 Do you sometimes feel rushed that you've lost connection with the things and people around you? The things around you are moving so fast without any clear goal or direction and that you're always chasing the next thing in order to be happy or successful? Well, what if I told you that you can actually be more productive and feel happier by slowing down and doing less? In today's episode, we're going to talk about the magic of unhurried as an approach to life in order to help us to stop living in a constant state of stress and feel less rushed. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Johnny and this is the service design show episode 191. Hi, my name is Marc Fontijn and welcome back to the service design show, the show where we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the hidden things that make the difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business, and of course our planet. Today, we're joined by Johnny Moore, an author, coach, and a founding father of unhurried. We often say that patience is a key quality of any service design professional change. Well, it just takes time. But having patience is easier said than done. Let's be honest, it's hard not to feel rushed when everything around us is moving so fast. There's always the next thing that needs to get done. There's always the next deadline which is looming ahead of us. We're under constant pressure to deliver. By rushing, we might feel that we're busy. And yes, maybe even productive. But being in this state also means that we're losing something very important along the way. If we strip back all the layers and take a closer look at what's really going on, we'll often find that many of our problems exist because we aren't connected anymore to the things and people around us. We are there without actually being there. Well, let me ask you this question. What would happen if for a moment you would just stop rushing if you would just take the time to listen with your full attention without any agenda with your guard down? Johnny started or rather stumbled in exactly this experiment a few years ago by using a deceivingly simple approach to guide conversations and build deeper relationships between people. Unhurried was born today. Unhurried is a growing movement and an approach to life that stretches beyond just conversations. Johnny recently published a revised edition of his book where he shares the most important learnings from the Unhurried experiment. If you stick around until the end of this conversation with us, you'll learn about the secret to break out of the ongoing feeling of being rushed, the profound transformation that happens when you start to unhurried. And what it takes to bring this approach into your work and life when being busy and getting shit done is the dominant story around you. That about wraps it up for my introduction. Now it's time to sit back, relax and let's jump into the conversation with Johnny Moore. Welcome to the show Johnny. Hi Mark, good to see you. Good to see you as well. This is going to be an interesting conversation and that's because you don't have a particular background in service design do you? No, my background I mean it's sort of related. I've worked in advertising and marketing and I did do a lot of physical design work but no I don't have a specialty in service design at all. I have a question which I've been asking to basically all of the guests on the show and that is when they first got introduced to service design. Now I have no clue if me reaching out to you was the first time that you got in touch with service design or was there a moment prior that you sort of stumbled upon the term? I think I've been aware of it for a long time. I kind of know what it is and of course in a sense everyone's an expert in service design because we're on the receiving end of it everywhere we go. We are on the end of allegedly designed services. Some of them design better than others. Yes, we're experts in services that fail mostly. So yeah, oh cool, I didn't know that. Thank you. Johnny, we have a lightning around. Five questions for you just to get to know you a bit better as a person next to the professional. I'm going to invite you to finish five sentences and I'm experimenting with these sentences. So let's see which ones give the most interesting answers. We won't dive deeper into them. So are you ready? Sure. All right, please finish this sentence. I've always wondered why. Always is difficult. I've always wondered, the always is difficult. I've always wondered why my dad was so bad at anything involving games or sport. All right, next one. Let's see if this one is easier. My greatest fear is? My greatest fear is going broke. Question for a follow-up. Next year, I hope to achieve. Next year, I hope to achieve being more of a fulcrum and less of a lever. All right. Question number four. If I could meet a one historic person, it would be? The philosopher John Stuart Mill. All right. And a fifth and final one. Our world needs more. Our world needs more compassion. Thank you. These were pretty challenging. I need to test them on myself as well. Good for you that you managed to get through them. Thank you for sharing. I feel that I didn't quite live up to the lightning branding, but I did get there in the end. We're prototyping. So now this is great. Johnny, let's dive into the topic of today. And we sort of already hinted upon this when you shared the world needs more compassion in our prep call you mentioned that we should have more faith and curiosity into our own lived experience. