Unpredictable Patterns #44: Waiting
Waiting, procrastination, zanshin, gunslingers and chief waiting officers on the hunt for opportunity
Dear reader,
Halloween is upon us and I was toying with the idea of writing about horror, but so far - luckily - the applications of horror to organizations, thinking, philosophy and technology seem few and far between. We should probably hope that remains the case. Even if I did sketch out a taxonomy of technology critics built on popular monsters - zombies, vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, the swamp thing - I think I speak for all of us when I say that it is a good thing I did not put that in any more discoverable format. What I did end up writing about, however, was something else entirely: waiting. So let’s get going!
The strategic logic of waiting
Something must, we often feel, be done. We know patience is a virtue - or a ”minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue” as Ambrose Bierce put it - but we also feel, acutely, the etymology of patience: one of its roots is a latin word that can also mean suffering. Doing something always feels better than waiting.
But waiting is a powerful strategy.
In fact, master Sun Zi noted in his art of war that it may be a supreme strategy, especially if you spend your time focusing on your own position. Sun Zi writes:
”The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. Thus the good fighter is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the enemy.
Sun Tzu; Lionel Giles. The Art of War: Full Translation, Introduction, and Critical Notes (p. 38). Kindle Edition.
Victory is created in waiting - but waiting is not just inaction, but attentive listening, observing and learning - before we act. In martial arts there is a term for this - zanshin - that can be practiced and honed to the point of anticipating what the opponent will do. Zanshin is not just waiting for the opponent to attack, it is also returning to that active state of waiting as the attack has been dealt with.
A state of readiness, of active waiting for the next move.
Zanshin takes years to develop, and is very hard to learn - not because it is an advanced technique, but because we are so focused on action. We want to do the next thing, we want to follow up, we want to jump to the next move. Rather than create those listening moments in between, we tend to run through a schema or plan without pausing - and this is how we make the mistakes that defeat us.
One martial arts teacher tells the story of how his master used to comment in his sword technique by nodding and saying ”isogashii, ne?” — literally, you are busy, are you not? He took that as great praise, until he realized that what the master was trying to show him was that he was so busy that he did not really understand what was happening. He had not yet developed the ability to wait between moves and adapt not just to the opponent, but to the entirety of the situation.
If we are honest we can recognize this often in ourselves: we go from one thing to the next, and we do not stop to understand what has really changed - we do not wait to see how the actions we take are playing out.
The same thing exists in organ music. If you play the organ in a church you are really playing the church - the acoustics in a church are a part of the instrument. That means that the speed with which you can play is determined by the architecture you are embedded in. A technically skilled organ player can easily sound amateurish if they don’t know how to let the music play out in the church room.
Waiting - active waiting - is a key component in both strategy, martial arts and music - and I am sure you can find other examples. Dance and conversation suggest themselves as two interesting domains where the use of pauses and waiting create something unique.
And this is a key insight: waiting discovers opportunity.
Strategy guru Richard Rumelt notes that Steve Jobs firmly understood this strategy. Rumelt writes:
In the summer of 1998, I got an opportunity to talk with Jobs again. I said, “Steve, this turnaround at Apple has been impressive. But everything we know about the PC business says that Apple cannot really push beyond a small niche position. The network effects are just too strong to upset the Wintel standard. So what are you trying to do in the longer term? What is the strategy?” He did not attack my argument. He didn’t agree with it, either. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.”
Rumelt, Richard. Good Strategy Bad Strategy (p. 13). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Waiting for the next big thing, however, is really, really hard. Not only do you have to have the discipline to wait - you also have to have the ability to act when that next big thing comes around. Waiting requires great capability building.
Warren Buffett, the famous investor, has a similar observation on what to invest in. He notes - with a baseball analogy - that there are a lot of balls thrown your way, but you do not need to swing for all of them - you can wait for the perfect one, in your window of competence, and then swing.
Competence - in Buffett’s understanding - is the ability to wait for the right moment.
Waiting can even save your life in a Western movie! As Niels Bohr noted, the gunslinger that draws first always loses. Bohr reputedly went so far as to test this with graduate students, winning every (fake) duel. Decades later researcher Andrew Welchman confirmed Bohr’s observation, and proved Bohr’s explanation: it takes less time to react than to act.
This is a subtle insight - but also an important one if you ever end up in a duel! Joking aside, it means that if you wait - you win.
