Why You Often Need To Start Slow In Order To Go Fast
Pixar founder Ed Catmull once wrote that “early on, all of our movies suck.” The trick, he pointed out, was to get them to go “from suck to not-suck.” It’s a quote that I’ve always loved not only because it’s honest, but because it’s so revealing of how the creative process works. Ideas don’t start out fully baked. They begin incomplete.
The simple truth is that to bring about anything new and different, you need to supplant something old and entrenched. Ideas that change the world always arrive out of context, for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. Breakthrough concepts arrive as ugly babies that need to be protected and nurtured, which takes care and patience.
That’s one reason that most organizations can’t innovate. They are designed to optimize, to reliably and predictably execute complex processes, which is a great thing. It takes talent, skill and dedication. However, it’s a different thing than creating something new. When you’re operating in the realm of the new and different, you need to move slow to go fast.
The S-Curve
One of the most consistent findings over decades of research is that change follows an S-curve, meaning that it starts out slowly, hits an inflection point and then begins to accelerate exponentially. The same research shows that the inflection point is usually hit when the participation rate is between 10%-20%.
There’s no need to try to convince everyone at once. Getting to that 10%-20% inflection point is what needs to drive your change strategy. Rather than trying to persuade people who are skeptical, go out and find those who are enthusiastic about the idea and empower them to succeed, so that they can bring in others who can bring in others still
If you try to overpower, you will begin to draw resistance before you’ve hit the inflection point and your effort will likely be sabotaged before it ever gets off the ground. But if you quietly gain support, without doing a lot to draw attention from detractors, you’re less likely to incur resistance early on and will have a much better chance of reaching the inflection point.
When we begin to work with an organization on a transformational initiative, one of the first things we work on is building a recruiting strategy for the initial group. Often, they know exactly who to approach. Other times it’s not as obvious. One tactic that’s often effective is to create an introductory workshop and then wait to see who comes up afterward.
What’s most important is that you identify people who are enthusiastic about the change you want to see. They will be the ones who will help you get to that 10%-20% tipping point that unlocks a cascade.
Start With #MonkeyFirst
One thing that change management “experts” often advise is to to start with a “quick and easy win,” which is usually a bad idea. The problem is that if you go around touting a “win” that others don’t find relevant and meaningful, you will lose credibility. There’s never any shortage of pet projects lying around and, if you get tagged as being one, your chances of success diminish.
At X, Google’s “moonshot factory,” the mantra is #MonkeyFirst. The idea is that if you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you start by training the monkey first, not building the pedestal, because training the monkey is the hard part. Anyone can easily build a pedestal. Doing that means nothing.
The problem is that most people want to start with the pedestal, because it’s what they know how to do and by building it, they can show early progress against a timeline. Unfortunately, building a pedestal gets you nowhere. Unless you can actually train the monkey, working on the pedestal is wasted effort.
There’s a reason that big projects tend to announce delays when they are supposedly 90% towards completion. They’ve spent the time racking up the “easy wins” and putting off the more challenging parts. That’s why it pays to move slow to go fast. You need to figure out how you’re going to get the hard stuff done or nothing else will matter.
Simulating Failure
In an interview with Harvard Business Review Jerry Seinfeld was asked whether a firm like McKinsey could make the creative process faster. “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way,” he said. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting.”
Anybody who’s been a successful performer, whether as an athlete, an actor or anything else, knows how important preparation is and, much to Seinfeld’s point, if you’re preparing right you experience a lot of failure. You want to explore every situation and simulate every possibility of failure, so that you can build skills and strategies to overcome obstacles.
Yet organizational dynamics often work against this. Projects are evaluated on the basis of timelines and lack of progress can result in a loss of confidence, diminished budget and interference, not only from above, but also from organizational rivals hungry for status and clout. Diligence, unfortunately, can be an easy target.
That’s why at Pixar, Catmull created an elaborate and structured feedback process designed to create safety around the development of new projects. Importantly, the number of people who can deliver feedback is limited to a small group of trusted creators who have skin in the game so that those “ugly babies” can be protected.
One of the most interesting things that Catmull had to say was that, although he had met an extraordinary amount of creative geniuses—and I would assume he included Steve Jobs in that group—he had never met “a single one who could articulate what it was that they were striving for when they started.” Yet still, they persisted because they understood the creative process is fraught with uncertainty.
Again, early ideas need to be protected. Go slow with them, at least in the beginning.
Embracing The Changemaker’s Mindset
When I first moved overseas in 1997, email was still relatively new. There was no social media. Mostly, we communicated by landline and that was expensive. You couldn’t always reach who you wanted to, so things necessarily moved slower. We had to be more thoughtful because we didn’t really have any other choice.
Today we live in a much more technological age, where many things move faster and we’ve come to expect nearly instant gratification. We communicate at the speed of light at negligible cost. We can order things online with little more than a few strokes on a smartphone and things almost magically appear on our doorstep.
Yet our brains still operate at the relatively slow pace they always did and there’s no indication we build trust any faster. So we essentially operate at two speeds. Our operating speeds move much faster than they once did, but human relationships still go at their turtle-like, ancestral pace. That’s why effective leaders need to master both a manager mindset, to handle operations, and a changemaker mindset, to innovate and take on projects that are new and different.
When you’re doing something big, new or different, you can’t assume an environment of predictability. You need to take the time to explore unknowns in an atmosphere of uncertainty. There’s simply no way to speed that up. You need to go slowly, figure out the stuff you don’t know how to do, examine possible points of failure and build strategies to overcome them.
As Jerry Seinfeld put it, when you’re in a creative process, “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way.”
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, and bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change. His previous effort, Mapping Innovation, was selected as one of the best business books of 2017. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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