Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast: What SEAL and Delta Force operators can teach us about management

Special Forces operators have a slogan when it comes to urban combat: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” Modern infantry combat centers around mobility—if you can’t move you get pinned down, but if you move too fast, you get surrounded and outflanked.

An effective team will advance slowly but surely through an urban environment. If you look closely at how elite infantry move, it looks like this: somewhere between a walk and a run, underscored by quick but careful footfalls, with weapons raised while rhythmically scanning the battlefield in all directions. Each operator’s weapon covers a portion of the 360-degree environment so that any sudden threats can be quickly identified, called out, and eliminated. This whole formation glides from building to building like the proverbial tortoise.

Less elite infantry—especially the irregulars fielded by many modern militias—may move faster at any given point in time. They will often zealously sprint into battle and give the impression of momentum, but when they encounter resistance, they must take cover in a position they have had little time to assess. They may find themselves isolated with supply-lines cut off, with a poor tactical understanding of where they are or how they got there. If they manage to fight their way out, they will often charge yet again, continuing an ebb-and-flow pattern until one side (usually them) gives way. Like the proverbial hare, this cycle of sprint-and-recover may seem fast in the moment, but long-term progress through the environment is slow and plagued by unidentified threats.

Trading our SCAR’s and M79’s for Asana and Excel, there’s a lot this philosophy can teach us about managing a team. The “slow is smooth; smooth is fast” mentality can be effective in environments ranging from startups to Fortune 500s to the federal government. Specifically, it teaches us:

• Tactical victories can be strategic losses: Charging ahead like a reckless militia may win you temporary gains, but if you can’t hold them in the long-run, you are worse off than when you started. When starting a company or launching a product, tactical victories should be gauged by—and only by—their contribution to strategic success.
• A deliberate pace allows for seamless 360-degree threat assessment: Nine out of ten times, moving fast might work. An enterprise can go for weeks or months at a sprinting pace without encountering a kink, just like a SEAL team could dash through a city and encounter no resistance for a time. But all it takes is one threat—one fatal gap in your risk assessment coverage—to bring the whole thing crashing down. Forward momentum is rarely worth a substantial likelihood of catastrophic failure.
• Back up your battlecry: Sometimes berserker charges are the best tactical decision. Ask any Delta Force operator—they may glide smoothly through an environment, but there are times (when breaching a door, for example) that the more highly trained soldier’s advantage comes from his ability to overwhelm the enemy with speed and measured ferocity. But if you’re going to shout and scream and make a scene, you’d better be able to back it up with a strategic plan. The graveyards of Silicon Valley are littered with tech startups whose reckless advances onto the global stage got them precisely nowhere.
• Slow is smooth, but too slow is dead: There is a dark side to slowness: use too much of it, and you’ll be left in the dust or outflanked. “Slow is smooth” should not be used as justification for paralysis by analysis. The central premise of the philosophy is movement—movement that is considered but also constant and unrelenting. The voices in an organization calling for careful assessment should be valued, but they should also be balanced by more aggressive thinkers.

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Joe Indvik is an entrepreneur and consultant with a passion for clean energy finance, sustainability, and business operations. He is the founder of Rock Creek Consulting, a boutique consultancy that helps clients solve challenges in those areas and beyond. Prior to that, he co-founded SparkFund, a fintech start-up that provides streamlined financing for energy efficiency projects.

Photo credit: Black Hawk Down