Waiting - understood as a state of awareness and readiness to act - is key to strategy. But waiting needs to be combined with capability building, observation and learning.
Waiting for the tools we need
Demis Hassibis once said, in a talk he gave, that he had considered going into artificial intelligence early in his career, but had observed that the technology was not there yet - so he went to have a brilliant and staggeringly fast academic career for a bit, while technology caught up with the idea he had.
This is a profound point - in many ways. Knowing what you can actually do with the state of technology - or the state of an organization - is the first step in understanding if it is worthwhile to engage in your project. But it is also a profound point because it builds on a really interesting insight about when we should do something.
It is an insight about the value of waiting.
If you want to build something, and you know that with today’s tools it will take a 1000 days, but with the tools you can predict you will have in a year it will take 100 days - well, then you are much better off just waiting a year and then building it - rather than start with something that you have to upgrade and rebuild after a year!
Here the notion of waiting simply means that you time your work with the optimal point in the relevant trends that affect it.
Reversely - if you do not think that circumstances will change in any material sense, then you should start immediately with the project.
Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has suggested that one reason we no longer are building cathedrals - that is, engage in projects we know it will take hundreds of years to complete - is that we predict that tools will be better soon, and so we should focus on building only that which can be built before our tools are obsolete.
If true, this poses an uncomfortable question: have we lost the ability to think long term because of the technological successes that we have enjoyed in the last centuries? Is our expectation of average tools for any endeavor now that we will have tools that are superior to the ones we have today with shorter and shorter times?
Actively identifying projects where this is not true then becomes a core political, and ethical, project. Climate change comes to mind as an interesting test case — do we believe that we need to do something now to combat it with the tools we have available, or do we believe that we will have better technologies in a few years that allow us to trivially deal with the problem then?
This may seem an absurd question, but the reticence some people have to discussing climate change certainly is at least in part based on the hope that we can solve it with not yet invented tools. Now, in this case the vast majority of people disagree - but the space of not yet invented tools remains an intriguing thought experiment for any number of problems that we are facing.
When we wait, we wait for something - and it can be not invented tools or undiscovered opportunity or a new option that has not yet presented itself. This waiting space should be actively explored and discussed when we use waiting as a strategy - what do we think will change?
The lost art of waiting
How do you wait? Say you are waiting for a bus - what do you do? Most of us probably pick up our phones, some may read a book - but fewer and fewer people can be seen just sitting quietly, waiting. There is almost something uncanny about the person who sits quietly, hands clasped and looks out into the air - letting their mind wander.
But practicing waiting actively is an interesting art - it allows us to find those small moments in which we can hear ourselves think. It is in waiting that we can turn our attention not outwards, but inwards and see what is going on.
Introspection - the art of looking within - is a part of waiting. When we wait actively we explore our own positions, our own feelings and our state of awareness. Waiting requires us to return our attention to ourselves - allowing it to sweep over our inner landscapes and survey them. It is not entirely pleasant, and that is why we fidget, try to do something and then ultimately pick up the phone.
The close relationship between waiting and observing is caught in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of dwelling on something - here quoted in Harold Schweizer’s excellent book on waiting:
“In the experience of art,” as the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes in The Relevance of the Beautiful, …we must learn how to dwell upon the work in a specific way. When we dwell upon the work, there is no tedium involved, for the longer we allow ourselves, the more it displays its manifold riches to us. The essence of our temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry in this way. And perhaps it is the only way that is granted to us finite beings to relate to what we call eternity.1 In the German original, Gadamer uses the word “verweilen,” which is here translated as “to dwell upon” and “to tarry.”
Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting (Thinking in Action) (p. 71). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
Gadamer suggest that to understand the work of art we have to dwell on it - or wait in it - and that is when it starts to open up to us.
The world and art are not that different - if we want to experience the world, waiting in it is a great way to do so. Schweizer also quotes Elizabeth Bishop:
As I waited I heard a multitude of small sounds, and knew simultaneously that I had been hearing them all along… Elizabeth Bishop, “Time’s Andromedas”
Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting (Thinking in Action) (p. 71). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
Bishop’s point here is suggestive: not only does waiting allow us to see the world - it also allows us to realize that they have been there all along; this implies that if we wait we start to realize what the world really looks like — waiting, then, is a method to reveal the world to us in the detail it presents itself, and reminds us of it at the same time.
