When Richard Jackson, a former senior UK government lawyer, puts his junior team through its paces, the process includes asking them to produce options for how to deal with a departmental crisis. He notes that for most of his staff, the option of “do nothing, yet” does not make their list.

Most people do not seem to think that deploying patience is a viable course of action at work. The word, which originates from the Latin word for “suffer”, nowadays tends to suggest passivity, forbearance, tolerance and even resignation. None of which are prized in the working world.

Yet it has a distinguished history, with the first known use of the phrase “patience is a virtue” in the late 14th century poem “Piers Plowman”, by William Langland. And patience was listed as one of the seven heavenly virtues by the Roman Christian poet Prudentius 1,000 years earlier in his book, Psychomachia (Battle of the Soul).