We Optimized for Speed and Lost the Pause

I had all sorts of jobs growing up in Italy, from being a fitness instructor to picking potatoes in the fields near my hometown of Tione di Trento. One fall, I worked as a promoter. That meant standing in a store (usually a grocery store) behind a small folding table covered with samples of whatever product I'd been hired to promote. Skin creams, crackers, a chocolate bar, sometimes whisky. My job was to get people to stop, try the product, and hopefully buy it.

I wasn't particularly good at it at first. I talked too much about the product and not enough about the person. I'd launch into descriptions of ingredients and special offers while the customer was already edging away. But over a few weeks, I learned to slow down, to ask a question, and let people talk.

And that's when I noticed something that changed how I thought about the job entirely.

Many of the people who stopped at my table weren't there for the product. They were there because a human being was standing in their path, making eye contact, and offering them something. And in that small interruption, there was an opening for contact that the rest of their day didn't provide.

I met grandmothers who lived far from their families and hadn't had a real conversation in days. They would sample a cracker and stay for twenty minutes, telling me about their grandchildren, their garden, the recipe they were planning for Sunday lunch. I met divorced adults in a quiet state of reflection about their lives, who seemed grateful that a stranger was willing to listen without judgment. I met college students who were trying to figure out how to make friends in a new city and didn't quite know where to start. One young woman told me she'd been walking through the store for half an hour, not buying anything, just hoping someone would talk to her.

These weren't transactions. They were tiny moments of connection, made possible by a small friction point in an otherwise routine errand: a person standing in your path, offering you something, looking you in the eye.

I think about those moments a lot now, because most of them would no longer happen.

The disappearing pause

I order my coffee through a screen. I check out at the grocery store through self-checkout. I board flights by scanning a code on my phone. I pay for parking with an app. I buy books without entering a bookstore. I check into hotels without speaking to anyone at the front desk.

Each of these innovations is, individually, a small convenience. I'm not nostalgic for long lines or inefficient systems. But taken together, they represent something larger: the systematic removal of the moments where strangers used to encounter one another. The brief, unplanned, slightly inefficient points of contact that nobody designed but that quietly did a great deal of social work.

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg called these settings "third places": the cafés, barbershops, bookstores, and public squares that are neither home nor work but something in between: places where people from different walks of life cross paths, strike up conversations, and develop the loose social ties that hold communities together. Oldenburg argued that these spaces were essential to civic life and emotional well-being. And one by one, we've been hollowing them out… not by closing them, necessarily, but by redesigning them to minimize the very human contact that made them matter.

The coffee shop still exists, but I order ahead on my phone and pick up my cup from a counter without speaking to anyone. The grocery store still exists, but I navigate it with earbuds in and check out without a cashier. The bank still exists, but I haven't been inside one in years. These places have been optimized for speed. And in the process, we've optimized out the pause: the brief, awkward, serendipitous moment where two people who weren't planning to interact end up doing exactly that.

Why the pause matters more than we think

Behavioral science has a lot to say about what happens when people engage with strangers and what happens when they don't. The findings are consistent and, for many people, surprising.

In a well-known study by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago and Juliana Schroeder at UC Berkeley, commuters on trains were asked to either start a conversation with a stranger or sit in silence. Before the experiment, most participants predicted that talking to a stranger would be unpleasant: awkward, intrusive, exhausting. They were wrong. Those who engaged in conversation reported significantly more positive commutes than those who sat alone. They felt happier and no less productive. But here's the striking part: when the researchers asked a separate group to predict how they'd feel, they consistently expected solitude to be more pleasant. We systematically underestimate the value of connecting with people we don't know.

My own research points in the same direction. In a series of studies, my colleagues and I found that simply asking questions (showing genuine interest in another person) led to greater closeness and more positive emotions, even between complete strangers meeting for the first time. We had college students engage in conversations where they were instructed to ask many questions or just a few. Students liked their partner more when they received more questions, simply because it gave them the opportunity to share something about themselves. People who ask more questions are better liked, and speed daters who ask more questions get more second dates. Yet we're usually reluctant to ask probing questions, believing we're getting too personal and that we should mind our own business instead.

