SPEED KILLS, BUT WHAT ABOUT IN BUSINESS?

MOVE FAST AND FIX THINGS

Today, inspired by an intriguing book, I’ll touch on a subject I consider important. Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems is here to help you manage your work more effectively and guide you through the journey of organizational change.

The authors define leadership as “imperfect people leading imperfect people.” They emphasize that while every organization has its inherent flaws, there is always room for improvement.

The authors, Frances Frei, a renowned expert in organizational change and transformation and a professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School, and Anne Morriss, a leadership coach and founder of The Leadership Consortium (TLC), assist leaders in achieving their full potential. Known for her work in navigating Uber’s leadership crisis, Frei highlights excellence in strategy, operations, and culture. Her books provide practical guides to fostering swift and effective transformation. Morriss, with over 20 years of experience in mission-driven initiatives, is an entrepreneur and leadership coach who leads global projects on leadership and cultural change, assisting leaders and change-makers to realize their full potential. As the founder of The Leadership Consortium, she has spent the last two decades building and managing mission-driven initiatives and collaborating with leaders across various sectors, from tech entrepreneurs to public sector executives.

Reading this book alone won’t cut it; you need to put these ideas into action, test them, and apply them both in your personal life and at work. In their previous book, Unleashed, the authors noted that supporting others in leadership is not merely a style—it’s critical for success. In this book, the authors discuss how to practice “empowering leadership” and achieve quick results by applying these principles in practice. It’s truly a must-read.

To give you a real-life example, let me tell you about “HALLEY”—the story of young Murat, still going strong and sitting on the shelves for you to savor.

 

The book starts with a premise: while speed often has a notorious image in business, this view may be misguided. The authors question the popular “Move fast and break things” motto from Meta, arguing that it’s not always a choice between speed and caring for people. Their suggestion? You don’t have to choose. They believe that the most successful leaders are those who address problems quickly, while also taking responsibility for the success and well-being of their customers, employees, and shareholders.

 

These types of leaders prioritize earning the trust of their teams while making rapid decisions and taking swift actions, bringing stakeholders along with them. Balancing speed with trust is essential. This approach allows a company to progress without falling into any of the four potential paths: Accelerated Excellence, Responsible Management, Careless Destruction, or Inevitable Downfall.

 

The book examines how speed and trust are inextricably linked and the profound impact this synergy can have on leadership. As the authors highlight, trust not only accelerates change but also ensures its lasting impact. This book serves as a guide for anyone looking to boost their problem-solving speed.

 

If you’re looking to balance speed and trust while transforming your organization with agility and impact, the authors have outlined steps to achieve this in just a week. In my view, though, depending on your organization’s size, these steps could span weeks or even months. Yet, never underestimate the importance of daily operations that drive a company’s success.

 

• Phase One: Identify the real problem.
• Phase Two: Build trust.
• Phase Three: Seek new allies and evaluate diverse perspectives.
• Phase Four: Craft a compelling story and shape your change narrative.
• Phase Five: Execute the plan swiftly and empower those around you.

 

I follow a similar process while making GOYA, setting a clear objective both during and even before the process—often a business goal—that ultimately leads to a new lesson learned or a problem solved.

 

Phase One: Identify the Real Problem

 

Any Monday can mark the beginning of your journey toward organizational change. Don’t wait for the start of the year or your annual meeting; instead, make the most of Monday, a weekly opportunity for renewal. The goal of this first phase is to identify the primary obstacle on your path to success and communicate it.

 

Although many leaders may already have an understanding of the issue, this phase calls for challenging assumptions and reassessing organizational narratives.

 

The authors recommend leaders take the following steps on Mondays:

 

1. Be Curious: Curiosity in the workplace has many positive effects, from reducing errors to improving innovation, reducing conflict, enhancing communication, and boosting overall performance. However, curiosity and judgment cannot coexist; therefore, leaders should set aside judgments and cultivate curiosity.

 

2. Create a Problem-Solving Team: Assemble a team that values empathy, observation, and the experiences of others. This group will help provide a clearer picture of the organization. This team must represent a range of functional and demographic diversity.

