Since losing my position as a facilitator with MIT India due to a budget cut a month ago, I’ve made a practice of witnessing and observing the future that wants to happen, as opposed to forcing one into existence. It is hard to be patient in the midst of uncertainty. Interestingly enough, the role with MIT India has found its way back to me, as I’ve been asked to take on that position again. While that is a comfort, I am still feeling rather open, though, to whatever else might want to unfold. I’m interviewing for different roles, sending out proposals, and have acquired a few contracts facilitating leadership and innovation trainings with teams.

I’ve also been using some of my extra time to start making sense out of the research on hurry that I’ve been engaged with for the last two years, precepted by Robert Poynton, an associate fellow at Oxford Saïd. I’ve now got a manuscript in the works, which I’m tentatively calling, ‘The Urgency of Slowing’. I imagine it will be about a lost discipline that can change (and has changed) lives and organizations exponentially for the better. Although we might not usually associate slowness with innovation or leadership, one of my favorite findings is that throughout history this discipline has functioned as one of, if not the foremost, essential characteristic(s) in resistance to tyranny and as a precursor to social change and human flourishing.

Amidst this transitional space I find myself in, I’ve also realized that I’ve made an assumption: that while the work I do is obvious to me, it might not be to you. Which has sparked an idea to share a kind of open cover letter with you, or ‘unprofessional history’. I’ve written the following not so much as to impress, rather to convey what really matters to me - my philosophy for the way I live and work. Here it is.

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania as a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA), a sect of Christianity that emphasized the importance of ‘sabbath’ and, well, slowness. I used to hate Saturdays (sabbath). It was the day whenever I couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t play video games, couldn’t do anything fun. But as I grew older and was beset with long workweeks, I came to appreciate the rest day, one filled with spaciousness, where I could give myself permission to not work, not be ‘on’, rather to feed my soul. And ironically, today it has become a day of play. Where I create space for the things I love but find hard to engage with Monday-Friday. I experiment with the “Ethics of Doing Nothing,” to quote an old acquaintance, Andy Blosser, who’s written a book by that title. I met him at my alma mater years ago.

I still remember the day I became a resident advisor of my peers at Andrews University. It was the spring of 2010, and Myles Compton, a senior RA at the time, had just placed a gift in my hands. A Moleskine journal. He encouraged me to take it with me everywhere, write. So I did. And fell in love with the practices of noticing, journaling, and reflecting.

By 2014, I had graduated with my BA in English and Religion at Andrews University, with no intention of ever becoming a pastor. However, I was interested in doing ‘ministry’, just in a much more unconventional way. I wasn’t sure yet what that would look like. Today, I would say ministry, for me, is all about making humans ‘human’ again. More empathetic, non-anxious, resilient. While I didn’t have language for that at the time, it was alive in me. Over the next decade I would learn to articulate what I do via practice, practice. “We can’t know everything before we start,” one of my eventual mentors, Karen Tilstra, who has founded several innovation labs across the US, would tell me. In this life, we prototype. We experience and experiment. The learning comes later. There are no real experts. “There is no such thing as a legitimate anyone. We are all, to varying degrees, attempting to act a role while keeping our follies and wayward sides at bay,” the writers at The School of Life have expressed.

Being an ‘expert’ too often gets in the way of what’s needed. Jiya Manchanda, one of my mentees, pointed this out to me recently with AI-boosted research she recommended from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. Breakthrough ideas typically come from those on the fringes, the article concludes. “Where you sit matters at least as much as who you are.”

While some, like Jiya, wise beyond her years, set out in undergrad to go into the field of innovation, my story was different. It came at me sideways.

Between 2015-18 I taught English to court-adjudicated students at a high school and then was an editor at a publishing house. When I moved from the northeastern part of the States to Orlando in 2019, I crossed paths with Karen, who told me she wanted a storyteller to join her team at AdventHealth Innovation Lab. So I accepted, and there, became well-versed in design thinking and Otto Scharmer’s Theory U framework for leading change. I had the chance to scope, design, and facilitate dozens of projects and workshops, while capturing teams’ innovation journeys and writing and sharing those stories with AdventHealth Central Florida Division’s senior leadership team. 

Once the pandemic hit, some within AdventHealth were thrown into a frenzy, while many others had an opportunity to work from home, or ‘pause’. In time, our department was right-structured, and I chose not to reapply to work at the new iteration of the innovation lab. In January 2021, with the space created, I began to reflect on my experience. I considered the last project I had facilitated. How markedly different it was. AdventHealth had been speeding up, scaling, acquiring new hospitals, chasing a bigger bottom line by 2030. Which resulted in many internal teams feeling like they had no time to innovate. Like the culture had become more machine, less human. But the last team I met with was willing to take the time (many of which were 24-hour-on-call transplant specialists). They had been working through a difficult challenge for longer than they’d wanted and were rather frustrated. But they kept showing up, stayed in the conversation, and through a willingness to be vulnerable, honest, patiently endure disagreement, and lower ego, something strange occurred. They created something remarkably efficient, but getting there wasn’t.

