accountants without financial reporting, and (sadly) no doctors without sick people. Professions emerged to address specific needs or challenges within society. As Charles Dickens once famously remarked “If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers”. So, I changed my mindset, and started to think of a solution or way forward on this particular challenge to the extent I as a lawyer could contribute.

Once we start to think in this way the “manic Monday” becomes an opportunity to demonstrate and develop problem solving skills and showcase our value to our firms or businesses. See this more general blog Why is problem-solving important in the workplace? (And tips) which suggests that strong problem-solving skills mean “You have the ability to handle difficult or unexpected situations in the workplace or help your employer overcome complex business challenges”. This skill set is beneficial in a number of ways:

• It inspires better time-management
• It encourages you to think unconventionally
• It motivates you to work well under pressure.
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The theme I am developing is that we should see problems as opportunities; if you are stuck on a train (most of which have Wi-Fi these days) use the delay to catch up on correspondence or do some preparation or drafting. Once we approach challenges in this way, then dealing with the issue is far easier and less stressful. As this short management blog Problems are Your Opportunities! suggests “When a problem occurs, instead of first exploring how to get the problem to go away, first stop and ask yourself: What is the opportunity here? This is the key to innovative problem solving. It's understanding that the problems you face are opportunities — no matter how frustrating they appear to be at first”. See also this older but still apposite blog How to Change Your Mindset to See Problems as Opportunitieswhich commences “Talk to any successful entrepreneur, or any professional with a positive attitude, and you'll find one key trait in common: all of them have a unique mentality that allows them to handle challenges differently. Rather than seeing problems as burdensome forces of opposition, they see problems as opportunities--opportunities to learn, grow, improve, or adjust in a way that leaves them better off than before the problem existed”.

And rising to this problem-solving challenge is increasingly important in our modern interconnected business world. See this Forbes article Stopping The Insanity: A Modern Approach To Solving Today’s Complex, Recurring Problemswhich suggests we need an updated approach “Today’s modern socio-technical working environments put tremendous pressure on human performance and create a new breed of intricate, multifaceted problems. This includes the proliferation of high technology; matrixed organization charts where we serve multiple bosses with a plethora of collateral duties….”. It advocates the use of six keys including:

• Critical Thinking - The unbiased and intellectually disciplined process of gathering, organizing and analyzing data, evidence and information…
• Systems Thinking ….conduct a systems inventory of affected programs, processes and procedures to establish a holistic approach that attacks problems from multiple perspectives.
• In-Depth Causal Analysis ……uncovers the small set of deep-seated causes that have far-ranging effects and will continue to generate events.

Once we start seeing problems not as a nuisance but instead as an opportunity to exhibit our professional and management skills, then we can start working far better on how to solve them. See, for example, this really good 2024 Harvard Business Review article To Solve a Tough Problem, Reframe It which proposes that instead of rushing into solutions it is critical to examine and define problems in depth – which is often not done because of time pressure. It therefore advises that “When we work with organizations and teams, we encourage them to spend more time up front on problem-framing, a process for understanding and defining a problem. Exploring frames is like looking at a scene through various camera lenses while adjusting your angle, aperture, and focus”. It then offers some tools to help do this, with good illustrations, including:
Phase 1: Expand In the first phase, set aside preconceptions and open your mind. We recommend using a tool called frame-storming, which encourages a comprehensive exploration of an issue and its nuances.
Phase 2: Examine If the expand phase is about identifying all the facets of a problem, this one is about diving deep to identify root causes.
Phase 3: Empathize In this phase, the focus is on the stakeholders—employees, customers, clients, investors, supply chain partners, and other parties—who are most central to and affected by the problem under investigation.

In applying this “structured approach for conscientiously engaging with complex problems before leaping to solutions” they cite a quote from Albert Einstein I have used before in blogs but is particularly apposite to this challenge “If I had one hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution.”
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In another quote Duke Ellington summed this all up nicely when he said: “A problem is a chance to do your best”.