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah. I think it's something that has dawned on me much more in the last two or three years than it did before. I think I might have got the theory before, but it's taken me a long time to really get the practice that often when I'm feeling anxious or panicked, I need to remind myself to pay less attention to what the external world is doing and more attention to what my internal experience is and to feel what I think the philosopher Henri Bergson called the Ellen Vitao, the life force running through me and that I think runs through each of us. All right. There's already a lot to unpack there. You mentioned that you sort of two or three years ago, I don't know, rediscovered it or were able to articulate it. Could you take us back to that moment and share what happened? So it wasn't a single moment, but the best way I think I can describe it is I think I've tried for most of my life to fix external things, to be happy and regarded with an irritation anybody who suggested that, you know, I need to do some sort of spiritual practice. I didn't totally reject them, but I never quite believed it and maybe I just needed to do decades and decades of decades of trying to make myself happy by coming up with schemes for changing my external circumstances and I realized this really isn't working. I think I've exhausted this line of thinking. So let me try seeing what happens if I try any kind of practice, just get in touch with what I'm feeling and more and more I've realized this isn't a secret of life, but it's certainly helped me feel a lot more composed in the last two or three years than in the decades that came before, I'd say. And when you mentioned this isn't a secret, what are you alluring to? I'm trying to remember the context in which I said that, actually. So I think you mentioned the context, the way I interpret it is finding external things to fix in order to increase your happiness, at least that would be my summary. Yeah, I mean, I think what I realize is we're in such a consumer organized society, there are so many cues to invest our faith in external circumstances. So I'm saying to a friend the other day, just going to the supermarket, just going to the supermarket, you are actually bombarded with bright colors and offers of, well, this is discounted, this has extra points on your loyalty card, buy three of these and you kind of find yourself under assault, basically, with stimuli. And you switch on TV and the ads that come your way, basically say, well, obviously to be happy, you need to have a beautiful home with perfect daylight, an ideal number of children, incredible happiness and great design values. And it's kind of almost implicit in our advertising messages that we should be leaving these these lifestyles and that by buying this product or living in this neighborhood or this house or going on this holiday or flying this airline, you will become one of these happy people. And it's, it's a gigantic, it's a gigantic delusion. But it's very, very persistent. And if your guard isn't up, if you're not paying attention, it's so easy to get sucked into it, into thinking, oh, I will spend 10 pounds on a bottle of wine, because that will make me happy. And, and actually, the more I pay attention to what experience is actually like, I realize, well, not necessarily might not make me that happy. What would be more satisfying and possibly less expensive? One exception to this story might actually be wine that could actually make you more happy. But in all other cases that you mentioned that, that might, you're probably right. So before we explore this further, I think it would be good to also set the stage and learn a little bit more about the unhurried movement that you started. I don't know if movement is the right word, but could you, could you share a little bit about unhurried? Maybe it's a tremor. I'm not sure if it qualifies as a movement, but it's a tremor. The origin story of this, I have told a few times, so I'll try not to sort of labor it too much. But basically, two things happened to me around the same time, about 10 or 12 years ago. I just moved here to Cambridge, and I was trying to sort of network a bit, locally, which for someone like me is actually quite a hard thing to do. I don't really like networking events, but I would go to one every week. And I found it quite frustrating. It seemed to consist largely of middle-aged white men interrupting each other a lot, which I didn't particularly enjoy. And I started to wish for a different kind of format for meeting people. And then I remembered that one or two times, maybe three or four times in my career as a facilitator, I'd sometimes used a talking stick process with a group. And I thought, what am I going to do that? Why don't I host an alternative gathering half an hour later, just down the road in another venue, and say, if you'd like to come, I'm going to have this talking stick process. And we'll see what that's like. It's the opposite of what you're doing, really, because the idea of a talking stick, if you hold it, you speak. And if you're not holding it, you do not interrupt, which is a small but quite dramatic shift in the way that we're used to talking. And it went quite well. And I quite enjoyed it. So I did it again. And actually, what I found myself doing was then doing it every couple of weeks. At around the same time, I was having, I had coffee with my friend Anthony, and we were talking about our shared love of improv theater. And also the fact that we loved it when it's good, but we really died inside when it wasn't good, especially when we were performing. And, you know, I'm a very average amateur improv performer. I have good days, but I've been in some performances where I just want to die and curl up. And he said, and I will never forget this, he said, he thought the quality of satisfying improv is that it's unhurried. He meant, by which he meant that the actors aren't generating so many ideas that you lose the plot, or that they're tripping over each other. The timing is good. It's not necessarily slow, but it's unhurried. And there's a kind of relaxed quality to it that invites the audience in rather than the manic kind that it sometimes slides into under pressure. And I thought, that's a good word. And I started to think that might be a good word to apply to some other things as well. And the first obvious candidate for that with these conversations, I just started. So I said, I'll call them an unhurried conversation. That's not a bad way to describe them. And that's how the experiment began, really. And with the experiment, what does that look like? What is the experiment? Well, I suppose what I said was an experiment was I never sat down