The pressure is real. The market will not wait. Competitors are not sleeping. Investors want to see results. So the message is: faster. More pace. No time for perfection.
Six months later: three projects stall at the same time. Mistakes made in the rush have to be corrected at great expense. The team is exhausted, quality suffers, and the supposed time gain has long since been used up.
The question is not “fast or thorough”. The question is: Where to be fast and where to be thorough? If you do not distinguish between the two, you will end up being neither. Pace is not an end in itself. It is a tool that must be used correctly.
A CEO I supported demanded “more speed in execution” from his team. Three months later, he asked me for an analysis of why nothing was moving forward despite all efforts. The diagnosis was sobering: execution was not too slow. Decisions were taking too long. On average, the team waited four weeks for approvals while working in parallel on three initiatives—none of which was prioritised. More pressure would not have solved the problem; it would have made it worse.
Pace and frenzy are often confused. They are the opposite of each other.
Pace means focused energy on what matters. Clear priorities, fast decisions, consistent execution. Pace comes from clarity. Frenzy means unfocused energy on everything at once. Constant changes of direction, rushed decisions, half-finished results. Frenzy comes from a lack of clarity.
| Pace | Frenzy |
|---|---|
| Focused | Scattered |
| Prioritised | Everything at once |
| Decides quickly, but deliberately | Decides rashly |
| Accepts imperfection strategically | Produces imperfection due to lack of time |
| Delivers results | Creates activity |
Organisations that confuse pace with frenzy confuse motion with progress. They are busy, but not productive. As John Kotter shows in his research on organisational change: urgency is productive; frenzy is destructive. The difference is not the energy level, but the direction.
Real pace does not come from more pressure. It comes from less friction and clearer direction.
There are situations in which pace is genuinely decisive. Recognising them is a leadership responsibility.
Market windows close. If a competitor is faster, the lead can become impossible to catch up. First-mover advantages are real. Here, speed matters more than perfection.
Crises require a response. If the business model is under threat, if clients are leaving, if regulatory changes are looming, waiting is not an option. In a crisis, a wrong decision is often better than no decision. Standstill is deadly. Acting quickly, even with incomplete information, beats perfect hesitation.
Momentum must be used. After a successful first phase, when the organisation has energy and successes are visible, that is the moment to continue. Momentum cannot be stored. If you pause, you lose it.
Decisions block progress. If teams are waiting, projects are stalled, and uncertainty is paralysing, a quick decision is more valuable than a perfect one. The cost of waiting often exceeds the cost of a suboptimal decision.
Equally, there are situations in which pace makes the problem worse instead of solving it.
When the direction is unclear. Running fast in the wrong direction is worse than moving slowly in the right one. Before you accelerate, it must be clear where you are going. Otherwise, you are only accelerating the burn rate. Anyone who steps on the gas without strategic clarity will hit the wall faster.
When mistakes are costly. Some decisions are hard to reverse: mergers, major investments, leadership-level staffing decisions. Here, thoroughness is not a delay; it is risk management.
When people cannot keep up. Transformation without acceptance is instruction without execution. If you move faster than your organisation can follow, a gap emerges between announcement and reality. This gap creates transformation fatigue.
When quality makes the difference. Client experience, safety, regulatory compliance: here, shortcuts can become more expensive than the supposed time gain.
When the team is already at its limit. Even more pressure on exhausted people does not create acceleration. It creates mistakes, illness, and resignations. Pace at the expense of people is short-term thinking.
The art is not being fast everywhere. The art is knowing where speed helps and where it harms.
An important distinction: fast decisions are not the same as fast execution. Both matter, but they must be managed differently.
A division head from the energy sector described the problem to me like this: “We need three months to make a decision, and then execution is supposed to happen in six weeks. People rush off, make mistakes, and in the end everything takes longer than if we had planned properly from the start.” This is a typical pattern: slow decisions are compensated for by frantic execution. That does not work.
Decision speed depends on clarity about criteria and priorities, availability of relevant information, leaders’ willingness to decide, and acceptance of uncertainty. Execution speed depends on resources and capabilities, clarity of responsibilities, process quality, and the team’s motivation.
