RR#107 - The Need for Speed: A Business Myth Debunked

A popular influencer recently shared this on LinkedIn:

And yes, speed is a superpower. You’ll get results faster when you’re making the right bets, and learn more quickly when you’re making the wrong ones.

But speed and urgency aren’t the same thing.

Speed vs. Urgency

Speed is about how quickly you get things done—making decisions, implementing them, and closing the gap between starting and finishing projects.

You can proactively build speed into your business by doing things like:

• Clarifying goals

• Using effective project management

• Creating strong meeting agendas & cadences

• Hiring people with a bias for action

• Designing (and maintaining) the right core values

By no means is this list exhaustive. But you can take proactive measures to ensure you and your team move quickly and aren’t lollygagging around.

Urgency, on the other hand, is about the importance you assign to the things you’re working on.

It’s like finding a weighted average: speed is how quickly you solve the problem, while urgency is the weight assigned to each variable.

When everything is urgent, every day is a fire drill. It leads to overcommitment that stems from believing everything is equally important, and that leads to subpar execution and low quality standards.

It’s a subtle difference in definition with massive implications on your long-term execution.

 

The Power of Prioritization

The muscle to build in your business isn’t urgency. It’s prioritization.

Prioritization leverages speed and allows you to see what’s truly urgent—and what isn’t.

In our math metaphor, if speed is how quickly you solve a weighted average problem and urgency is the weight you assign to each variable, prioritization is the order of operations.

While nuanced, the differences between speed, urgency, and prioritization have a profound impact on your ability to get results over the long haul.

Learning From Experience

As a wildly impatient leader myself, I mistakenly believed that manufacturing a culture of perpetual urgency was the same as building speed. I thought prioritization was less critical if we just moved really damn fast.

But I’ve also experienced the fallout that comes from this approach, including burnout and high turnover.

Like any advice you get from influencers or gurus, context is king.

So, instead of building the muscle of ‘urgency,’ consider building ‘prioritization’ and systematizing speed into your business.