and thought I'm going to start a movement over the next 10 years to bring this philosophy to the world. I didn't even know there was a philosophy. I just felt like hosting this process and calling it unhurried. And having that word in my mind just kept me thinking about it. And so I just carried on hosting those conversations at a cafe here, you know, once or twice a month. And after three years, I thought, oh, I wrote a blog post about what I've learned. And it became quite a long blog post. I was quite surprised. Oh, actually, I thought, I realized it had shifted me. Hosting that process had shifted the way I work. It made me more comfortable with silences in less of a rush. It gave me a lot more faith that everybody in a conversation can bring something really interesting to it, that everybody's experience is potentially rich, complex, and interesting. And, you know, I had a few other things. I went, I went trying to articulate the whole lot list here. But after three years, I realized, oh, I've come up with this. And then I waited and wrote a longer post a year later. And so it started to sort of emerge slightly as a byproduct of this small gesture to hold a conversation that I thought would be satisfying. So there was never a grand plan. So that's what I suppose I mean by experiment. Well, it wasn't even a conscious experiment. It was just me. There's a French term brick a large tick tinkering. I love I love the term in in Dutch, we would call it Knutselen, or playing around, fooling around. So yeah, now Knutselen, Knutselen. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, tinkering. Chloe, that's even the better word. I think Chloe is the better word. So if any of the Dutchies are listening, help me here. I think Chloe and would be the better word. But anyway, before we explore this even further, how would you describe the current state of unhurried? It's just it continues to be a little bit of a, I suppose you could call it a passion project. It's just something that I've continued to feed. So I mentioned the blog posts bit later than that. My friend Viv McWhorter's encouraged me to turn them into a book, which I did. And then this year, I've revised the book and added a bit more content to it and added a lot more to it. So it's not it's now not just about that conversation process, but it's about a kind of a way of working a way of operating in the world where we essentially rush less and create more space to create, not just in terms of time by not rushing as much, but by by a more playful attitude to see more of what's possible. So it's kind of it's kind of grown. So I'm continuing just to keep, you know, explore it. I will probably revise the book again in three or four years time and say a bit more. I put up a website. So I occasionally do that. I host a month and a few people are hosting them now, but I host one once a month at the moment online. So I'm continuing to have it at the back of my mind is a way of approaching things. Has it expanded beyond conversations? Are you applying the unheard or have you seen people apply the unheard philosophy onto other areas? It has expanded. I think what I've done is I've realized that under that sort of heading would go a lot of other things that I have found interesting and satisfying in my work. So other processes where we rush less, where we're more playful with possibility. A lot of it I think is about paying more attention to what's happening right now in the moment and spending less time in what are often rather grandiose fantasies about the future. So, you know, I've kind of filled in the blanks around it. So it's more than just a pacing thing. A lot of it for me is also about thinking a lot lately about there was a saying in England when we used to write checks. Occasionally you'd get one sent back by the bank who'd refused to cash it because they said the words and figures don't agree. And a friend of mine adopted that as a phrase to describe when people are incongruent. So people go around saying one thing and saying these are my values, but they don't notice they're not actually living them out moment by moment. So there's this mismatch between what we think in this part of our brain and what we're actually doing and that some of the most powerful work I do with groups is just picking up on details of how people I feel like performing with each other. So I'm much, I think I like to think that on a good day at any rate I'm much more present to what is actually happening in front of my eyes and I'm less distracted by these sort of grandiose visions of the future which are a bit like those external things that we were talking about earlier. I'm really curious to hear from you. What have you seen happen when people engage in this process? So if it's an unhurried conversation, I always have a consistent experiences of turning up for them sometimes in a bit of a rush wondering why have I decided to do this? I'm not sure I have time for it today and then three or four minutes into it I go oh this is great. This is what I was missing. I didn't realize I was missing this contact because I think what can happen in an unhurried conversation is you actually just start to feel the presence of other human beings. You get a kind of sense of resonance with them because of the pacing in the space that I think we don't realize we're not getting it the rest of the time because we're rushing about trying to you know leverage each other and transact. So you start to feel I imagine the kind of connection that our ancestors might have felt sitting around a campfire when they'd finished their hunting at the end of the day where you're kind of connecting around just being with each other. So that's one thing and then as I sort of indicated earlier when anyone in the conversation shares some story from their life you can resonate with it. You can usually resonate more than you might expect with all these other human beings who you don't know. That sounds great. I definitely subscribe to this philosophy also in the circle community that I host, deliberate communication, intentional communication over instant messaging or being real time all the time. The