In our fast-paced, information-rich world, we often find ourselves skimming through texts, scanning for keywords, and scrolling for the main points. We're drawn towards the allure of efficiency and productivity, driven by the use of Generative AI tools and data-driven decision-making. However, it's essential to recognise that sometimes, speed is a choice.
While these tools can undoubtedly enhance the efficiency of writing and problem-solving, they cannot replace the benefits of slow reading and narrative creativity.
Slow Reading
Slow reading offers moments of contemplation to simplify complexity and develop a more acute sense of empathy, enhance our creativity by exposing us to new perspectives, and help us reconnect with ourselves.
From The Case for Slow Reading by Thomas Newkirk, published in 2010.
I would like to propose some strategies for slowing down and reclaiming the acoustical properties of written language—for savoring it, for enjoying the infinite ways a sentence can unfold— and for returning to passages that sustain and inspire us.
- Memorizing
Memorization is often called "knowing by heart," and for good reason. Memorizing enables us to possess a text in a special way…
- Reading Aloud
Reading aloud is a regular activity in elementary classrooms, but it dies too soon. By reading aloud, teachers can create a bridge to texts that students might read; they can help reluctant readers imagine a human voice animating the words on the page. Besides, some passages seem to beg to be read aloud…
- Attending to Beginnings
Writers often struggle with their beginnings because they are making so many commitments; they are establishing a voice, narrator, and point of view that are right for what will follow... Readers need to be just as deliberate and not rush through these carefully constructed beginnings. As teachers, we can model this slowness.
- Quote and Comment
Here, students copy out passages by hand that they find particularly meaningful and then comment on why they chose those passages. Copying a passage slows us down and creates an intimacy with the writer's style—a feel for word choice and for how sentences are formed. At the end of a unit in which my students have done a great deal of reading, we celebrate by selecting passages we want to hold on to and reading them aloud to the class. It always interests me to see which passages the students select.
- Reading Poetry
Even in this age of efficiency and consumption, it is unlikely that anyone will reward students for reading a million poems. Poems can't be checked off that way. They demand a slower pace and usually several readings—and they are usually at their best when read aloud.
- Savoring Passages
Children know something that adults often forget—the deep pleasure of repetition, of rereading, or of having parents reread, until the words seem to be part of them.
Not all our reading, nor all our students' reading, can or should have this depth. We read for various purposes. But some of our reading should have such depth, inefficient as that might be.
Narrative Creativity
Angus Fletcher, a Professor of Story Science, highlights the human brain's capacity to draw hypotheses from minimal data points, advocating for a 'good enough' mentality. This approach can ward off perfectionism's destructive effects and help us thrive in uncertain environments, where historical data might not suffice.
The human brain is data-light: It draws hypotheses from a few data points. And it never strives for 100 percent accuracy…
The brain’s strategy of minimal viability is a notorious source of cognitive biases that can have damaging consequences…
But … we don’t want to stray into the greater problem of over perfection. There can be enormous practical upsides to a good enough mentality. It wards off perfectionism’s destructive mental effects, including stress, worry, intolerance, envy, dissatisfaction, exhaustion and self judgement.
A less-neurotic brain has helped our species thrive in life’s punch and wobble, which demands workable plans that can be flexed, via feedback, on the fly…
Rather than using pre-made formulae, open your mind, learn something new and expand the ways you can flex your life. If you do that, you’ll feel calmer and more effective. If you don’t, you’ll be more anxious and angry…
In volatile, uncertain environments, the data required for accurate computation are often absent, and even when it does exist, that data can only reveal which old actions worked in familiar yesterdays, not which new ones might work in unprecedented tomorrows. Such new actions must be generated by breaking from history.
So, how can organisations harness this type of human creativity? Angus Fletcher suggests the following
Train your existing workforce to leverage anomalies. To nurture a culture that fosters originality, try this team exercise: Have everyone anonymously write down something they like but are afraid to admit to the group. Then share the answers, maintaining anonymity. When each answer is shared, ask everyone to take two minutes to imagine that they like the same thing and silently plan a way to incorporate it into the workspace.
This exercise has three benefits. One, it empowers subjective bias, which is a logical weakness but a creative strength. Two, the exercise stimulates teams to actively appreciate nonconformity. And three, it primes the brain to value anomalies: the most potent biological source of creative inspiration.
(Next), think of a new competitor in your market — an existing startup, maybe, or an established company that might enter your lane, or some kind of organization that you anticipate might emerge in the future. Identify one highly anomalous feature of the competitor — and now imagine that you are that competitor. What does your anomalous feature enable you to do in the market? Stretch your horizon as long-term as you can.
This is counterfactual thinking. Unlike brainstorming, it activates motor regions in the brain that are nonlogical and mostly nonconscious, which is why most of your biggest insights seem to pop into your head from nowhere.
Whether it's through the art of slow reading or the embrace of anomalies, both approaches ultimately enhance our ability to navigate the complexities of modern life.