In a recent Business Week article, “The New Humble World Order,” my colleague Harry West pondered what it will be like to hop back on the economic bike from which we’ve just taken a tumble. The question may not be so much what kind of bike we’ll get back on after we dust ourselves off; but rather, what the road we’ll be pedaling down will look like this time around?

A return to the mega-highway speed of life with more fast lanes and high-velocity on and off ramps seems imprudent, although perhaps instinctual. Do we want something like we just had or something akin to the 1990s—a singularly insane period of time when we managed to create and then destroy more wealth than in the history of coins clinking in our pockets. An illusory and intoxicating time in most ways—and a time in which there was one speed: Faster.

During those halcyon but hectic days of the pre-dotcom bubble burst, I was writing for Fast Company where our daily mantra was the Hunter S Thompson prescription for life: “Faster, Faster until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.” We even drank from trough-sized coffee mugs emblazoned with these words in illustrator Barry Blitt’s hyper-stylized, graffiti-spattered pen. We were all about fast. It’s what we drank. It’s how we rolled.

Slow was anachronistic. You could say, almost a quaint and humble sentiment. It may seem a big surprise then that several years into the breathtaking, maddening but awesome pace of Fast Company, I found myself on a plane to Bra, Italy to write about the burgeoning Slow Food movement. There’s nothing quite like hanging with Italians to recalibrate your sense of time, urgency and immediacy. Literally. Folks at Slow Food HQ actually told jokes about snails and turtles. I observed the slow patience of some of the best vintners of the Piedmont region. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder and potent proselytizer for life thoughtfully led, was late for our scheduled interview. And not just by a few minutes. But by two days. That’s how he rolled.

What does all of this have to do with a new (humble) world order, falling off bikes and pace? Fast leads to hard falls and big crashes. It happened nine years ago—when the bubble popped and over $8 trillion of market value evaporated in a seeming instant. To offer some perspective, as Burton Malkiel does in his tome “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” this evaporation was “as if a year’s output of the economies of Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain, Holland, and Russia had completely disappeared.” That’s a big fall. The $12 trillion tumble of the past few months (and that’s not accounting for the $10 trillion lost in real estate) does more than scrape a few knees.

So before we get back on the economic bike this go around, it will be prudent to force to the forefront that humble and quaint notion of Slow and ask: What is the appropriate velocity of things? Because it’s only in times of forced slowness—slow spending, slow growth, slow recovery—that we have the time and hopefully the humility to ask about appropriate velocities: of markets, communications, relationships, production, supply chains, technology, global connectedness, growth—of companies and investment portfolios—of development and our own rabid consumption.

“We have lost our sense of time,” was the first thing Petrini said in our interview—the shot over the conversational bow those many years ago. It’s an even more urgent proclamation now. The brand of slow he was talking about doesn’t mean checking-out, off-ramping and becoming stupid. It’s not about a lowering of bars or expectations. It’s about control and consciously choosing the rhythms of life.
And this includes the rhythm of everything we do, from the pace of our own days to how we choose to grow our food or to invest our money. It’s about accepting a more natural metabolism.

We face a lot of broken systems that need to be fundamentally redesigned—from healthcare to finance, education to transportation. First this requires a redesigned collective mindset—what President Obama has been urging with his calls to accept a “new era of responsibility” and that we “put away childish things.” These admonitions urge us to downshift and think before we pass go once again.

Have you heard the joke about the turtle and the snail? In the middle of the forest, a turtle and a snail have a gruesome head-on collision. The snail is rushed to the emergency room, where a doctor asks what happened. On the edge of consciousness, the snail responds, ‘I don’t know, Doc. It all happened so fast.’

This is one of the jokes I heard at Slow Food—where some fast ideas have been spreading these many years. As we think about rebuilding roads, the systems we need to redesign, and the products or services we can create to meet a new set of emerging needs, let us not just focus on being “shovel ready” to go go go; but rather, let’s take a little time to root the idea of the appropriate velocities of things into the terrain of our current conversations.

Image: BeneToZi