questions I have around this and we would love to hear from you is I can see this playing out in an environment where there's quote unquote no pressure. So when you have friends around you at a dinner table, people don't necessarily bring an agenda. There is maybe more space to have this kind of conversation. Have you seen examples where let me ask this as an open question. What kind of environments have you seen this work and the implicit question here is does this also work in organizations, companies who are sort of always rushed to do the next thing? I think there's a real art to judging when to try this out in an organization. I mean in the coffee shop version people know what it is. They wouldn't come if they weren't at least reasonably open to the idea. They've got an idea of what the process is, so they've come wanting it to work. That's not an assumption you can make in an organization where people may not want to even be there actually or would regard this as a trick. Quite understandably they regard it as a facilitator trick to be sabotaged. So I don't use it a huge amount in organizations but when I kind of feel it's worth the risk I will try it. I think I'm quite good at judging when to do it. It doesn't go wrong when I try it because I think I'm careful about when I do it. If I try to put my finger on what's the judgment I'm making, I think if there's not like terrible politics going on where you sense there's something they're just refusing to talk about, where there's a degree of tuning into each other that's happened already, there's a certain amount of goodwill in the space, when it feels right I'll run it and then it can often be amazing what happens. It can have some really quite surprising experiences and it's just I do think it's, I do think that facilitation, my day job, is an art. There's an art but I can't write down and capture in a process about judging when to do something. So in the book I've mentioned, I tell a story of one time I ran it and it was a gathering about 20 business people in London from very different companies to try and organize a joint project which was quite a complicated thing to do in sustainable building materials and we're doing all right and I thought we'd try an unhurried conversation and that went okay and then just before a tea break one of the participants said something like this he said well when I arrived in London this morning I was very optimistic about what we could do here and I have to say at what are we 2.30 in the afternoon I'm feeling very disappointed. I don't think we've reached any useful agreements and I'm not sure where we're going. He said it very cleanly and then it was the tea break and I thought I've spent the tea break wondering if there's anything I could do about it and calming the client down who was panicking and when we came back my instinct was let's continue the same process not because I knew it would work but because I couldn't think of anything better and I had a feeling that if I tried to do something clever it would backfire and the most amazing thing happened the next person to speak was this guy's partner and he said something like this he said well Sven and I have decided to invest 250,000 pounds in an initial consignment of this so what I think must have happened is one partner had presented the problem to the group that had a chat over the break and made a decision to do something about it themselves and it just emerged out of the circle rather than being solved by anybody else and that's genius I love that's when that happens there's a kind of a beautiful serendipity to that that I think we're going to miss when we're trying too hard to leverage each other that's I love that story and thank you for sharing and I'm sure that there are even more stories in your book I haven't read it to be honest yet so this kind of emergence and giving this space for things to emerge serendipity and and not knowing where you'll end up what does that require from the participants it's it's classic you know ability to be comfortable with discomfort um I mean my mind went to what does it require from me if I'm trying to do this and it requires me to be patient with myself it requires me to feel my rising panic and then just like feel it rather than try and fix it um I think I think it means that I have to bring a kind of I don't know how to describe it a stillness if you like and and hope that people pick up on it I think there's something you know in the hosting role that you can do that makes people think this sounds really weird but he looks all right he looks like he's comfortable with it um and then they just have to be willing to try I think I mean I think this is true of any process you know there is a tendency in human beings to look at a process and instead of trying it to sit back and go well this won't work um you know to which I always want to say well why don't we decide whether it works by trying it for a bit instead of pre prejudging it um I suppose what I would add is a lot of people when they hear about it imagine it can't possibly work and are surprised to find that it does and that and that they're more comfortable with it than they expect it's a it's a deeply human process I think when you mention they don't expect that it works what is it that they're not expecting so sometimes you know when I'm when I'm doing the cafe version or the online version some person who hasn't come before might say at the start well this sounds quite interesting but I'm a very bad listener so I don't know if I'll be able to handle it or they'll say I'm not very good at stopping talking so I'm not sure I'll be able to handle it and it turns out that they are um there's something about it that certainly in the right circumstances touches something very profoundly human in I think most if not all of us um that we might look as if we're desperate to keep the hamster wheel spinning but underneath that apparent busyness many of us are actually yearning for a bit of space and quiet but you might not guess it from surface appearances and giving yourself permission to create a space I can imagine that having an excuse like