On Speed

Reference

CoE-0003

Category

teaching

Version

1.0

Speed is usually discussed as an efficiency. It is more useful to consider it as a moral condition, because of what it removes.

A decision made quickly and a decision made slowly may reach the same conclusion. But the slow decision has passed through states the fast one skipped: the objection that occurred overnight, the person who was consulted because there was time to consult them, the second reading in which a phrase looked different. Those states are not decoration. They are where most errors are caught.

Acceleration does not make people wrong. It removes the interval in which they would have found out.

What speed takes

It takes the objection. In any group, the person with a reservation needs time to formulate it, and usually needs to hear it half-formed before they will say it. Compress the meeting and the reservation is not overcome. It is simply not raised, and everyone leaves believing there was agreement.

It takes consent. Meaningful agreement requires understanding what is being agreed to. A process fast enough that no one can read what they are accepting has not obtained consent; it has obtained a click.

It takes the second look. Almost everything worth doing improves on revisit. The second look is the first casualty of a deadline, and its absence is invisible, because you cannot miss what the second look would have caught.

It takes reversibility. Fast systems commit. By the time a problem is visible, a great deal has been built on the mistake, and unwinding it costs more than continuing. Speed converts recoverable errors into permanent ones.

It takes the ordinary. A person moving quickly attends to what is urgent. What is merely important — a colleague’s difficulty, a small unfairness, a growing sense that something is off — does not announce itself and is therefore not seen.

Where the pressure comes from

It is worth being clear that the pressure is rarely irrational.

Competition is real. A team that deliberates while another ships may lose, and losing has consequences for people who did nothing wrong. Funding cycles impose their own tempo. Public attention moves and does not wait. Anyone who tells you to slow down without acknowledging what that costs has not been responsible for anything.

So this teaching does not ask for slowness as a virtue. Slowness is not a virtue. There are situations where delay is the harm — a treatment withheld, a warning not sent, a fix not deployed.

What the teaching asks is that pace be chosen rather than inherited, and that the choice be matched to reversibility.

The rule of the door

A useful test: can you go back through this door.

Where a decision can be undone cheaply, move quickly. Most decisions are of this kind, and treating them all with ceremony is its own failure — a form of caution that consumes the attention needed for the decisions that matter.

Where a decision cannot be undone, slow to the pace of the least confident person in the room. Not the most senior. The least confident, because they are usually the one who has noticed something they cannot yet articulate.

Irreversibility is the variable. Deployment to a population, publication of a dataset, disclosure of a capability, dismissal of a person, a public commitment that creates its own momentum: these do not have doors on both sides.

The practice

The Sacred Pause exists in this tradition for this reason. It is not meditation and it is not a technique for calm. It is a deliberate interval placed before an action, long enough for a second thought to arrive if a second thought is going to.

It works because the second thought usually already exists. It has simply not had room to surface. Most people, asked what worries them about a decision they are hurrying, can answer immediately. They were not unaware. They were unpaused.

Try the smaller version. Before sending, deploying, agreeing, or committing, wait for one full breath and ask: what would I notice if I had a week. Then go, or do not.

The practice will feel useless most of the time, because most of the time there is nothing to catch. That is the nature of a safeguard. You cannot tell whether it is working from the inside, and a safeguard that only runs when you expect to need it is not a safeguard at all.

A caution about this teaching

Speed makes a convenient enemy, and there is a version of this argument that is really an argument for the comfort of the person making it.

Slowness protects incumbents. It favours those already established, those with time, those whose position is not urgent. Institutions have used the language of care to delay things that people needed. That is a real pattern and it should be held alongside everything above.

The test is who bears the cost of the delay. If it is you, the caution is probably genuine. If it is someone waiting, examine it more closely.