The biggest time losses do not occur in execution. They occur while waiting for decisions.
Not everything deserves the same speed. A deliberate differentiation helps.
| Fast | Thorough | Iterative |
|---|---|---|
| Decisions that block others | Strategic course-setting decisions | Product development |
| Responding to client feedback | Leadership-level staffing decisions | Process optimisation |
| Corrections of obvious errors | Investments with long-term commitment | New ways of working |
| Communication in times of crisis | Changes to core processes | Technology implementation |
| Pilots and experiments | Cultural change |
The categorisation is not set in stone. But it forces a conscious decision: What pace is appropriate here?
Sometimes the call for more pace is the problem itself.
Faster masks a lack of clarity. “We need to get faster” is often a symptom, not a diagnosis. The real question is: Why are we slow? Missing decisions? Unclear priorities? Too many parallel initiatives? More pressure solves none of these problems.
Faster overloads the system. Organisations have a capacity for change. That capacity is limited. Anyone who ignores it does not create more results, but more resistance, more mistakes, and more burnout.
Faster prevents learning. If you only keep running forward, you have no time for reflection. Yet especially in transformations, learning is decisive. What works? What does not? What do we need to adjust? Without these loops, you simply repeat the same mistakes faster.
Faster signals panic. If leadership suddenly demands speed, the organisation asks: What do they know that we do not? Frenzy from the top creates uncertainty at the bottom.
Pace is a leadership decision. It cannot be delegated. Three levers are decisive.
Differentiate and create decision-making capability. Not everything has to move at the same speed. Define explicitly: What has priority? Where do we accept 80% solutions? Where do we need 100%? This clarity gives the team orientation. If decisions take too long, it is rarely due to a lack of will. It is due to unclear responsibilities, missing information, or fear of mistakes. Address the causes instead of increasing pressure. And communicate the why: pace without a rationale creates resistance. When people understand why speed matters, they will support it.
Remove obstacles and find the bottleneck. Often it is not the work itself that is slow, but everything around it: alignment, approvals, waiting times. Identify these friction points and eliminate them. The Theory of Constraints teaches: a system can only be as fast as its tightest bottleneck. Often, this bottleneck is a single person, a department, or a process step. Speeding up everything else achieves nothing as long as the bottleneck remains. Find it, widen it, and the whole system will flow faster.
Protect capacity. Fewer parallel initiatives mean more capacity for each one. Focus is the underestimated lever for speed. If you do five things at once, you do none of them properly. Accept imperfection strategically where it is acceptable. The question is not: Is this perfect? The question is: Is it good enough for the next step?
Before you demand more pace, answer three questions:
First: What exactly is currently preventing us from being faster? If you cannot formulate the answer in one sentence, the diagnosis is missing.
Second: Which decisions have been waiting for an answer for weeks, and what are they blocking?
Third: What can we drop to create capacity for what matters?
If the answer to the first question is “too little pressure”, take a closer look. That is almost never the real cause.
The call for more pace is often a reflex, not a strategy. It feels like action, like leadership strength, like urgency. But real pace does not come from pressure. It comes from clarity, focus, and removing obstacles. It comes from decisions being made instead of waiting. From priorities that are priorities, not just lists.
Sometimes that also means: slowing down to go faster. In motorsport, every driver knows: if you do not brake before the corner, you crash. If you brake, you exit the corner faster. The same applies to transformations.
The fastest organisations are not those with the most pressure. They are those with the greatest clarity. Look at your project list tomorrow: Which of the ongoing initiatives would move faster if you made a single decision that has been postponed for weeks? Make it.
Transformation fatigue – When quick wins become a permanent strategy, the organisation becomes fatigued. Pace without recovery leads to exhaustion.
Quick wins vs. sustainable transformation – The balance between rapid successes and long-term change determines success.
All Insights can be found in the overview.
Proven tools and models for self-application are available under Solutions.
If you want to take these thoughts further for your company, a no-obligation initial conversation is worthwhile.
