Go Slow, Go Fast

I just finished attending a 2-day workshop on capital stewardship today. An internal company session for equipping leaders with a systematic methodology on managing capital investments in light of leadership behaviors, decision making process, and organizational capability.

During a series of business simulations, we were challenged to make good decisons upon a portfolio of project initiatives with financial consequences in the future, conflicting interest of various stakeholders, and needs to comply with regulatory requirements and environmental concerns. Within a limited time constraint, we were pressed to make various decisions.

One of the takeway nuggets from this excersise is Go Slow to Go Fast. On being confronted with pressing situations, in our daily life, we most often go fast trying to solve the problems. This is done without giving enough time upfront for some planning, process organization, and agreed approaches in cases of involving others in the decision making. Quick, quick, quick as timing is part of the game. At the end, we frequently end up with running out of time resolving the issues with a lot of confusing information as things do not get organized neatly and clearly.

It proves to be, on average in general, spending some time upfront on ways and approach to tackle the issues is contributing more to coming up with good decisions: things move faster at subsequent steps, information can be intelligently digested. Time spent is amazingly shorter than otherwise. It's slow at the beginning, but then it's moving much, much faster afterwards. This can be applied to, as simple as, our business meetings: spend intial time to reach an agreed agenda: points to discuss, process to resolve issues, ways to tackle disagreements....prior to adressing the subject matters.

In managing big projects, as we are aware but often neglect, spending enough efforts and time for upfront planning provides solid basis to execution that give more predictable good outcome. Re-work on construction phase is much more expensive than re-work on planning stage. And we seem to be frequently reminded: good planning with bad execution generates most-likely better results than poor planning with good execution.

But how often that we appreciate in performance appraisal for those already delivering 'good planning' (no execution stage yet) as compared to those already delivering some execution results?

Note: I am trying to be back on blogging -- reviewing/finalizing some unfinished write-ups, including this entry ...