The Slow Fix Quotes

“Solving complex problems always involves change,” he says, “and the number one thing people look for during a change process is security. Ideas change, circumstances change, and teams change, so people need a single person who has a clear idea of where they are going and is ultimately going to be responsible for what happens and who makes them feel safe. They want a leader.” Every Slow Fix we have encountered so far has such a figure.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Examine any Slow Fix, and you often find one person who embodies or even supplies the underlying vision, who stitches together the team, acts as a hub for the network or a lightning rod for the crowd, who inspires others to strive, make sacrifices, and overcome the resistance and inertia that the most ambitious problem solving always entails.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“The best problem solving usually blends individual and collective brilliance. At the very least, you need someone to manage the group,”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“The transformation of Bogotá reminds us that sweating the small stuff and thinking holistically and long term are essential elements of the Slow Fix. But it can also teach us something just as valuable. You may have noticed I attributed the changes wrought in the Colombian capital to the city itself or to nameless municipal officials. The truth is more nuanced. It turns out Bogotá is a vivid example of the next ingredient of the Slow Fix: having a strong figure to drive the search for a solution.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“It’s a moment when everyone can taste what it would be like to have a city run for people rather than for cars,” she says. “And once you taste something, it becomes a possibility in your mind.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Every Sunday the balance of power now swings sharply in favor of the pedestrian as Bogotá closes seventy-five miles of its streets to traffic. People of all social classes pour into thoroughfares normally jammed with cars to run, cycle, stroll, and play football and Frisbee. With bands playing in the parks and aerobics and yoga teachers leading classes in the open air, there is a carnival atmosphere, a giddy sense that the natural order has been reversed, or restored.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“To make the TransMilenio work, Bogotá had to engineer a broader transformation, which included many of the ingredients of the Slow Fix we have seen so far. It started with a long-term goal: to create a city where everyone felt comfortable mingling in public spaces. Tackling poverty was identified as an essential part of making that happen. The city brought potable water and sewers to nearly all its citizens. Snazzy new schools, swimming pools, and libraries sprouted in the poorest neighborhoods. To crack down on crime, Bogotá modernized its police force with bigger budgets, better training, and more accountability. Through amnesties and mandatory searches, it collected and melted down thousands of firearms. All of these measures were underpinned by Colombia’s success in pushing the guerrilla forces deeper into the jungle and bringing economic stability.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“The TransMilenio is not carbon neutral. To keep costs down, its caterpillar buses run on diesel rather than on cleaner fuels that are more expensive and less suited to the high altitude of Bogotá, which sits 8,500 feet above sea level. Nevertheless, a TransMilenio engine is so efficient that it emits less than half the pollution of an old-fashioned minibus. By embracing BRT, Bogotá has taken more than 9,000 small private buses off the roads, slashing the overall consumption of bus fuel since the first line opened in 2001. Some private cars vanished too. Last year Ortega sold his Audi sedan and now travels around Bogotá either by TransMilenio or taxi—a big step in a society where having your own wheels is the ultimate status symbol. “I just don’t feel like I need a car anymore,” he says. “You can live differently in this city now.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Even as emissions from industry fall, world traffic is forecast to spew out 50 percent more environmentally unfriendly gases by 2030, with much of that rise coming from the developing world.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“The group is crucial for developing and improving ideas, but often the best ideas start with a single person. The individual is supremely important.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“It is no coincidence that every Slow Fixer we have met so far, from IDEO to Le Laboratoire to NASA, warns against fetishizing the group. Instead, their aim is to forge a symbiotic relationship between collective and individual toil, giving everyone the freedom to nurture their own ideas in splendid isolation before pushing them through the filter of the team or the crowd.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“That is why throughout history and across disciplines, the best problem solvers, the big beasts of creativity who conjure earthshaking breakthroughs, have cherished solitude. Einstein spent hours staring into space in his office at Princeton University. William Wordsworth described Newton as “a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” Every major religion has prophets—Buddha, Muhammad, Moses—who went out into the wilderness to grapple with the big questions on their own.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Though Rembrandt worked closely with other painters in his studio in Amsterdam, each artist was assigned a private space for working alone. When consultants compared six hundred computer programmers across ninety-two companies to pinpoint what separated the top performers from the pack, they found the secret ingredient was not higher pay or more experience but having a private work space that minimized interruptions. Human beings are profoundly social, but we also crave privacy and personal freedom. Research shows that open-plan offices can make us anxious, hostile, tired, and prone to illness. They also bombard us with distractions that undermine deep thinking.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Now is the time to sound a note of caution: collaboration and crowdsourcing both have their limits. Working together is not the only answer to every problem. Even teams with a fine track record can, over time, grow stale and narrow-minded. The crowd can make mistakes or be sabotaged by rogue members.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Fiat started building the world’s first fully crowdsourced car at its flagship factory in Betim, Brazil. The company set up a web portal where anyone in the world could post ideas on how the vehicle should be designed and engineered. More than ten thousand suggestions poured in from a hundred and sixty countries. At every stage, the crowd—which ranged from experienced Fiat staff to teenagers in their bedrooms—critiqued, debated, and refined the ideas. Fiat made sure the dialogue flowed freely in all directions, explaining why ultimately some suggestions ended up prevailing over others. “This is completely different to the usual design process, which is entirely hidden and secretive,” said Peter Fassbender, manager of Centro Estilo, Fiat’s design center.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“There is a big lesson here for anyone—not just firms obsessed with trade secrets—hoping to tap the crowd: you have to play by the rules. The crowd will only serve up its wisdom if you treat it right. The crowd wants respect. It hates feeling exploited. It expects openness in return for its insights and enthusiasm. If the crowd suspects you are taking it for a ride, it will rebel, disperse, or move somewhere else. Nobody owns the crowd.