Volume 200: Speed Provides, Coherence Multiplies.
tl;dr: When speed is a given, coherence creates advantage.
As I research my upcoming book, one of the standout observations is how oxygen depletion at the highest altitudes of corporate leadership appears to have excised the capacity for intelligent people to think critically.
Now, this could easily be an obvious segue into the wall that AI model development appears to be hitting, but I shall refrain. Instead, I want to talk about something more immediate and practical, which also applies to AI: speed, specifically, the consequences of its fetishization.
If I were to highlight one single thing that has caused more dysfunction, failure, and inefficiency among the clients I’ve worked with over the past decade, it’s the fetishization of speed at the expense of all other factors. This form of leadership blindness then leads directly to, among other things:
Mistaking activity for progress: teams running around like chickens with their heads cut off, blindly doing stuff without ever having time to think about what they’re doing, and burning themselves out in the process
Shortcutting processes: directly compromising outputs and causing poor business outcomes. Leaders then question everything except their own insistence on speed-driven hacks as they push for even quicker fixes, which inevitably leads to a recursive doom loop that takes ten times longer than doing it right in the first place.
Diminishing returns: addressing increasingly diminished returns by increasing the velocity rather than changing the trajectory, and then wondering why it isn’t working. Speeding up something that doesn’t work anymore won’t magically make it start working again.
The biggest thing that worries me is the loss of coherence when you elevate speed above all else: The chaotic inefficiency, the constant reinventing of the wheel, everybody fighting for the same swimlane, and the crazy tangent’s autonomous teams often diverge across. Tangents that are sometimes downright oppositional.
We’ve all heard the management idiom that trying to change corporate direction is like “turning a supertanker.” This is a speed-based metaphor. However, in these days of devolved authority and autonomous teams, what if we’re no longer turning supertankers, but instead trying to “direct a flotilla of speedboats?”
So, I did some research around this idea, looking for evidence as to whether I might be right, or whether I was just making up pretty little mind pictures for myself, and here’s what I concluded:
Speed is the first-order constraint; coherence is the multiplier.
In other words, if you’re not moving fast enough to keep up with your market's decision cycle, nothing else matters but catching up. If you can’t catch up, you’re toast.
However, if you do move fast enough to stay within your market's decision cycle, the returns from increased speed diminish rapidly. Here, coherence becomes your advantage—it, rather than speed, becomes your edge.
So, what does this mean in practical terms? I’d say this. Speed matters up to a point, but once you reach that point, leadership should focus less on accelerating faster and more on ensuring everyone is moving coherently at the speed they’re already going.
If I were to use a further metaphor, if the business leader of the past was steering a single supertanker, the leaders of tomorrow must choreograph a flotilla of small boats. If I were to paraphrase strategy thinker David Teece through the lens of the last Off Kilter focused on Narrative as Firmware, I might suggest that there needs to be stability in narrative and adaptiveness in action.
To fully kill the metaphors for one edition, corporate leaders must shift their mindset from being ship pilots to a new role as harbour masters.