Slot Machine Effect

You have felt Slot Machine Effect even if you have never read it. Reading it simply gives your experience a label and a little dignity.

This is one of those findings that improves manners. Once you know it, you judge others more gently, because you can see the machinery moving inside yourself first.

What this concept offers is a pause — one extra beat between what happens and what you do about it. Civilisation, someone said, is measured in that beat.

Watch a good tailor in a busy lane. He does not measure twice out of fear; he measures twice out of respect for the cloth. Teams led with that spirit rarely need scolding.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. The idea has done its job if, the next time it happens to you, you smile before you react.