Moving at speed – but are you on the road to nowhere?

I love little quotables. One of my favourites is that a leader should only Move at the speed of Trust. In this family, Move at the speed of Relevance and Move at the speed of Failure are thought-provoking.?

But, science nerd that I am, I want to look deeper. Speed is how fast you’re going. Whirl a weight around your head and the weight will be going fast. But it’s also going nowhere. All that effort and where did it get you??

Velocity, on the other hand, is a measure of speed and direction. 100 km/h north is very different than 100 km/h south. Neither is better, neither is faster: unless you know want to head south, then very quickly there’s a 200 km/h difference between them.

It is easy to forget when we come to apply strategies and plans. With the new FY starting next week, I predict directional errors for some as new plans are interpreted as simply urging ‘faster Faster FASTER.’

I worked with a regulatory organisation this year who were always busy busy busy. One reason was that the team produced huge papers for Board meetings, regardless of the topic or need. Sometimes the Board required this but not always. Sometimes, the need was to create an expansive discussion on a strategic direction; the Exec Director wanted them to ‘make a powerpoint and chat’. But 20 years of acculturation to an idea that ‘Boards require full papers, or I'll be somehow wrong’ meant they wrote 60 or more pages. And then they didn’t get the direction they needed for the next step, because it landed as a piece of knowledge rather than an idea stimulant. A small directional error led to a bigger one.

The team were focused on the speed (rate of work needed to meet the deadline), not velocity (the combination of speed and direction; asking what was actually required). ?

Set velocity: direction AND speed

Before haring off with a strategic initiative, be a tortoise and think about it. What does the deliverable actually look like? What are its contents, qualities, benchmarks, assumptions? Have we defined and agreed them?

I’ve watched planning get hung up on the completion date. Whether it’s ‘this week’s sprint’ or ‘the next Board report’ we fall into the trap of structuring activities around completion time and often spend more time on setting and agreeing the deadlines than we do on determining what ‘done’ actually looks like.

Slow down and check the road sign

Keep pausing and checking: are we heading in the right direction? If not, you need to adjust direction. To do this without reducing speed, don’t push. Authority will always slow a team down. Instead, pull: be clearer on the destination, and let the team work out the course correction themselves.

Express direction in a common language

Heading ‘North’ or ‘East’ is pretty clear, and we have tools that can reassure us that we’re heading in the right direction. But ‘Growth’, or ‘Stakeholder engagement’ are not directions. We need to get our terminology straight and quantified so we all know the direction. Or effort is wasted.

And get straight what you mean by Purpose, Mission, Vision, Strategy. (I’ve seen Board-level documents use these as synonyms.) There are too many 'Thought Leaders' cooking in the kitchen and they've spoilt the linguistic broth. Express in language that everyone can understand. A great measure is to cascade it through the organisation and see what comes back. Do the materials and conversations bubbling back up express your ‘Guiding Star’ coherently, with just a little changes to the seasoning? Or are they reading like they're from different restaurants?

Speed isn't capability. Velocity is.

Speed at work is often mistaken for productivity. People can look at a colleague rushing from meeting to desk to meeting and say 'they're always so busy! They're doing so much!' - and often think they have to be somehow 'faster'.

I once had a large team containing someone that many thought a 'Plodder'. They might take a month to get something done, while others would bring me something in a week. But i never had to re-brief the so-called 'Plodder', but the apparently-fabulous Fast Dude needed to have another go, then another, then another. Equivalent tasks could take Fast Dude six weeks. And yet managers all around wanted Fast Dude. Take him, I thought... I'll happily keep the 'Plodder' that none of you notice is quietly achieving.

Don't believe the hare is faster because you can see it zipping about. Ask yourself: does the hare reach the goal?

Change speed and direction at the same time.

Take a look at this – the route taken by the Voyager 2 satellite:

?It passes close to planets, so close that in order the planet's gravity slingshots it forward. Too close and they make too tight a curve and may crash into the planet. Too far, and they don’t get their acceleration.

Great leaders work to be the gravitational slingshot when they think through how to run 1:1s, how to chair a Project Board, how to steer an initiative. You need to position yourself close enough, but not too close, that you can nudge its course and give speed. If you do it well, you’re get the work moving in a better direction, and faster. You’ll know you’ve got it right when the staff member begins to ‘move away’ from you and focus on the steps after the meeting.

Boards should try to give this to their Executives. Gift them a velocity boost – a course correction and speed increase. Be the planet that stays in its lane while the CEO zooms off with a spring in their step. If they leave the meeting flat, slower, and talking about coming back for more guidance… Something’s wrong and there’s a deeper fix needed beyond this issue.

Road to nowhere

This newsletter’s headline is an excuse to crowbar in my favourite piece of music video trivia. The video for Road to Nowhere (Talking Heads) features a tiny running man in the bottom right corner. It changes through the songs – backgrounds, real vs animated footage and so on. But at one point (3:21 in the official video) it’s a stop-motion animation of pale brown against a textured cream background made with a marmite/solvent mix painted onto on cheap bread. Because it was lying round the animator’s studio and looked cool. And how do I know this? The UK’s newly-launched Channel 4 did a music video day, showing hundreds of videos and documentary snippets about them over about 8 hours. A Youtube-style deep nerdy dive long before Youtube. The animator was featured and this – of all the innovations – was the one he went on about, while giggling on camera.?

Move at the speed of amusing yourself

Marmite – love it or hate it? This newsletter – love it or hate it? Hit the like button if you feel inclined and I’ll see you in another bi-week.

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Paul.

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