What this body of work tells us is that we are wired for connection but we are also wired to avoid the friction that connection requires. We overestimate the awkwardness and underestimate the reward. So when technology offers us a way to skip the interaction entirely (to get the coffee without the conversation, to get the groceries without the checkout line) we take it. Not because we don't want connection, but because we've told ourselves a story about friction being purely negative. Something to be eliminated. Waste.

What this means for organizations

I see the same dynamic playing out inside companies. Over the past several years, especially since the pandemic reshaped how we work, organizations have invested heavily in removing friction from workflows. Asynchronous communication. Automated approvals. Self-service tools. Digital dashboards that replace in-person check-ins.

Each of these changes is sensible on its own. And yet, in my work with leadership teams, I keep hearing the same frustration: people feel disconnected. Collaboration feels transactional. New employees struggle to build relationships. Trust is thin. The culture that people describe in surveys doesn't match the culture they experience day to day.

When I dig into what's changed, the answer is often not dramatic. It's not that something terrible happened. It's that the small, informal, slightly inefficient moments of human contact (the ones that never appeared on anyone's productivity dashboard) have been eliminated. The hallway conversation after a meeting. The lunch with a colleague from a different department. The impromptu chat with someone while waiting for the elevator. These moments didn't have an agenda. They didn't produce deliverables. But they were building trust, surfacing information, and making people feel seen.

Neutral spaces are settings outside the formal structures of work where people from different backgrounds, functions, and levels can encounter each other without the weight of hierarchy or agenda. Istanbul's coffeehouses in the sixteenth century were a version of this: places where men of all ranks and professions could socialize and exchange ideas without the constraints of status. These cafés succeeded, in part, because they fostered conversations across differences. The modern office used to have its own version (the break room, the cafeteria, the shared kitchen) but many of these have been downsized, deprioritized, or replaced by Slack channels that carry none of the same relational texture.

Not all friction is waste. Some of it is where the human part of work lives.

Designing for the encounters we've lost

I'm not arguing that we should go backward, that we should tear out the self-checkout machines and force everyone into meetings they don't need. But I am suggesting that we need to be more intentional about what we've lost, and more creative about designing it back in.

In practice, this means a few things.

First, notice what's disappeared. Before you can replace the informal moments of connection, you need to see which ones are gone. Ask yourself: When was the last time you had an unplanned conversation with someone at work who doesn't report to you? When was the last time a stranger made your day slightly better? If you can't remember, that's likely because the infrastructure that used to produce them has been dismantled.

Second, create friction on purpose. This sounds counterintuitive, but some of the leaders I work with have figured it out. They schedule "walk and talks" instead of Zoom calls. They hold meetings in shared spaces rather than private offices. They eat lunch with their teams instead of at their desks. They create moments where people have to be in the same physical space, without a task to complete, and let the informal conversation happen. One CEO I worked with replaced his Monday morning leadership call with an in-person breakfast. No slides. No agenda. Just coffee, pastries, and forty-five minutes together. Within a month, his team told him it was the most valuable meeting on their calendar, precisely because it didn't feel like a meeting.

Third, protect the pause in your own life. The next time you're in a checkout line, put your phone away. The next time you're waiting for a coffee, look up. The next time someone (a neighbor, a colleague, a stranger behind a small table in a grocery store) offers you a moment of contact, take it. You'll almost certainly enjoy it more than you expect.

We live in a world that is constantly asking us: How can we make this faster? How can we remove the friction? How can we skip ahead to the thing we actually want?

But the thing we actually want —connection, belonging, the feeling of being seen— has always lived inside the friction. Inside the pause. Inside the unplanned encounter with someone we weren't looking for.

I learned this standing behind a folding table in an Italian grocery store, handing out samples of crackers to people who weren't hungry. They didn't come for the crackers. They came for the pause.

The question worth sitting with is: what have you designed out of your life, and your organization, that you didn't realize you needed?