Benefits to moving fast

Speed is inspiring

Patrick Collison keeps a great list of "ambitious things" accomplished in impressive feats of time.

Moving fast sets a pace for others

As well as being inspiring, moving fast sets the benchmark for others and communicates expectations of what is not only possible but required. Running faster yourself makes other people run faster. Until Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile in 1954 it was considered impossible. Today more than 2,000 people have.

Moving fast minimizes exposure to volatility

Lots of things can go wrong, particularly in startups. These may be controllable things, or completely external factors. While time may be fungible, timing is not.

The longer a thread is left open, the greater the chance of it unraveling. Long-running processes, events and plans are subject to more volatility and outside factors than those which start and finish quickly.

Moving fast builds momentum

Speed compounds.

Being able to make decisions fast frees up time, and enables more decisions and actions to be taken overall.

Making decisions fast unblocks dependents faster, and the benefits to speed compound.

Many games are matters of speed

It's tempting to think of things like recruiting or sales as principled games in which the best offer received will always win out. In reality, the first offer received is often enough the one to get accepted. Many challenges in life that appear to be one thing are in fact speed games at the end of the day... at least for a significant enough proportion of their players.

Speed circumvents politics

Just as moving fast minimizes exposure to external volatility, it also minimizes the surface area for decisions to morph into status games, questions of social dynamics, matters of defensive memo-writing, or exercises in stakeholder consensus building.

How to move fast

Picking direction absent complete information

Effective decision makers and leaders typically have their own solid framework for decision-making, and are decisive. This means that they have a set of heuristics — developed, inherited or otherwise adopted — which enable them to act fast and with conviction. And they value execution in line with their framework. These frameworks may be formally expressed in a handbook; in dribs and drabs through strategy letters, blog posts, and in interviews; or informally held (perhaps even unconscious and unrealised). But harboring strong beliefs and operating principles that translate into a particular way of work (not necessarily the same one across different successful organizations) appears to be a commonality amongst top leaders.

Disagree and commit

A culture of moving fast doesn't eliminate disagreement, but it does enable progress to be made in the absence of consensus. For this to work all parties involved have to be willing to proceed with 100% energy and effort even when they have failed to persuade other people of their view, including when they may lack conviction in a particular chosen course of action. This requires high levels of social trust and a sense of intellectual security within an organization.