A week ago, I worked with Heads from all 18 United World Colleges (UWC), in Changshu, China. The brief was clear: define a set of core experiences that could be shared across the movement. Experiences that would matter to students, wherever they were in the world. Experiences that might influence beyond the 18 Colleges.

These Heads are sharp. They run complex boarding schools. Fast thinking is part of the job, and there’s always a new challenge to respond to. They balance on a tightrope between being guardians of a powerful mission and drivers, with their students and alumni and staff, of fresh ideas and vision.

But for a one-day workshop to succeed, we had to design a different pace from the one they live every day.

In the weeks leading up to the workshop, we listened. We gathered stories, surfaced patterns, defined the huge number of ‘DNA’ elements of the movement, and mapped out the tensions and emerging possibilities across the movement. It wasn’t flashy work - it’s the unglamorous plod work done behind closed doors. It’s not photogenic… but it helped us spot something else:

The slow hunches.

Steven Johnson talks about the slow hunch as the kind of idea that doesn’t arrive in a single moment. It lingers. It evolves. It might sit in someone’s mind for years, waiting for the right context, the right collaboration, or just the right question to bring it into focus.

That’s what happened here.

Most of these leaders had been sitting with unspoken ideas, hopes, frustrations, and ambitions for years. Many of these were not fully formed, not ready to act on. But they are the kind of thoughts that persist.

The workshop was designed to give them the chance to hone down all that language that clouds clarity, to bring those hunches to the front. To hear them spoken aloud by others. To test them. To build on them with others.

Those slow hunches became the ideas that shaped the outcome.

What came through was simple, powerful and concrete: a set of shared student, community and staff experiences that could shape identity, agency, and values across all UWC schools. There was no sign of the abstract, just concrete experiences that had been growing in the minds of this group long before the day itself.

From the outside, I’m sure it looked like a one-day wonder: all smoke, no fire; all thunder, no rain. But it worked thanks to picking up on the slow hunch, because we all took the time to notice what was already there.

When we’re under pressure to deliver something big, fast, it’s tempting to speed things up. It’s tempting to jump (too early) into solution-finding. But the best thinking often starts long before the meeting. And when you give those slow ideas the right moment to surface, the clarity comes quickly.

The trick is to build just enough space for the hunch to speak.