Festina Lente
Festina lente, meaning “make haste slowly”, is an oxymoron with roots back to the Roman Empire, where Caesar Augustus used it to admonish his generals against rashness. In the 15th century, the philosopher Erasmus wrote extensively on the phrase as a means of reflection and controlling passions. I do not remember exactly where I first came across it; but I do remember being struck by how applicable it was to the crime scene work that was my primary responsibility at the time.
Processing a crime scene can feel chaotic, with so many potential pieces of evidence, many of them unseen and transient, competing demands and calls for updates, and trying to remember proper processes and protocols. In this, you need a way to manage yourself to ensure that you get it done and you get it done right, but in a way that also keeps the pace of the investigation moving forward. While working scenes in Alaska there also always seemed to be the imminent threat of an incoming storm or the temperatures dropping well below zero, so we had to make haste…but we also had to do it right. So festina lente resonated strongly with me and has continued to do so ever since.
And it resonates almost perfectly with the research and writing of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, who brought together his life’s research in the epic book Thinking, Fast and Slow, in which he describes two distinct systems at work in our brains – Type 1 and Type 2 Systems. Type 1 consists of our automatic responses, where we see a pattern and we automatically react to it based on our past experiences and the mental models we’ve developed from those experiences. Type 2 thinking is slower, thoughtful, and more deliberate. Because Type 2 thinking is difficult, and uses a lot of energy, we spend most of our time in Type 1 mode, and generally this works, but the Type 1 System also is prone to biases and the potential for missteps.
Type 1 could also be described as “reactive” and Type 2 described as “responsive”. Often, reaction is what we need. When I slip on a wet rock, I want reaction. I don’t want to consider how to respond to potentially falling into a cold, fast moving river; I want my body to react, rebalance, and carry me forward to safety. No thought needed or wanted.
Conversely, sometimes reaction is exactly what we do not want. I was reminded of this a few days ago when I found myself standing in my driveway yelling at a moving van driver who was demanding $700 cash from me to continue unloading my belongings from the van. The problem was, I did not owe anyone $700 and nothing he had unloaded thus far actually belonged to me. I was angry and my immediate reaction was to fight back. That was precisely what was not needed in that situation as all my initial reaction served to do was escalate the situation.
I needed to make haste slowly. We needed to get this resolved, quickly, but I needed to step back to the place in my mind that would consider an appropriate response, rather than a reaction. A response that would recognize the driver was just as frustrated as I was. He’d just been hired to drive a load of stuff to New Hampshire, he probably wasn’t going to get paid for it, and now he had to figure out what to do with all this stuff in the van that wasn’t mine. In fact, it turned out that nothing in the entire 26-foot van belonged to me. When I finally got my brain to the point of responding to the situation in its entirety, rather than reacting to the anger I felt, things worked out better and we parted amicably.
To make haste slowly, to festina lente, we need both systems, and we need to practice effectively moving from Type 1 to Type 2 when we need to. In an interview, our Type 1 can be helpful, especially when we are well practiced and expert at the basics of interviewing, but it can fail us when we give a rote response that disregards the needs and values of the interview. A good example is when the interviewee tells us about something they have struggled with and we react with a formulaic “I completely understand” and to them it is quite clear we have no means or experience to completely understand what they have just told us. And now they no longer want to engage with us.
We often need to get through interviews quickly but we also need that voice in the back of our brain that lets us know when it is time to slow down, to focus, and to respond to the interviewee, rather than react to them. It saves a lot of work in the long run when you don’t have to undo the problem you’ve just created through a Type 1 reaction that worked in other situations but was not actually suited for this situation. You may totally understand when your spouse is frustrated that the dog won’t stop barking (because they almost never stop barking) and you can continue on in Type 1, but you probably won’t truly understand the litany of hardships an interviewee is recounting to you and that is the time to make haste slowly and to consciously switch over to your Type 2 system so that you can respond to them as an individual.
Festina lente will always get you to the objective more smoothly and more quickly than will simply making haste.