participating in a session like this grants you that space and okay everybody else is doing everybody else is unrushing or slowing down so I might as well participate because I'm like if you're in an environment where everything is very high based on rush you have to be very courageous and brave to step out of that pattern on your own it's a yeah it's it's and it's it is I mean I think I think relationships are always series of small acts of courage um to keep to find the aliveness in any in any relationship so perhaps I've had a bit more practice because of this um it never feels completely safe I mean I think the online invasive versions are but whenever I run it in an organization it feels like a risk to me each time I'm never completely sure it will work so that's interesting could you share with us where do you feel the risk and again and what's the thing that you feel might not work so the risk is most organizations are going very fast most of the time are I mean it are in a way I think in a kind of permanent state of semi-panic um and you know I don't know about you but um when I'm in emotional distress it's not very helpful to come to me and tell me to calm down it's actually quite a provocative thing so to come in and suggest a slow process is quite a radical thing to suggest and needs to be done with some care and skill because otherwise it's actually rather unhelpful you know it doesn't I don't want to present this as if it's a criticism of what they're doing you know I try to make it an invitation I I think the way that I pitch it is designed to make it sound attractive but the fear is well the fear is that it it will it I say it won't work I mean everything works in a way it just doesn't work the way you're expecting but I suppose there's a danger that you know and it did occasionally in the past when I ran the process in an organization this is a long time ago it just didn't work it was just a long walk with silence and someone said I'm really uncomfortable I want to do something else and we did we changed so there's no guarantee at all that it will lead to the kind of brilliant thing that happened in the story I told you more often than not it's very satisfying but there's no guarantee and it's still a bit counter-cultural and unconventional it's it's not as safe as putting people into group discussions and asking them to come up with five answers on a post-it note yes I guess the thing we're not comfortable with is sensing and being present and being silent it it feels more comfortable to look busy and to write things down and to stick sticky notes on a wall right well that does feel productive and again more comfortable it's not per se maybe even often it's not the thing that needs to be done yes Mark and when you say that it reminds me of what we were talking about earlier about you know you the challenge in a in one of these in in an unhurried conversation or in any format that creates a kind of pause or space is you get what most people call it you can get what some people call an awkward silence of course the thing is it's not a real silence is it for most of us because immediately in our head it's going what's happening why isn't anyone saying anything should I know they won't oh god I hate this process our internal dialogue kicks in and you know I suppose the what I think unhurried has helped me to do is to be a bit more patient with the internal dialogue and not like shut it down but allow it and and go this is my internal process this is something I might need to experience more rather than thinking this is uncomfortable let's have a coffee this is uncomfortable let's write some colored post-it notes this is uncomfortable let's take some action in the external world yes and have you seen stages I don't know what the right word is but let's call it maturity where people get I don't can you get better at this I'm assuming you can but we're curious if you've seen any level of progression I mean I think what will happen is if you've done it once and it's gone okay you immediately feel more comfortable about the likelihood of it running again um I mean not not totally guaranteed but I do I come back to thinking it's actually a very simple process and it works well for most human beings and you just need a bit of I call it practice or I could just call it experience really I mean I've had the benefit of having hosted a couple of hundred or more of them so I have a lot of experience it doesn't mean I can guarantee it'll work but it means that I be more become more comfortable with it and for the online thing I'm doing you know there are people who've come to that many times so they arrive with a lot of expectation and goodwill when you say that people feel okay about it and that it works I know I'm sort of nitpicking on that term but I'm really eager to to understand that a bit more is it that people feel that they can gain a lot of value even though they're quote-to-quote again not doing anything except that they are listening and being present rather than again having to say something or write something down or is is that the transformation that happens the insight that emerges I think that's a big part of it I think there's there's various things that are happening with this process that don't happen in a regular conversation so if someone is speaking and let's say they're saying something that you don't agree with now in a normal conversation you would interrupt partly because you wouldn't want to look like you're colluding with their statement of the factually incorrect so you know in a normal conversation if someone said I'm exaggerating to make my point well actually it's the moon it's the sun rises in the in the west and it sets in the you'd interrupt otherwise you'd be thought to be going along with this nonsense when you can't do that you can go oh well I can just relax then because I'm not expected to correct them in fact I'm not even allowed to correct them and instead of being more stressful that's often less stressful it's like oh I can just let them talk and if you're speaking what what often happens in an unhurried conversation is as a result of the little talking stick