Waiting is a special kind of time - it is not the clock time that we are used to use to measure activity, but rather a time that is oriented around the next thing and so slows down to a point, a flat timescape that is disrupted as the next event occurs.
Schweizer notes that when we wait we spend our own time, and so our waiting is ultimately the allocation of our own time and attention to something specific. That means that it is one of the clearest examples of subjective time - time that also helps constitute ourselves.
We wait ourselves into who we are.
Waiting as work
Our time praises swift replies and quick turn around times. Tools like Slack and email encourage immediate replies and instant messaging. All waiting has been eliminated, and so the quality of thinking these tools allow also is quite abysmal. The swift response comes at the expense of waiting.
Waiting is known to also be a great way to improve our ability to understand the world. Super forecasters, the experts that are able to better predict the world in Tetlock’s studies, come back to themselves with new views occasionally - and Sunstein and Kahneman has shown that getting a second opinion from ourselves actually is a powerful way to make better decisions.
Wait for yourself to find out what you really think!
Waiting while you understand a problem is also a good way not to waste energy. Problems unfold over time and the first version of a problem is rarely the one you end up solving.
Waiting has gotten a bad rep because we fear procrastination, but the two are really quite different. Procrastination is delaying a well-specified action, waiting is allowing the set of options to mature. If you know that you have a paper to write, and you have the ideas - then you are not waiting, you are procrastinating. Procrastination is essentially waiting for nothing at all, and as we have already noted the value of waiting lies in the object of your waiting - the things you are waiting for.
One of the least understood components of the Getting Things Done productivity systems is the folder or project that Dave Allen lays out called ”Waiting for…”. In this folder, he suggest, we put projects where we are waiting for someone else to do something. We could also put things in here where we are waiting for the conditions to change or new tools to emerge - and managing and reviewing this folder then becomes key to getting things done. But this folder is often misunderstood. Worst of all: some use this heading as a way to categorize all the things that they think are not their responsibility anymore - but that is not waiting, but rather something close to the ugly habit of blame shifting. Everything in your ”Waiting for”-folder should be an area of capability building - how do you prepare to react once the thing happens? The ability you have to respond when the waiting is over is key!
Waiting is even helpful in everyday conversations. Journalists and police know that asking a question and then waiting will elicit much more interesting responses than just ceaselessly pressing on with new questions - so the silence that waiting produces opens up new conversations.
These are just a few examples of the uses of waiting in thinking - but they are worth considering and building on.
The way you wait is the way you work.
So what?
What can organizations do here? Are there ways of waiting more effectively? Is this applicable to the tech industry in any way?
First, it seems obvious that the technology sector is - whether it likes it or not - waiting for regulation. That in turn suggests that this is the time to build greater capability to receive it, and create a position that is - in Sun Zi’s words - unassailable. This extends from institutional frameworks to compliance practices, internal processes and education - and will ensure that when the regulation we are waiting for comes, we will be ready to receive it.
Second, there should be some value in discussing the set of expected tools that we should be able to work with in different sectors. Health, energy, climate — openly discussing which problems we will be able to solve with better tools and where we need to act now is a task the tech industry can excel at. In order to not overpromise and underdeliver, and believing that they have lost the mandate to speak about the future, many tech companies are not discussing the long future anymore. Talk about moonshots has been eliminated, thoughts about the long now are now held back — but technology’s mandate to change society depends not on incremental improvements, but the technologies we are all waiting for.
Third, there are some policy and political challenges that may actually best be met with waiting. The tech-lash criticism has now swung so far that some of the ideas and authors already seem to be losing favor - their lack of solutions, their obvious self-interest and the posing associated with them is increasingly clear. Waiting for some of the tech lash to just fade, rather than engaging with it, seems at least an option worth thinking about. It is a gunslinger duel in slow motion, where reaction may actually trump action. To provoke: it is much more important to build capability to receive the regulatory shift than to shift the narrative this late in the game.
On a personal note I rediscovered waiting while hunting. In one form of hunting you settle down and wait for your prey, just taking in and observing the environment around you. In the silence of the forest, waiting also allows you to both reflect attention inwards and rediscover the forest you are in - and that you have been in it all the time, to draw from Bishop.
A hunter’s wait teaches the art of discovering opportunity - and there is something in that we can all learn from. Who is responsible in your organization for waiting? A chief waiting officer - for the next big thing, as Jobs suggested - might be an interesting thought experiment.
As always, thanks for reading, and do share this newsletter if you liked it!
Nicklas