A firm that accelerates is making a wager about which of its current decisions are reversible. Most firms wager wrong.
The reversibility frame
There is, in practice, a small subset of any firm’s decisions that cannot be unmade — hires at the top of the house, brand promises taken seriously by customers, technology platforms that other technology platforms have learned to depend upon. Acceleration over those decisions costs more than it appears to.
What slows down
The instinct, when a firm decides to move faster, is to compress everything. The instinct is mostly correct. But it is correct in a specific way: the firm should compress the reversible work and resist compressing the work that, once done, cannot easily be undone.
The bill
The firms we have worked with that paid the price for acceleration paid it years later, in the form of a senior hire that could not be unwound, a brand that no longer matched its customers, or a platform that had to be re-laid because it had been laid in haste.
The bill always comes. It is not always priced into the velocity calculation when it is being made.
Practice · Management