thing is you get a lot more attention than you're used to and that's a very interesting experience because you weigh your own words more carefully when you know people are really listening so the funny thing is people worry oh what if someone grabs a talking stick and talks for an hour it's never happened in my experience and one of the reasons it doesn't happen is when you know you're being listened to you tend to become less repetitious less rambling uh because you're being heard uh you know in regular conversations you'll notice people repeat themselves a lot um I think it's because um they're fit they're afraid they're going to be interrupted so they have to talk quickly and they lose their thread and they gamble or or or they think people aren't hearing them so they repeat themselves so when we properly listen we create a very different kind of relational space fascinating and when you shed is I can I can totally imagine this happening and it's so interesting that when when you're not when you're not speaking to uh it's interesting to be heard or that you're sort of fighting for attention that like the attention is already established you don't need to speak up louder or say more or take more time because whoever speaks the longest is has the highest ranks like if all that falls away I can imagine that it yeah beautiful things can happen maybe that sounds a little bit uh um abstract but yeah the the dynamic completely changes yeah I think I think perhaps one of the most important things is in a normal conversation it does become a fight for attention and you know what will often happen in those conversations is they'll go at the pace of the most impatient and vehement person now I can't guarantee no vehemence in an unheard conversation but it's much less likely to happen have you so let's imagine we want to replicate this style of being in our own environment are there things that you would advise us to do and are the things that you would advise us not to do like yeah I think my number one piece of advice would be try try it um as my friend Viv says start before you're ready I mean maybe come I mean maybe come to one I mean I think it's something it's actually very helpful to experience it once with other people to to sort of get that the world will not swallow you up it'll give you a bit more confidence and then the process is dead simple it doesn't take a lot of explanation um so I'd say try it um keep the explanation really short don't bore people to death with all the detail uh and learn by doing that would be my if I had to whittle it down to one chunk of advice it would be that we curious have you seen examples where somebody participates in this kind of conversation but engages in it with an agenda so have you seen hijacking of these kind of sessions and so how do you act I mean I suppose you have to ask ourselves what hijacking really means um because my experience of it is that it doesn't it does feel like a very you know even-handed process that doesn't mean everyone talks some people are happy just listening or listening more and talking less um I well I found the story that comes to mind is and it's not quite this but I do remember hosting one here uh four or five years ago and somebody came as a participant for the first time um and wanted to introduce herself uh which we don't normally do I mean it's optional we don't we don't generally have a round of introductions we just get straight into it so she was a bit confused by that um and um she said to me at the start she wasn't sure it would work and had lots of questions and then halfway through she she she announced she grabbed the talking I've got to leave because I got a very important phone call and she never came back and I think she was expecting to carry on living in a rather high status world where you show off about how important you are so I think people who are very attached to being important um might get a bit might might be made very uncomfortable by it because I think it is a bit challenging to um to self importance um so yeah that's that's that's that has happened yeah that might be a very uh good disclaimer at the start of these conversations that it might be very confronting uh when you have to listen and sort of put your ego aside initially it might be very confronting at the same time you probably feel very liberated yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't even mention it in a disclaimer because I think it's it doesn't happen often enough to justify raising the fear of people um I prefer to go as if it's going to work that seems to be a good way of getting it to work it does remind but actually I've just sort of another incident that I thought was very funny I was hosting it and someone who's a coach a life coach really struggled just couldn't follow the rules just just really struggling with staying quiet how does this work in not quite getting it and speaking out of turn and and and she grabbed the talking stick and said why she hated the process and she said it's very very difficult to listen people because I'm a coach and I when people state a problem I'm it's my job to give them solutions very important that they get solutions and I smiled to myself and kept quiet and I thought well I know what my response is but I'll wait uh you know and then you know somebody else in the group was very funny and they kind of gently took their turn to slightly tease this person that that was a very controlling way of approaching people to think that they'll to approach another human being as if they're just a problem for you to solve is a really grim way to operate in the world um and I don't know about you Mark but advice is not something I you it has to be very well timed to be helpful to me and often when I'm especially if I'm in a distressed situation I don't want someone to say well why don't you I don't actually want a solution I want empathy and connection and care not why don't you do this this um this made me think about the situation where you approach these conversations from a perspective where there is no where there isn't anything to solve um usually a lot of our conversations especially