Go slow to go fast

“Execute with urgency.”

“Deliver with agility.”

“Bias to action.”

You’ve probably heard some version of this sentiment in your work life, as modern businesses have placed increasing value on speed. This is for good reason: we know that many industries are “winner take most,” and whoever builds that competitive moat first can come out on top.

But what if I told you that many modern companies miss the point completely? What can you do to model true speed and to help your team do the same?

Relative speed

You see, speed is relative. At the level of the market, where companies vie for traction and consumer loyalty, speed is crucial. In the words of Brad Porter, former VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, “speed and scale are weapons,” and Amazon used them to strike down their competition ferociously.

But at the human level, speed is a distraction. When people are all simultaneously executing with urgency and delivering with agility, we see that as massive productivity while overlooking the negative impact on “global speed.”

A brief metaphor, if you’ll allow me.

Imagine a large crew, perhaps 20 or 30 people, sailing a ship. You’re standing on the deck, and when you look around, you see everyone running and pulling lines and adjusting controls and yelling back and forth, the boom swinging powerfully to and fro. You’d be reasonable to conclude that this is an efficient and nimble crew.

But now imagine that you could fly above the ship and look down at it from the sky. On the deck you can see all the frantic activity, but you can also see the ship itself deflecting wildly in either direction, pointing north, then south, then north again, or sometimes going around in a complete circle.

That’s is an exaggerated example, but I hope it illustrates how “speed on the ground,” as we individually perceive it, may not reflect the kind of speed that has real impact for a business. The ship needs to make progress in a general direction, even if that means the crew has to slow down and talk to each other more.

Be durable, then be fast

To ensure that the overall direction is maintained, you must be thoughtful about whether each decision you make is optimizing for speed or for durability.

I like how the famed Google/Shopify performance engineer Ilya Grigorik put it:

When making a decision, have a meeting if you’re optimizing for speed, write first if optimizing for quality.

Good decisions require clear thinking. Clear thinking requires sitting with the problem to understand it deeply, which writing forces you to confront what decision is being made, the tradeoffs, and downstream second+ order impact.

Synchronous decision making optimizes for speed, guided by intuition, pattern matching, and mental heuristics. It seems effective because it feels efficient, but it does not yield same results.

Amazon learned early on that quality and durability of decisions is more important than speed, which led them to create the famous “six-page memo.” You can read what Brad Porter thinks about that in The Beauty of Amazon’s 6-pager.

The tl;dr is that, at the market level, it’s more important for an organization to be committed to impactful initiatives that have staying power than it is for everyone who works there to be running around like chickens with their heads cut off, glorifying “executing with urgency” and “bias to action.”

Act, of course, but act with the confidence you can only acquire with adequate thought.

Waivers, caveats, and disclaimers

Encouraging folks to prefer action over inaction in general is probably good advice, but I remain skeptical that it should ever be ratified (in individual performance expectations for instance) because it isn’t universally the right choice.

On the other hand, when is “be thoughtful about your actions” bad advice? Even when encouraging a preference for action, we would still expect everyone to be aware of the consequences of their actions, wouldn’t we?

Ask yourself these questions:

• When deliberating on an action, do I understand the trade-offs between more certainty/durability and more delay?

• If I’m not certain of the whole decision, how can I break it into smaller parts I’m more certain of?

• When I encourage my team to act, do they understand how to explore the trade-offs between speed and the durability of the outcome?

• What is our team’s (or company’s) philosophy of decision-making? Are we striking the right balance in our process?

As always I am interested to hear from you. How do you measure speed, and how do you measure effectiveness at different altitudes? How do your decision-making constructs help? How do they hinder?

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