Restoring Home-Work Balance
Last week I was working with a multinational COO. They asked me if we could focus their coaching session on how to speed up their thinking.
They reported that the level of operational intensity in their organisation was off the charts. There was excessive busyness; a constant snowfall of emails; late nights, no vacations and weekend working, just to keep up, was the norm.
“The pace is unrelenting and there’s no end in sight” they said. “Home/work balance is non-existent”.
Prior to this job, their experience was that they were usually the fastest thinker in the room.
But in this new role they’d observed that the CEO, who we’d worked with before, seemed to think extremely fast.
They thought that if they could speed up their own thinking then there was a chance that they could get the same amount of work done in less time and maybe restore some balance.
I agreed to unpack the four things that significantly speed up thinking. But first let’s just dispel the myth of a Nobel Prize winner.
Thinking Fast and Slow
Most people have heard of Professor Daniel Kahneman’s idea about thinking fast and slow (Kahneman, 2011). It was built on earlier work exploring cognitive dual processing (Stanovich and West 2000), automatic and controlled processing, (Schneider and Shiffrin 1977); experiential versus rational systems (Epstein 1994) and associative versus rule-based reasoning (Sloman 1996).
Kahneman suggested the brain’s fast “system 1” relies on automatic, effortless parallel processing and is largely unconscious. It operates continuously, using sensory impressions and feelings. It accesses simplified experiential patterns rather than entire data sets. System 1 can’t be switched off because we are constantly sensing our environment.
In contrast, Kahneman suggested that “system 2” draws on working memory, processes data sequentially, resolves conflicts and slows as it tires.
Since the idea was popularised, many researchers have come to regard the neat split into two separate systems as a myth. A convenient story rather than a truth. For example, some researchers found that peoples’ first, intuitive answer was usually right, and further deliberation rarely changed the result (Bago and De Neys 2017 and De Neys, 2023). Some authors have argued for decades that “fast and frugal” often beat complex analysis (Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011). It been suggested that Kahneman’s results were driven more by the test protocol than by any thinking processes.
So having dispelled the myth of fast and slow thinking I went on to explain what could help the COO speed up.
Speed Tip 1: Avoid the DIY Lobotomy
To help this COO speed up their thinking I suggested the first step was to avoid brain shut down under pressure. When human beings feel threatened their physiology naturally becomes chaotic, something I demonstrated live on stage in my first TEDx talk. It’s an ancient survival mechanism. When faced with a predator we don’t need smart thinking. So, our physiology goes into chaos to shut down our frontal cortex (Arnsten, 2009) and thinking becomes binary: fight-flight or play dead. Anything more sophisticated and you will likely be eaten.
To speed up our thinking we must avoid this DIY lobotomy. This requires us to develop our emotional self-regulation abilities. This starts with learning how to regulate your breathing in a very specific way. The key is rhythmic, even breathing rather than deep breathing. Such breathing creates coherent physiology, resulting in faster and better-quality thinking.
Rhythmic breathing is often part of yogic practice but may be a consequence of many other disciplines (Bernardi et al., 2001). Precision in breathwork is the key to generating coherence (Watkins, 2021). Such biological “flow states” may also underpin the speed and efficiency seen in groups. Group synchronisation is often referred to as “entrainment”. It’s possible to generate complete coherence in complex systems to drive improved performance. The mathematics of entrainment are now well understood (Strogatz, 2003).
Speed Tip 2: Use All 22 Senses
Once you’re able to avoid the DIY lobotomy, the next step in speeding up your thinking is to improve your sensory abilities and the quality of the data you take in. Fast thinking is only ever as good as the sensory information it’s built on.
At school we were taught that we have just five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. But neuroscientists now acknowledge we have somewhere between 22 and 33 senses (Barry Smith, 2026). For example, proprioception (where your body is in space), balance, temperature, pain, a sense of time passing, and a whole family of interoceptive senses that tell you what’s happening inside you: your heartbeat, your breathing, the knot in your stomach.
Most leaders ignore almost all of this data. They run their entire professional lives on two senses – what they see and what they hear. Not surprising then that many leaders are easily blindsided as markets change or customer behaviour changes.
What we sense alters thinking speed because the brain isn’t a passive receiver of information. It’s a prediction machine (Clark, 2013; Seth, 2021). It constantly guesses what’s going on and uses incoming sensory data to correct its guesses. The richer and more accurate that data, the quicker the brain converges on an accurate model of reality. If you are operating with only two senses rather than 22, you will get many more prediction errors, a lot more second-guessing and much slower comprehension.
The Power of Intuition
The scientific evidence that the body knows before the mind does is compelling. In Antonio Damasio’s famous gambling experiments, people’s skin conductance started spiking before they reached for a risky deck of cards, long before they could consciously say which decks were dangerous (Bechara et al., 1997). Their bodies had sensed it first. On a London trading floor, traders who were better at detecting their own heartbeat made more money and tended to last longer in the industry (Kandasamy et al., 2016). Interoception, it turns out, is a commercial skill.
Intuition isn’t mystical. It’s the integration of sensory data into a pattern your conscious mind hasn’t yet put into words. And the research suggests that intuition works better when three conditions are present (Kahneman & Klein, 2009):
- The environment is stable enough to create learnable patterns.
- Feedback is rapid and clear.
- The person has honed their intuition through repeated practice.
