SPACIOUSNESS

‘Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.’

Winnie-the-Pooh, A. A. Milne, 1926

Across many areas of life, from education and health through to business and politics, we’ve become obsessed with the ‘doing’ mode. We like to keep busy in a world where success is measured and rewarded through meeting immediate, tangible targets. Pausing, stepping back to reflect on what this busyness is all about, is seen as a sign of laziness or inefficiency. It can also feel terrifying when we’re not used to it – it forces us to engage with who we are when we aren’t busy with our busy doing.

Yet our creativity, our understanding of the world, our important relationships, even our joy of living doesn’t arrive to order. It’s unlikely to be found at the end of a check-list, or squeezed in during tightly managed meetings, or on away days stuffed full of activity that deliver that familiar sense of busy worthwhileness, while we avoid those open spaces where doubt can breathe.

When we think back to some of our most important moments and memories, times when we have felt truly alive and when we’ve been flourishing, they are rarely found in our relentless doing but rather in the spaces in-between.

In the business language of my research, these more spacious moments show up when we are feeling psychological safe, when our deep listening is switched on and our speaking up is being done with skill. And it is in these enlivening moments that it becomes possible for us to be at our innovative best, approaching our attempts to ‘transform’ with wisdom rather than superficial haste. When we’re not chasing out tails ‘doing’, only then can we engage with the complexity of our ‘wicked’ challenges.

Of course, the doing mode is crucial and accountability for action essential. But if our ‘doing mode’ isn’t guided by a more ‘spacious mode’, we are likely to head in the wrong direction, make unwise decisions, cease to experience meaning in what we do, become increasingly isolated and joyless. And that would mean individual and collective performance will suffer, as people stop caring about and connecting with what they do and its consequences.

Having dedicated the last 25 years of research to dialogue in organisations, to our capacity to think, create, speak, listen, challenge, learn and experience together, there is one thing that has always been used as the excuse for why change in habits is impossible, why all we can do is keep on doing what we’ve always done.

Time.

‘Psychological safety is definitely important to me, but if I ask people to speak up, I’ve no time to deal with what they say.’

‘My team and their development is vital – but right now, we’re just flat out with trying to reach our targets. Could you perhaps just do a 30-minute webinar rather than the half day?’

‘Mindful leadership? Ah yes, we’ve ‘done’ that - we had a speaker at last year’s conference.’

‘Burnout is becoming a real issue. Do you have any quick fixes or top tips?’

‘People are really stretched so we can’t do the away days – we’re restructuring and there’s too much to do because we’ve had to let a lot of the team go.’

And so on. All variants on the theme of: ‘I’d love to change, but I’ve just not got the time.’

This cacophony of busyness reached such a level that John Higgins and I decided to engage deeply with it, become curious about what it gave people and what it cost them (ourselves included). In the beginning, people were quick to tell us about their experiences of compression, stress, burnout and lack of time but we wondered whether coming at it from another direction might shed a different light, so we asked them to explore the positive experience of ‘spaciousness’, rather than its absence, in life and work. And by anchoring our work in what people knew worked, and the difference it made to them, draw out practical ways for how we might regain the space to think, relate, create and find meaning in our lives.

In the summer of 2023 we began our research into the experience of spaciousness, running inquiry groups, carrying out interviews, embarking on action research, reviewing the literature and using surveys to generate quantitative data. And here is our first research report, published in January 2025.

There are two versions. The full report, unashamedly detailed and we hope, deeply thought-provoking. And, with the irony of this fully appreciated, we have provided the ‘mini’ report which is simply the contents list, executive summary and conclusion – for those who just don’t have the space to read the whole thing…

If there is one thing we’d emphasise it is this - our challenge is not one of time, although that gets easily blamed. Our challenge is attention.

Every day we choose what to pay attention to. Or rather, more often, we allow our attention to be captured by doing tasks. Whilst we must allocate some of our attention to doing stuff in order to survive and thrive, we’ve forgotten the power of pausing, applying a ‘spacious mode’ to ensure we attend to the right things in the first place.

This report is about how we can attend using both the doing and the spacious modes in order to flourish.

If you are interested in being involved in the second round of this research, which could mean you’d simply like to access our articles, or be involved in an inquiry group, or indeed run your own research with others on this theme, please contact John and I via this website.

“We know we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations – and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found.”

Jenny O’Dell, How to Do Nothing, 2019