“The time has come to resist the siren call of half-baked solutions and short-term palliatives and start fixing things properly. We need to find a new and better way to tackle every kind of problem. We need to learn the art of the Slow Fix.”
Imagine a prisoner trapped inside a tower, with a rope half the length needed to reach the ground. Undeterred, the prisoner cuts the rope in half, ties the halves together, and escapes. When told to imagine themselves as the prisoner, 48% of people figure out how they did it. When told to imagine the prisoner is someone else, 66% solve the problem. How we frame the problem, and how we think about it, matters (the solution is at the end).
Carl Honoré worries that this captures a larger problem: that we have fallen victim to a culture of quick fixes. Both psychologically and societally, he argues that we turn almost immediately for the obvious solution, and end up curing not the cause, but the symptoms, of a problem. Of course, some problems can and should be cured with a quick fix: but for problems like global warming, financial crises, obesity, and others, we need to spend time understanding the problem before we can solve it.
To help, he offers a series of 12 steps problem-solvers should go through, including collaboration, devolving authority, going over the details, and others. The core of his book, however, lies in his examples. The rehabilitation-oriented prisons of Norway, the exclusively student-run conflict resolution systems of the elementary schools of Finland, locally produced coffee from farms of Costa Rica and the online chore game-ification of ChoreWars all provide grist for his mill as he puts smart solutions to difficult problems under the microscope.
As befits a book focused on slow, however, and as he himself points out, he has no easy solutions to problems or simple lessons. Difficult problems take time and care, and shortcuts are not always an option. A good start, however, is ignoring 24 hour news cycles and voters who prefer instant decisions over correct decisions. The prisoner, by the way, splits the rope lengthwise – Honoré will be disappointed if you have skipped to the end to read the solution instead of slowly digesting the material in the middle.
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