in a business environment and maybe even in in many other environments as well is that we're always trying to solve something we're always trying to again we have an agenda um we have goals ambitions deadlines there's always something to get to there's always an unmet need and unsatisfied desire if you approach a conversation with no agenda like what what happens because that's what I'm sensing from what you're sharing yeah it's a great it's a really good question and I think it was one of the things that dawned on me doing the coffee shop process the the invitational process because I never set an agenda for those I can't remember why I didn't but I didn't and I realized oh these work really well without an agenda if people just come and share what is on their mind it's very satisfying much more satisfying than you might expect and that's a very radical insight isn't it into a world where people will say well don't go to a meeting if there isn't an agenda it's the definition of a futile and pointless meeting and I go and I go oh steady on now I'm not saying don't have meetings I'm not saying things must things get done there are meetings we need to have where it's useful to have a clear purpose and agenda I'm not saying that but I'm surprisingly satisfying not to have one and I I think what I see in organizations and I'm not not and I don't say an unhurried conversation is is the solution to this but so they're so busy organizing the future and making things happen that there's no time to connect as human beings and then when that's not happening everything becomes more stressful and panic laden and there's so much discomfort and fury and you know I do sometimes work with a team where they've gone away and they've been busy and they come in and they're fuming just below the surface and and it's only when you create the space to talk about what they're feeling not like how do we progress x but how are we feeling that you get that there's all sorts of unspoken anxieties frustrations but also hopes and dreams and appreciations and all of the subtle things that I think deeply we deeply need as humans the things again I am simplifying and I know this is an idealization but when we were roaming the savannah in groups of 20 or 30 we do about hunting and we'd sit down and tell stories at night around the fire we'd tune into each other we weren't so busy hunting because you could only hunt the day's food you couldn't store the food so you'd only hunt for a certain amount of time and then you'd have time to connect and and and relate as humans and if we starve ourselves of that apparently pointless connection we become horribly inefficient that's the paradox we become horribly inefficient and wasteful that's what was also going through our minds on the on this end of the microphone that making these human connections is probably one of the most productive things you can do but it most likely doesn't feel that way in the moment because it's very hard to create causal relationships between having a stronger connection with your colleague with your family with your friends and how that leads to better faster outcomes or you achieving your goals and because there is like that connection is very hard to make we just we prefer to to do the things where there is a very obvious connection yeah it's funny when you said making human connection I could just feel myself going oh just just having someone talk about it makes it feels like a relief to me so even though here I am championing it it's very reassuring to have it said by someone else uh because I do think it's precious and I do think it requires a bit of bravery to ask for it because it looks like we should all be rushing about that's what everyone else is doing um but you know when a group slows down enough to share frustrations but also to share little appreciations it's amazing the difference it makes when people just realize oh oh you liked it when I did that well that's nice to hear oh you liked this this oh you saw that I did that oh oh maybe you're not such a terrible person after all when we engage in this kind of conversation you mentioned that there is no agenda and is there an opening question or prompt did you often use so I want to sort of distinguish what I call the cafe version which is the invitational one but I say cafe or it might be online we're upfront about there isn't an agenda so or or I say if you want an agenda it's whatever is on your mind is the agenda share whatever comes up for you if that's in connection with what someone else has said great but if three people have been talking about world politics and climate change and you want to talk about your lost cat that's what you should talk about that's what makes it interesting is that we don't stick to a topic so what's what's on your mind that's that's the prompt that's the default now in an organization sometimes there's a bit more context um but generally I bring it in it's sort of obvious what the context is because I'll probably be doing it in as part of a series of things where there is a theme so there's an in kind of a a kind of theme but I I suppose I think what I've learned from doing this is there's a general rule as a facilitator when I give a group a theme or a question I often say but if that's not an interesting thing for you to talk about well you're really smart people so I you know don't get stuck in my cream or question if there's something you think it's more important to talk about then talk about it um which usually gets a laugh because I think I've just I've probably only articulated what they were going to do anyway I'm thinking about I've just thought one more thing I want to add very excitedly and I'm not being very unhurried I know as I say this but there you go we all teach what we most need to learn everything's connected so what actually is off topic um I remember doing a I wasn't it wasn't an unhurried conversation I ran a process for a pharmaceutical company and we did this a process called open space that allows people to set the agenda and it was supposed to be about business and someone said I want to talk about how do you deal with teenage