Why slowing down first gets you there faster

Four partners launch a pilot: a municipality, a housing association, an energy company and a residents’ group. There is money for eighteen months, and the steering group wants first results in six. So every partner gets going straight away, each with its own way of measuring. A year on, there are four sets of data that do not fit together. Nobody can say whether the pilot works, and the follow-up is in doubt.

Speed was never the problem. What was missing was time at the start to ask what the partners wanted to learn together. The shared goals were in the agreement, but in words each partner read differently. The question came up anyway, a year late and with less money left.

National programmes often go the same way. The mid-term review is in the diary before the programme office knows what the programme is meant to show. So it measures whatever can be measured. Taking a few weeks at the start to talk about what counts looks like wasted time. Skip those weeks and you pay them back later, with interest.

Oddly enough, the private sector often handles this better. A family business thinks in generations, not quarters. An owner wants to hand the business on one day. So she takes her time over a new machine or a new customer. Around succession, a family can talk for years before anything changes. Startup founders learn it quickly too. With little runway, you cannot afford a measurement that tells you nothing. So they test small first whether a customer wants the product. Only then do they talk growth with an investor. Small businesses work the same way. When it is your own money, you know that rushing gets expensive later. Slowing down there is not falling behind. It is how you keep costs down.

Think slow, act fast. That is how we would like it to work. Thinking slow means making time for the questions that have no quick answer. What do we want to change, and for whom? Which assumption is weakest? What do we do if it disappoints? Acting fast means starting small afterwards, checking quickly what happens, and adjusting. The measurement does not have to be perfect. It has to fit the question you agreed on together.

Rushing is often a way of chasing certainty. A dashboard that turns green after three months calms the steering group down. Slowing down means letting uncertainty in: we do not know yet what to measure, so we talk first. That feels uncomfortable at a table that wants results. Yet that uncertainty is what makes you faster later, because you know what you are looking for.

We rush too, sometimes. A client wants a plan in two weeks, so we write a plan. We do not always say that we would have liked a conversation first.

We would like the first weeks of a pilot or programme to stop counting as falling behind. We would like a steering group to ask not only whether there are results yet, but also whether enough thinking has been done. Start slowly, and you can move much faster afterwards.