Like many of you, I recently started to travel again. The experience has been a rich reminder of how doing something after a long break brings a whole new set of observations and insights. I call this experience “‘the clarity of distance”’ — when being far away from something, in time or space, helps us see things we couldn’t see before.
How this happens in the brain is intriguing. Everything we observe is linked together in our brains within complex schemas or conceptual architectures. The medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region located near the center of the forehead, is central in holding these connections together. Walking past a sandwich shop we see often, we might recall a friendly experience with the cashier, a favorite sign, or the way our child always picked the tomatoes out of her sandwich. If we come back months later, many of those connections have faded. Now we see a sandwich shop with signage that needs repair, a lack of healthy options, and an overwhelmed cashier. Getting distance from something allows us to see it with fresh eyes because the connections that have been made in the brain around the previous memories have loosened.
Many people coming back to work at an office right now are having a similar experience. After more than two years of working from home, perhaps you wonder why the employee parking lot is so far away. Or why the temperature is uncomfortably cold compared to home. Or how the sound of quiet typing is distinctly more calming than the screaming children you had to endure while working from your kitchen table.
This kind of clarity, in which we experience something differently after a break from it, is a valuable commodity that’s too often wasted. Going back to traveling again, one big thing I noticed over a few flights was, well, abject chaos. Twice, I waited on the tarmac for 40 minutes for airport controllers to find a gate to park the plane. One time, it took an hour to get my bags. Getting out of an airport parking lot (yes, that’s you, Miami) took 20 minutes, as a line of cars waited to pay an attendant instead of being able to automatically pay via machine.
As I pondered these seemingly disconnected events, my big insight wasn’t just to avoid airports and travel. It was the value of good management. It struck me that good management is invisible—things just work. We take good management for granted, only seeing its importance when it is absent.
Good management is also about leveraging the clarity of distance. We can only hold so much in our working memory at one moment, and when it’s full of trees, we can’t see the forest. Think about a manager in charge of assigning gates to airplanes. Because the manager is not focused on exactly where every plane gets parked, they can see higher-order patterns, and generate new solutions. Instead of just telling everyone to hurry up, they can perhaps put planes elsewhere that won’t need a gate for a few hours.
Having the clarity of distance also allows us to think more deeply about long-term consequences. At New York’s LaGuardia airport recently, I saw a sign showcasing the awards their new terminal had won while noticing I was using a lot of effort to pull my carry-on bag. A new carpet had been laid that was thicker than anything I was used to walking on. I looked ahead and saw endless corridors of this carpet and others struggling with their bags.
I tried to imagine the person who made this decision saying, “This lovely thick pile is so much nicer than the thin carpet we had before,” as they ordered miles of this unexpected full-body workout. A good manager would have run the decision by a small, diverse team with different perspectives: people with different schemas, who might instead consider how the carpet might wear, or what it might feel like to pull luggage or push a wheelchair along. Diverse teams harness the clarity of distance, and good managers harness the power of diverse teams.
To make sure managers have some clarity of distance, they shouldn’t be involved in every daily task of the workers they supervise, but instead, focus on the bigger picture. They need to take time to reflect on the process of work, not just the work itself. Put in reflection points, whether weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually, to help step back and see the patterns. For really big decisions, take a few days or weeks away from a topic before revisiting it with a fresh eye, as well as consulting diverse and fresh perspectives to find the best solutions.
We all need a little more clarity. Clarity is where our big ideas come from, it’s where value is created and big problems are solved. Clarity is an asset to manage. To maintain this asset, we need to make sure people take quality time off, have weekends where they unplug, and ensure there’s the time and space to step back from the day-to-day enough to see the patterns. Without people who regularly can see things with a fresh eye, whether at a sandwich shop, an airport, or in our organizations, we can never truly make things better.
David Rock is cofounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a cognitive-science consultancy that has advised more than 50% of the Fortune 100, and the author of Your Brain at Work.
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