5 Ways To Deploy Speed As A Competitive Advantage (without creating a culture of chaos)
Speed wins. But only when it’s purposefully engrained in an organization’s culture and workflow.
In an AI-fueled business landscape where technology and customer expectations are both evolving continuously, speed is the most powerful competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, in an attempt to move fast, many organizations end up moving recklessly. Strategy and priorities are unclear. Decisions are unnecessarily delayed. Execution is always under time pressure. The result is a culture of chaos.
The goal isn’t just speed. The goal is disciplined speed. This article outlines five practical ways leaders can empower their teams to move faster, make better decisions and execute with confidence, not chaos.
- Set Good Guardrails
Speed without guardrails creates chaos. The pace of execution is frantic. Moves are made without alignment. Decisions are made without complete information. The time required to reset and realign slows everything down.
Fast-moving environments require leaders who can set clear and correct guardrails for team members. If a task is between the guardrails, execute quickly. No leadership bottlenecks. If a task is on a collision course with a guardrail, team members know they need to slow down and seek alignment before charging forward.
2. Think Fast and Slow
In Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast & Slow” he introduces two systems that drive human thought.
System 1 is fast, intuitive and emotional. In contrast, System 2 is slow, deliberate and logical. Leaders need to bring awareness to which system of thought is needed to move fast in a given scenario.
While System 1 moves quicker by definition, an organization that consistently operates in System 1 will have a chaos culture. There are times when System 2 should be prioritized to ensure clarity around objectives. Insights and strategy require slower thinking, but they can reveal the correct path forward. Intelligence powers speed.
3. Collaborate Early And Late
Collaboration is best deployed at the beginning of projects to get alignment on guardrails, goals and roles. Discussions can be had around worst case scenarios so there is alignment around pivots and alternate plans.
The end of projects can also benefit from collaboration to ensure deliverables check all boxes from multiple perspectives.
Alternatively, when you try to deploy collaboration early and often, execution slows. Opinions differ. Roles become muddy. Politics creeps in. Decisions bottleneck. And most damaging, team members lose confidence in their ability to make decisions independently. Every task is delayed as it waits for group approval.
4. Build Stability For Your Team
Employees want to feel stable in their roles. Some leaders try to create stability by avoiding change and evolution.
But stability doesn’t need to be static or without motion. Speed can create stability if it is predictable and consistent.
Think about the physics of riding a bike. If you don’t move, you’re unstable. The same is true in business. If you’re not moving, evolving and pivoting to answer the demands of the market, you are unstable. Speed and momentum can create stability.
As a leader, you should be consistent with your work philosophies and your work pace. You should have self-awareness around executing with System 1 or System 2 decisions and be able to clearly communicate when thinking needs to toggle between the systems.
Before I stepped in as President of Squeeze Massage, I met with every team member and outlined their role in the changes that were inevitably coming. I wanted them to understand the volume of changes that we were going to be executing so when changes started happening day 1, they weren’t blindsided. If anything, they were empowered to be a part of the change. Evolution is the expectation.
5. Make It Exist First. Make It Perfect Later.
If the goal is perfection, the speed of execution has to be slowed to ensure every detail is correct. In this AI-accelerated era, moving slowly can be costly.
Let go of the pursuit of perfection. Launch with a solid B+ product and then ride the learning loops to improve as you go.
Today’s marketplace requires evolving continually versus annually or even quarterly.
Organizations that want to thrive in today’s modern marketplace can lean into speed as a competitive advantage. But in order to thrive, organizations can’t simply sprint blindly.
Leaders need to design speed into how decisions are made and work is executed. When teams have clarity around the goal, how decisions are made and when “good enough” is good enough, speed doesn’t feel chaotic. It feels empowering.
In an AI-driven world that will only move faster, the competitive edge belongs to organizations with leaders who can build teams that execute with purposeful speed.
