Principles

Speed is valued in business.

Faster to market.

Faster sales.

Faster development.

Faster hiring.

Faster automation.

Faster growth.

A slow company is often considered weak and a fast company strong.

But speed does not show whether the company is moving in the right direction.

A company can very quickly build the wrong product, serve the wrong customers, hire the wrong people, and automate unnecessary activities.

The greater the speed, the more expensive the wrong direction becomes.

Speed is an amplifier.

It magnifies both the value of the right choice and the consequences of the wrong one.

Movement is not the same as progress

A great deal may be happening in a company.

Meetings.

Campaigns.

Development projects.

New hires.

Software implementations.

Partnerships.

People are busy, and every week leadership can report on everything that was done.

But the volume of activity does not show whether the company’s core performance improved.

Did the company acquire more of the right customers?

Did profitability increase?

Did the customer reach value faster?

Did the company become less dependent on the founder?

Can the same team now produce better results?

If the answer is no, the company may be moving quickly without moving forward.

Speed easily creates a sense of progress.

That is precisely why it is dangerous.

Speed can be a way to avoid making decisions

Action feels like management.

When a problem arises, a project is started.

When sales decline, a campaign is launched.

When people are overloaded, recruitment begins.

When information does not flow, new software is bought.

When a competitor adds a feature, the same feature is put on the development roadmap.

All of these activities give leadership the sense that the situation is being addressed.

But before acting, the fundamental questions may remain unanswered:

• What is the real problem?
• Why did it arise?
• Which outcome do we want to change?
• What constrains that outcome most?
• Which activity will we stop because of the new priority?
• How will we know whether the choice worked?

Fast action can conceal a decision that has not been made.

The company does not yet know what it should do, but starts something to avoid standing still.

An unclear strategy makes every department move quickly in a different direction

When the company’s shared direction is unclear, every department creates its own logic.

Marketing optimises visibility.

Sales optimises revenue.

Product development optimises features.

Operations optimises efficiency.

Finance optimises costs.

Every department may move quickly and professionally.

The company’s overall performance may still deteriorate.

Marketing brings in leads that sales does not want.

Sales brings in customers that operations cannot serve profitably.

Product development builds features that sales promised to one customer.

Finance cuts costs where doing so creates more manual work for others.

The faster each part achieves its own objective, the stronger the conflict between departments may become.

The speed of an organisation is not the sum of the speeds of its departments.

It depends on whether everyone is moving towards the same outcome.

Before increasing speed, choose the right customer

A company can be highly efficient at serving the wrong customer.

Marketing finds them quickly.

Sales closes the deal.

Delivery handles their special requests.

Customer support resolves the resulting problems.

Everything works.

Yet the customer may:

• require too much manual work;
• buy only at a discount;
• demand bespoke solutions;
• receive too little value from the product;
• leave quickly;
• pull the product in the wrong direction;
• generate revenue but no profit.

Speed does not improve such a customer.

It simply brings more customers like them into the company.

Before scaling sales and marketing, the company must know which customer it can repeatedly create more value for than it costs to find and serve that customer.

Otherwise, the company is scaling its future problem.

Faster development does not fix an unclear product

In software development, speed is often considered a competitive advantage.

A new feature reaches the market sooner.

The customer gets a solution faster.

The team learns faster.

All of this is true when development is solving the right problem.

If the company does not know whom the product is being built for and which customer outcome must change, greater development speed means more features that later have to be:

• maintained;
• tested;
• documented;
• supported by customer service;
• integrated with other features;
• removed if necessary.

The cost of producing code falls.

Product complexity grows.

AI can make this conflict even greater.

A feature can be built quickly, but someone must still decide whether it was needed at all.

Development speed is not the same as learning speed.

A fast team is not the one that produces the most.

A fast team discovers earliest which solution genuinely creates value for the customer.

Automation magnifies the impact of the wrong direction

Automation promises to perform the same work faster, at lower cost, and at greater scale.

But automation does not ask whether the work itself is necessary.

It repeats the logic it is given.

If a sales message is irrelevant, it is sent to more people.

If the data is wrong, it moves faster into more systems.

If a process contains an unnecessary check, the waste is automated.

If the logic of customer communication is poor, more customers receive a poor experience before anyone notices the problem.

Before automation, the work must be:

1. made visible;

1. tested for necessity;

1. simplified;

1. linked to accountability;

1. and only then automated.

Speed is no reason to embed bad logic in a system.

Hiring too quickly increases organisational complexity

When work piles up, more people are hired.

But if the workload is caused by unclear accountability, a broken process, or too many priorities, new people enter the same confusion.

They need management, information, access, tools, and coordination.

The leader’s workload does not decrease.

It may increase.

The company hires faster, but its ability to make new people productive does not grow at the same pace.

Speed turns a staffing problem into an organisational problem.

Before hiring, the company must decide:

• which outcome the new person will create;
• why that outcome is not being achieved now;
• whether the work itself is necessary;
• which capability is missing;
• whether the role has genuine decision-making authority;
• who will help the person reach independent performance.

Fast hiring is not an advantage if the company does not know whom it is hiring or why.