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“It’s clear that the best place to put out these problems is to adjacent fields,” says Spradlin, “but the thing is you can never predict which adjacent fields. It’s not about trying to figure out the fifteen hundred people who might be able to solve the problem; it’s about letting go and saying ‘I have no idea where the solution is coming from, so I need to get to everybody.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“don’t have a lab or a garage where I can create devices or test compounds,” he says, “so what I’m doing through InnoCentive is really just thought experiments.” Lucas makes a point of steering clear of problems in his own area of expertise. “Usually when these companies are stuck on something, it’s the people that work in that field that can’t solve it, so really it’s ripe for somebody else to look at it from a different point of view, to come at it from a side angle.” Like so many Slow Fixers, Lucas approaches every problem with a large reservoir of patience. He never expects to crack the code with his first solution.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“That is why InnoCentive tries to frame problems so no one feels excluded from trying. A challenge from a drilling company, for instance, will appear with no reference to the oil and gas industry. “Most people will stop reading the problem as soon as they see ‘oil and gas’ because they will think ‘I’m not from the oil and gas industry,’” says Spradlin. “Our model is about throwing a very broad net to avoid limiting it to the same old experts.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Bottom line: it pays to tap the largest, most diverse crowd possible.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“A Harvard University study found that the best solutions often come from people operating “at the boundary or outside of their fields of expertise.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Remember the BoGo flashlight? While developing the prototype, Mark Bent ran into a problem: his device could not illuminate a whole room in the same way as a kerosene lamp. So he turned to InnoCentive, challenging its crowd to find a way to disperse the light. Within three months, an engineer in New Zealand came up with a design that allowed the BoGo to double as a lamp while also putting less strain on its rechargeable batteries. Tapping the crowd through InnoCentive often forges partnerships that would once have been unthinkable. When NASA asked for help improving the packaging used to preserve food on space missions, the winning solution—using graphite foil—came from a Russian scientist.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“The first step is to help seekers pull the andon rope to figure out exactly what their problem is before working toward a solution, just like Geir Berthelsen did at Norsafe. “Most organizations have no idea what their real problems are, and even if they have a basic idea, they have real trouble articulating them,” says Dwayne Spradlin, president and CEO of InnoCentive, which runs training workshops to show seekers why and how to tap the crowd. “When you’re dealing with deep, complex problem solving, you can’t just set up a quick ad on Craigslist and assume the world will kick in. It’s not Yahoo! Answers. We help our seekers ask better questions and frame the problem so they get better answers.” Just like IDEO.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“Many people leave my assembly optimistic that crowdsourcing can help reboot Iceland. Some talk of laying the groundwork for a new form of politics. “What you’re seeing here is superdemocracy,” says a university lecturer. “The discussions are so powerful and creative and innovative, but it will take time to trickle up and reshape government.” Even participants of a less academic bent seem delighted with the ideas that have bubbled to the surface. “To be honest, I expected a boring day, but it was actually quite invigorating,” the marketing manager tells me. “When you put a range of people around the table together, you generate new ideas and new approaches to old ideas.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“In the previous chapter, we saw the power of working together within and across disciplines. But traditional collaboration tends to involve teams with limited and tightly focused membership. Only a select few are invited to work on projects at Le Laboratoire or conduct research in those open-format labs at Columbia and Princeton. Crowdsourcing means taking a problem normally tackled by the few and putting it to the many. In the wrong hands, it might only deliver a quick blast of publicity or some cheap market research. Used properly, however, the crowd can be a powerful ally in the battle to solve hard problems. You can ask the crowd to gather or mine data. You can invite it to test and judge solutions.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“When you aggregate the decisions of the many, even if some of those decisions are boneheaded, the outcome is a single collective decision that is often as good, if not better, than what the sharpest person in the crowd would have come up with alone. That insight is the cornerstone of the Google empire.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“It’s a logical truth: under the right conditions, a randomly selected collection of problem solvers outperforms a collection of the best individual problem solvers.” In other words, the crowd is worth listening to.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“That is often how collaboration works in a Slow Fix. Check your ego at the door, be prepared to share the credit, and let the creative juices start flowing. That was how Monty Python minted some of the most famous sketches in the comedy canon. One member of the troupe, John Cleese, summed up the genesis thus: “The really good idea is always traceable back quite a long way, often to a not very good idea which sparked off another idea that was only slightly better, which somebody else misunderstood in such a way that they then said something which was really rather interesting.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“The best thinkers always surround themselves with a good team, whether they admit it afterward or not.” Julien Benayoun, another designer, likes how the competitive spark within the group was channeled toward a common goal rather than personal glory or reward. Studies show that creativity nosedives when companies foster too much internal competition because employees stop sharing information and start obsessing about beating the rival in the next cubicle. That never happens at Le Labo. “By the end, you don’t know who had what idea, this one or that one,” says Benayoun. “You can’t say ‘that was me’ because there are so many influences and inputs from others and everyone nourishes everyone else.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success

“In our highly specialized world,” says David Edwards, “we often get stuck in holes of expertise, which stops us communicating with other holes, which in turn limits our vision and our creativity. The great creators dream of exiting their holes, because they know that pooling knowledge and insight is the best way to solve problems.”
― Carl Honoré, The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better In a World Addicted to Speed – A Revolutionary Guide to Sustainable Solutions and Personal Success