Whilst I’m talking about the national museum in Singapore (or, more particularly, its restaurant!), I was mesmerised by one of the exhibits, Suzann Victor’s “Contours of a Rich Manoeuvre 2006″.Eight red chandeliers hung from a high ceiling. To quote the museum’s description:

Installed at three metres above the floor of the bridge and one and a half metres apart, each chandelier swings across the bridge’s width in sequence or in a staggered pattern. The lights on each chandelier intensify to maximum brightness on the inward arch and dim on the outward arc.

Every time one emerged from one gallery, to walk to the next, the chandeliers had swapped to a different choreographed routine: ‘Pairs’, ‘Tattoo’, ‘In Rank’, ‘Helix’, each combination swinging for thirty minutes.

But then I found myself on the bridge, looking up, and the exhibit was still. “It’s broken,” was my first thought - and then I looked at the placard describing the artwork. There, it was explained that, twice per day, the chandeliers performed a half-hour “break”. And, rather remarkably, this sense of quiet-where-there-was-usually-motion inspired a very deep sense of peace, calm, stillness in the viewer.

For a proposal manager, one of the bravest things to do when working on a longer project is to know when to stand the team down - to make them take a break, to send them home, even though deadlines are looming. There’s the ever-present fear that “we must keep going” and “we must be seen to be working flat out”. Yet taking that downtime can do wonders for morale, motivation, energy, well-being - and creativity. And you’ll be amazed at how the team more than makes up in the following days for what some might see as ‘lost’ time, both in terms of their output and (more importantly) its quality.