Speed can conceal a quality problem

A fast-moving company reaches the next project before the outcome of the previous one is truly visible.

Sales closes a new deal before it is clear whether the previous customer was satisfied.

Development starts a new feature before usage of the existing one has been measured.

A leader hires the next person before the previous role has become clear.

A project is completed on time, but rework and customer support effort appear later.

Speed can produce a good short-term number.

The consequences move to another part of the company or into the next period.

The company must therefore measure more than how quickly work is completed.

It must also examine:

• whether the customer received the promised outcome;
• how much rework was created;
• whether the solution reduced or increased future work;
• what the actual profitability was;
• whether the knowledge gained changed the next decision.

Speed without feedback does not create learning.

It creates repetition.

Direction does not mean a perfect plan

The need for direction does not mean that a company must know everything before acting.

Especially with a new product, market, or business model, complete certainty is impossible.

Direction means that the company at least knows:

• which problem it is testing;
• for whom;
• which assumption is uncertain;
• which outcome it expects;
• how much time and money it is prepared to spend;
• which result will lead it to continue, change, or stop.

In this situation, speed is valuable.

The faster the company obtains a reliable answer, the less money it spends on a false assumption.

A company with an unclear direction performs many activities.

A company with a clear direction runs fast experiments that improve the next decision.

The right speed depends on the type of decision

Not every decision must be made at the same pace.

Some decisions are easy to reverse.

The message for a small campaign.

A limited process experiment.

The configuration of one tool.

These decisions can be made quickly, measured, and changed if necessary.

Other decisions may be expensive or difficult to reverse.

Entering a new market.

A major investment.

Replacing a critical system.

A long-term contract.

Choosing a key member of the leadership team.

For these, slower and more thorough decision-making is sensible.

A fast company does not make every decision quickly.

It makes reversible decisions quickly and irreversible decisions with sufficient care.

Much of an organisation’s slowness arises because low-risk decisions are subjected to the same controls as choices that determine the company’s future.

One clear outcome provides direction

“Growth” is not yet a sufficiently clear direction.

Does the company want to grow revenue, profit, market share, customer value, or its independence from the founder?

These may require different decisions.

If leadership has not chosen the core outcome, every activity may appear useful for growth.

More marketing.

A new product.

A new market.

New people.

New software.

Everything is moving.

The company does not know which change actually needs to happen.

One clear outcome helps determine:

• which work matters now;
• which bottleneck constrains it;
• which project must wait;
• who owns the outcome;
• which metric should be used to measure progress.

Direction does not have to describe the entire future.

It must provide enough clarity for today’s choices.

Direction is also a decision about what will not be done

A company’s focus is not shown only by its project list.

It is shown by its “not now” list.

If a new priority stops none of the old activities, the company is simply adding more work.

People’s calendars fill up.

The number of unfinished projects grows.

Everything moves more slowly.

Leadership may demand greater speed even though the problem is the volume of work and the absence of choices.

A clear direction states:

• which customer is not our customer;
• which feature we are not developing now;
• which market we are not entering;
• which project we will not continue;
• which exception we will not make;
• which good idea must wait.

There is no focus without giving something up.

Without focus, speed is merely greater effort from people.

How can you tell that a company is moving quickly in the wrong direction?

Warning signs include:

• more projects are started than completed;
• priorities change constantly;
• the volume of activity grows, but the core outcome does not;
• sales grow, but profitability falls;
• development produces more, but customer usage does not increase;
• new people are added, but leaders’ workload does not decrease;
• automation increases checking and rework;
• every department meets its own metrics, but the company’s overall performance deteriorates;
• leadership cannot name one main objective;
• no one knows which activity was stopped because of the new priority;
• deadlines become more important than the outcome behind them;
• employees are constantly busy, but important problems recur.

These signs do not mean the company should slow down.

They show that its direction must be clarified before speed is increased.

How do you give a company direction before speed?

1. Define one core outcome

Which change must be genuinely visible by the end of the next period?

2. Find the main constraint

What is preventing that outcome most?

3. Make the necessary choice

Which customer, product, process, person, or decision needs to change?

4. Decide what will not be done

Which activities will be put on hold or stopped?

5. Appoint one owner

Who is accountable for the overall outcome, not merely for organising activities?

6. Grant the necessary decision-making authority

The owner must be able to influence the main levers that produce the outcome.

7. Create fast feedback

Which indicator will show early whether the direction is working?

8. Only then increase speed

Automate, hire, develop, and scale what has a sufficiently clear value logic.

A good company does not choose between speed and clarity

Excessive analysis can be as harmful as thoughtless action.

A company does not have to wait until every risk has disappeared and the entire future is known.

It needs enough clarity to decide.

What is the objective?

What is today’s constraint?

Which assumption are we testing?

What are we giving up?

Who is accountable?

How can we find out quickly whether the choice worked?

When these answers exist, speed becomes a competitive advantage.

The company learns faster, corrects mistakes sooner, and reaches the right solution at lower cost.

When the answers are missing, speed only increases the volume of activity, costs, and confusion.

Speed does not rescue a company from the wrong direction.

It merely takes the company faster to where it should never have gone.

Mikk Orglaan

Challeng.ist