So we can become more intuitive, and faster, if we deal better with uncertainty, get clear feedback and hone our intuitive powers.
Like most executives, the COO I was coaching had been trained to dismiss sensory data as “just a feeling”. But developing your sensory capabilities is one of the best ways to think faster, and to get better at anticipating the future.
Speed Tip 3: Better Fossicking
If you kick around in the dust of central Australia, you can often discover precious stones lying in the dirt. It’s basically free money. The Aussies call this fossicking. We use this word to describe how good leaders are at extracting value from any conversation or meeting. Most leaders will miss some incredibly valuable insights in a conversation. Partly because they don’t listen well; partly because they have not developed their senses; and partly because they think they already know the answer and so are not even looking for more data.
The fastest thinkers I know are expert fossickers. They can extract value from any conversation, meeting or environment. Including the dull ones. Especially the dull ones.
Many leaders walk into a meeting, decide within 90 seconds whether it’s relevant, and if not, they may spend the rest of the meeting on their phone. They listen to a junior colleague just long enough to confirm what they already believed: that the junior has nothing useful to say. They dismiss the critic, the supplier, the customer complaint or the data from outside their sector. It feels like fast thinking, but it’s really just fast exclusion. They’re ignoring some potentially incredibly powerful insights or nuggets of value.
Every encounter can add value. And there’s a bonus. Ellen Langer’s decades of research suggest that actively noticing new things is energising rather than draining (Langer, 1989). Fossicking doesn’t just make you think faster; it makes the meetings you can’t avoid less exhausting.
Fossicking is partly a skill, but it’s mostly a function of developmental maturity. More sophisticated leaders value data that stands out and challenges their assumptions, because it expands their existing model. So, cultivate your fossicking: in every meeting or conversation, ask yourself, “What’s the nugget?”
Speed Tip 4: Build a ‘Palace of the Mind’
The fourth, and perhaps most powerful, accelerant is the breadth and depth of your reference points.
In 1973, research showed that chess masters could reconstruct a game position after a five-second glance, whereas novices couldn’t. But if the pieces were scattered randomly, the masters’ advantage largely vanished (Chase & Simon, 1973). They weren’t faster processors. They’d stored thousands of patterns, so they recognised positions instead of analysing them. Speed is recognition. And recognition depends on what you’ve already stored.
Now here’s the key: most executives build their pattern library in a single domain. Twenty-five years of finance, or operations, or sales. That makes them fast inside their silo and slow the moment a problem crosses a boundary, which in an AI-accelerated world, is most of the time.
The polymathic integrator has a different advantage. With reference points drawn from biology, history, physics, philosophy and the arts, they can see that a supply-chain problem is really an immune-system problem, or that a culture problem behaves like an ecosystem. Nobel laureates in science are roughly twice as likely as other scientists to play a musical instrument, around 12 times more likely to write poetry or fiction, and around 22 times more likely to perform as amateur actors, dancers or magicians (Root-Bernstein et al., 2008). An analysis of 17.9 million scientific papers found that the highest-impact work combined deep conventional knowledge with unusual combinations from distant fields (Uzzi et al., 2013). And in Philip Tetlock’s two-decade forecasting study, the “foxes” who know many things consistently out-predicted the “hedgehogs” who know one big thing (Tetlock, 2005).
Breadth alone isn’t enough though. It needs architecture. The ancient Greeks used the “method of loci”, placing memories in the rooms of an imagined building. It still works. Memory champions don’t have unusual brains; they use exactly this technique (Maguire et al., 2003). In one study, ordinary people who practised it for six weeks more than doubled their recall, and their brain connectivity began to resemble that of the champions (Dresler et al., 2017).
Developing the palace of your mind isn’t just about storing facts and patterns. It’s a way of deliberately organising the architecture of your mind with rooms for systems, subjects and sensed data. Every new fossicked insight is tagged with multiple associations then carefully stored in the most relevant place. And at the centre of the palace, a room for thinking about thinking. Metacognition (Flavell, 1979) is the master skill, because it tells you which room you’re standing in, which pattern you’re applying, and whether it fits the problem in front of you. This is how slow thinking becomes fast thinking: you build deliberately so that you can recognise instantly.
So Why Does the CEO Think So Fast?
When the COO and I discussed the CEO’s fast thinking, it became clear that the CEOs speed had very little to do with raw processing power. The CEO remains steady, even under pressure; they notice more, waste fewer conversations and draw on a far wider library of patterns.
In other words, the CEO isn’t running a faster processor. They’re running a better operating system.
Kahneman was right when he said we can’t simply will ourselves to think better. But he was too pessimistic about our ability to develop. We can. And the irony is that the fastest way to think faster is to slow down long enough to grow up. Which, as it happens, is also the quickest route back to some home-work balance.
To Speed Up Your Thinking Ask Yourself These Four Questions
- When the pressure rises, do you actively regulate your emotions or does your thinking become binary?
- How many of your 22 senses did you consciously use in your last meeting?
- How good is your fossicking? Can you extract value even from the dullest of conversations? What nuggets have you extracted from this newsletter beyond the obvious?
- Do you spend any time organising the Palace of your Mind? When did you last add data to your palace from a discipline that has nothing to do with your industry?
If your leadership team is running flat out and still struggling to keep up, we can teach you how to think faster. Just reach out if you want help.