Go Slow to Go Fast
It's counterintuitive. But it works.
It can feel frustrating when we want to go fast on a project and things take longer than expected.
The extra meeting. The extra explanation. The extra off-site. The extra hour adjusting the budget.
They all feel like they’re slowing us down.
But in reality? They’re the things that create speed down the road.
Clarity takes time.
Alignment takes time.
And most importantly, trust takes time.
When we skip those steps, we might move faster in the short term…
But we’ll create friction later in the form of misunderstandings and rework.
It’s not wrong to desire speed.
But too often, speed = rushing…
And rushing leads to lazy errors and preventable miscommunications.
Imagine it in real life
A software company facing high bug rates could try to ship a patch within four hours. But they’ve learned from experience that it might not be airtight. Instead, they take two days for an all-hands roundtable to align on bug-triage criteria and ownership. Two months later, bug count drops 65%.
A manufacturing firm adds a weekly 20-minute alignment meeting across product, sales and service teams. Within 90 days, time-to-resolution on service issues falls by 27%.
A mid-size services firm holds a half-day off-site to map client delivery processes end-to-end. Post off-site, their onboarding time drops from 15 days to 9.
It Makes Sense
To accomplish anything at scale, alignment is necessary.
Sure, if your child spills Cheerios all over the floor of your minivan, the fastest way to get it cleaned up is to grab the shop-vac and do it yourself, right away.
But business isn’t like that.
Business is like trying to get forty people to vacuum a thousand minivans… while blindfolded.
And that will happen much more efficiently if we take time upfront to align on vision and execution.
The Fastest Organizations Are the Ones That Slow Down First
They take the time to think, to listen, and to plan. They make sure everyone’s rowing in the same direction.
It’s not glamorous or flashy…
But it’s the kind of discipline that pays off.
Through helping hundreds of clients at STL, we’ve seen that the best way to go fast
is to go slow first.