Slowing is not nothing. It’s not empty. It can be a rich and fertile practice. It is a more organic way of unfolding ideas that comes from giving more attention to relationships with self and others. But you have to be willing to remain in the 'pauses' and not rush out of them. Feel the awkwardness, the anxiety. Wade into those waters a bit longer than you’d like. See what you find there. Many of us don’t do this kind of inner work because it’s hard. We are afraid of what we’ll meet in the deceleration. And we don't align our teams and organizations for these practices, because who’s got the time? And would there really be ROI? Shouldn't we just move fast and break things, doing more with less, as our business schools and corporations have long taught us?

After I left the innovation lab, I began taking on my own clients, guiding them in unhurried innovation efforts, leadership training, and pitching in as a designer. A few months before this I became a learning director and youth pastor at Patmos Chapel SDA Church, where I remained until the end of 2022. There, I created The Drip, a learning experience co-created for (and with) youth that saw our youth attendance grow from less than 5 weekly to an average of 30 and as high as 50. 

Toward the end of 2022, I founded and led the co-creation of Unhurried Design with Johnnie Moore, an approach to design that places emphasis on surfacing groundbreaking ideas more organically through forming and deepening relationships, adhering to parameters for less material waste, as well as other grounding principles. Unhurried Design is a response to the unreflective speed, dehumanizing efficiency, and disintegrating isolationism that too often bogs down organizations in their decision-making processes. Its intention goes beyond providing people with another framework for creating equitable and sustainable innovation, toward inviting each person to cultivate more of a non-anxious presence as a change agent for both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, while strengthening connections to self, others, the planet, and what they create. It is a way of bringing ‘sabbath’ principles into one’s daily presence and decision design.

Currently I hold radical innovation seminars on Unhurried Design at MIT xPRO, where I began working in the fall of 2021. Today I am fortunate to serve as the lead facilitator for the MIT xPRO Technology and Innovation Acceleration Program, comprised of mostly mid-career participants from around the world—ranging from executives, engineers, surgeons, and frontline employees, working for startups all the way through Fortune 50s.

Since I transitioned into facilitating innovation in 2019, I’ve worked with more than 50 organizations and thousands of people across six continents, teaching and guiding people and teams in their approaches such as design thinking, systems thinking, agile, lean, equity-community centered design, life-centered design, Theory U, DEI&B, and narrative intelligence to co-create solutions with more presence in the complex challenges they are facing. Recent clients have included Emeritus, Rotman School of Management, Axonius, The Common App, Rollins College, Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, the NFL, and ADRA. 

I’ve come to believe that the work of innovation is very much a form of ‘ministry’, too often neglected and misunderstood by those belonging to the Christian faith. I also believe slowness, while panned as a pejorative, is a vital pace for innovation, one which we need to experiment with more to create the future that is calling us. (Cal Newport suggests such a need in his newest book, Slow Productivity. As well as Steve Spear at MIT, and Gene Kim, emphasizing a need to ‘slowify’ decision-making in Wiring the Winning Organization, and Bob Sutton at Stanford, coining ‘strategic slowness’, in this article. Their work builds upon that of others, such as the recently passed Daniel Kahneman, who wrote Thinking Fast and Slow, and Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow.)

Some of the reflective questions I am holding as I continue to work with teams include:

What if forgiveness is at the core of leading innovation? 

What if ‘negative’ emotions prevent practitioners from designing with essential stakeholders, sometimes neglected and othered? 

What if soft skills are quite hard, never optional, and most important?

What if a richer understanding of our stories, about ourselves, friends, enemies, and the systems we create and enable can lead us to design a more beautiful world?

What if a single person practicing non-anxious presence as opposed to panic can unfold what's needed during these volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous times?

The enriching legacies of Miyamoto Musashi, Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, Teresa of Ávila, Henry David Thoreau, Søren Kierkegaard, Bell Hooks, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to name a few, might have something to teach us about the subtle, overlooked yet profound, creatively pregnant discipline of slowing.

These days, I seek to become more of a non-anxious presence by creating a ‘home’ for myself, within myself. For the last year-plus I’ve been a nomad, traveling between the States and Europe, most recently Arenas de San Pedro in Spain and Boulder in Colorado. Along the way I journal to process my emotions, practice breathwork to regulate my nervous system and attune to the intelligence in my body (not just in my head), read spiritual literature, write entries on my Unhurried Design and personal blogs (to bring what I am learning to those in my community, and learn from them in return), practice radical honesty and confession with a men’s group weekly, hike and run in nature to experience the healing and natural rhythms of creation, and participate in spiritual communities such as Boulder SDA Church and Pinewood Church whenever in Boulder, and a yoga temple outside of Arenas whenever in Spain.

 

Since 2019, I’ve acquired certificates in Storytelling for Social Change from the University of Michigan, Advanced Design Thinking from IDEO U, Leading from the Emerging Future from u.lab (MITx), Creative Leadership from Creativity Effect, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Workplace from the University of South Florida, among others.

 

Over the last decade my experiences have ranged across innovation, experience design, teaching, storytelling, facilitation, technical leadership, and pastoral ministry. And while I believe I bring a useful blend of skills to our rapidly changing world, don’t get it twisted…

I’m ordinary. I’m very much still figuring things out. I’m a work in progress. I don’t know what’s coming next. I’m accepting that more and more. Embracing it, even. And that’s probably my biggest asset.

“The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.” - John Naisbitt, Megatrends, 1982