Productivity & the Diffuse Mode

The Power of Productive Distraction: Embracing Focused and Diffuse Thinking for Enhanced Creativity and Learning

Barbara Oakley, a systems engineer turned leading education and learning researcher (author of Learning How to Learnand A Mind for Numbers), tells a great story about how what looks like counterproductive distraction can actually be key to a productive or creative process.

She relates the visual scene of a chess match between the world-renowned grandmaster Garry Kasparov and a then much-lesser-known 13-year-old named Magnus Carlsen. The former seemed appropriately hyper-focused throughout; the latter stood up and wandered away from the board between moves, seemingly as interested in observing the games he wasn’t playing as in concentrating on his match with Kasparov. And yet, Carlsen played the world’s most famous player to a draw.

Oakley tells the story to illustrate the distinction between what she and others call Focused Mode and Diffuse Mode thinking—both of which are valuable and perhaps even required in learning and creative processes. Focused Mode thinking looks like thinking. As the name suggests, it involves concentration, paying attention, and what Oakley characterizes as “a direct approach to solving problems using rational, sequential, analytical approaches.”

Diffuse Mode thinking can look like a different thing entirely—but it’s a highly complementary one. Diffuse mode allows for processing to be done and new connections to be made, and it’s often best engaged when the mind is wandering and attention is relaxed. As Oakley writes, “[R]elaxation can allow different areas of the brain to hook up and return valuable insights. […] *Diffuse-mode insights often flow from preliminary thinking that’s been done in the focused mode.*” (Emphasis added)

The upshot here is that our best work might require activities that don’t look much like working—i.e., the thing(s) that we’re paid to do. As creative problem solvers and learners, this is where we need to give ourselves permission (and perhaps a bit of grace) to explore and experiment with the process, to consider what productivity and work look like when we’re actually functioning at our sustainable best—not simply performing the thing that looks like work. Maybe that means making time for a walk or a nap in the middle of the day; maybe it’s finally recognizing that the thing that looks/feels maddeningly like procrastination is actually the peculiar way that your brain moves toward insight/breakthrough/wisdom.

This is relatively easier to do for ourselves—should we be fortunate enough to have considerable latitude for experimenting with schedules and processes. It becomes all the more challenging when we’re responsible for the productivity or learning of teams. Here, we have to balance Focused and Diffused and direct and indirect approaches to work across groups of individuals who are likely to differ in their own specific processes.

The degree of difficulty here is surely higher, but the invitation remains the same—to let go of a monolithic notion of what work or learning or productivity “looks like” (along with some of the easy measurables that notion entails) and to instead feel our way collaboratively and perhaps clumsily toward something more human, more variable, and more organic but with a potentially much higher and more sustainable performance upside.

@Jeffrey