children and like 20 people turned up for that conversation I thought what's that about have they got a is this because they're selling ritalin or what's this got to do with the business no it's just to do with the stress of having teenagers and it became a really powerful conversation about work-life balance where they could relate to each other and support each other and I thought oh what's the client going to think the client thought it was the best conversation he'd been to all day and it actually was valid to the organization's purpose because it allowed people to create real care and emotional connection which lifts the boat for other things so what is off topic if I was being really provocative I'd say that yeah that's that's that's there is a very good point I have to say that while you're sharing this I'm also reflecting on the circle community which I've had the pleasure I'm privileged to house for the last three years where we are having monthly discussions conversations and there is an interesting dynamic going on which I'd like to share where there is a topic there is a host each month but usually we don't announce the topic very elaborately and the thinking behind that is most of the value gets created in the conversations that happen on the spot so you might see a topic and think well this isn't relevant for me and then decide not to go but then you're missing out on the human connections that are being made regardless of the topic so what I'm trying to infuse in in in our community is that it's really like the topics are just an excuse to get together and to listen to each other and to share and if you if you get something out of it that you can use next day and you work that's great but that's probably not the biggest value you should be focused on does that make sense it makes enormous sense and if I was you know at the risk of being very radical I kind of think given given the crises that we face why can't we we should really get better at deriving pleasure and satisfaction from relating to each other so that we don't have to go rushing about consuming as much stuff as we are doing that if we are lucky enough to be to have our basic physiological and security needs met big if right but if we are lucky enough to be in that position then then let's get as much satisfaction as we can out of sharing each other's experience convivially in community because then we don't need to go rushing about buying things as much and then you know and that's I think given the the state of the planet that's something I think it's what's often missing from conversations about sustainability which sometimes feel like they're about doing without and and what maybe I've glimpsed from an unhurried is there's a there's a plus side to all of this is that actually if we stop burning up resources we can devote more time to relating to the pleasure of just hearing someone share their experience to if it's a funny story lovely if it's a sad story to feel the resonance to feel compassion and care love you might say for each other is that one of the most satisfying things that we can do while we're on the planet yes happiness is already it's around the corner and we don't have to do a lot to actually access it we probably should do we have to do less in order to make it more visible it again with the risk of sounding very abstract and conceptual I do I do really believe that Johnny we are sort of trying to wrap up here if somebody got inspired and listening to this story what are some of the good places they could learn more I suppose the easiest thing to do we go to the website which is unhurried.org where there's more information and stories and you know if you're interested in the book there's a link to the book as well that'd be one thing there's links on there to the to people who are hosting these including me so come to one would probably be the best thing and if you can't come to one organize one with your friends do the process that would be that that's where I would start or talk to me I'm quite a conversational character pop me an email I'd be happy to have a chat if that would be of interest to people I can confirm that that's the case it was pretty easy to get this conversation arranged maybe a final question and I don't know if you if there is anything but is there anything you'd like to revisit from the thing we just discussed in the last 50 ish minutes do you know I think we've really kind of covered the ground to be honest Mark yeah um yeah I kind of feel like I've said enough not in the sense of feeling satisfied with myself is like no I don't want to labor the point for people hopefully there's enough there that people can kind of kind of feel like oh there's something in this we'll see we just put it out there and then let the universe do the rest of the work it resonates yeah people who need to hear the message so let's see where it lands I like that principle let the universe do the work yes thank you so much for thank you joining us and sharing the philosophies behind an hurt and your life philosophies and your journey I'm really curious how it's going to evolve over the next years how the experiment is going to continue I know that I'm going to be more explicit about some of these principles within my community so at least you've inspired me to adopt some of these practices well that's lovely to hear Mark I've really enjoyed well I enjoyed this conversation I enjoyed the one we had preparing for it so thank you very much for having me it's been a it's genuinely been a pleasure how could you bring unhurried into your working life I'm really curious so please leave a comment down below and let's continue the conversation over there if you've made it all the way here and enjoyed this episode please do me a quick favor click that like button not to feed the youtube algorithm rather to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this my name is Mark van Tijn and I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me to grow as a service design professional please keep making a positive impact and I'll catch you very soon in a brand new episode of the service design show see you then