 

3. Investigate Barriers: Identify the key obstacles hindering the organization’s success. Formulate questions that explore what employees value or dislike, who your top customers are, which opportunities are most effectively seized, and how the organization best handles threats.

 

4. Select a Problem to Solve: Work with the team to choose the most urgent and critical issue. This step is crucial to make the current state “unacceptable” and establish a starting point for change.

 

5. Gather Data: Collect the organization’s current data relevant to the problem. The required data to address the issue can be found across various sources.

 

6. Build a Case with the Data: Identify the problem’s source and develop solution options based on existing data. In this process, analyze the data and look for patterns to approach the problem systematically.

 

7. Deepen your understanding of the problem: Engage with the stakeholders most impacted by the problem to gather more insights. Open and honest communication with all relevant parties is essential.

 

8. Decide What to Improve This Week: Based on the data and insights gathered, determine which problem needs solving first. This problem should represent the organization’s most significant obstacle and require immediate action.

 

Phase Two: Build Trust

 

On Tuesdays, leaders turn their focus to building trust. The goal for the day is to create an “Adequate Plan” that will rebuild and reinforce trust with stakeholders. Embracing mistakes—viewing them as opportunities for learning rather than setbacks—is key to this journey of success.

 

Tuesday’s agenda:

 

1. Don’t Fear Mistakes: Initiatives such as the “Fail Wall,” where employees openly share their mistakes, help speed up learning. Companies like Google acknowledge that 80-90% of controlled experiments fail, yet they advance by leveraging the insights these failures provide.

 

2. Identify the Trust Issue: Organizations often lose trust due to a lack of authenticity, empathy, or logic. When stakeholders doubt a company’s reliability in these specific areas, trust erodes. Following a well-defined problem statement, it’s crucial to pinpoint the source of the breakdown in trust and develop pilot solutions to address it.

 

3. Examine Your Business Model: Logical inconsistencies in a business model have the potential to block the fulfillment of stakeholder needs. Reviewing and enhancing the model can help build stronger trust.

 

4. Nurture Your Employees: Identify skill gaps within the organization and focus on bridging them by investing in your employees’ development. Investing in skills leads to greater employee loyalty, commitment, and job satisfaction.

 

5. Alter Your Operations: Redesigning workflows, roles, and responsibilities can boost organizational motivation, especially with advances like AI integration.

 

6. Identify New Talents: Evaluate the potential of your current workforce and recognize outstanding employees. Internal promotions often bring greater efficiency and increase employee engagement more than external hires.

 

7. Make Tough Calls Without Hesitation: Parting ways with employees who contradict the organization’s needs is crucial for building and maintaining trust. These decisions clarify job expectations and set performance standards.

 

8. Prioritize Empathy: A lack of empathy is a common challenge for organizations. Develop systematic approaches to understand and meet stakeholder needs, using tools like feedback and feedforward systems.

 

9. Deliver on Promises: Maintain authenticity within the organization. Your organization must align its actions with its words to build trust with stakeholders.

 

This process is rooted in acknowledging current mistakes and committing to continuous learning. By following these steps, the “Adequate Plan” you established on Monday can evolve into a “Better Plan.”

 

Ultimately, what matters is the impression you create among your employees—maintaining this impression is challenging but altering it can be even harder. Well-structured 360-degree evaluations within the company will guide your path.

 

Wednesdays: Expand Your Scope and Embrace Diverse Perspectives

 

Collaboration with people who bring diverse perspectives, assumptions, and experiences is essential to producing effective solutions. Midweek is the time to unlock your team’s full potential—let’s explore how.

 

The first theme, inclusivity, is defined as creating conditions for people to grow, not “despite” their differences, but “because” of them. Diversity is an asset, and the importance of trust within the organization grows significantly. When team members maintain and even leverage their differences in their work, the team becomes stronger, more empathetic, and more authentic. Inclusivity fosters a trust-driven cycle that leads to quicker and more efficient outcomes.

 

Wednesday’s agenda:

 

1. Understand Your Goal: Inclusivity isn’t only beneficial for minority groups; it benefits everyone. Inclusive environments allow people to express themselves more authentically, building greater trust and increasing the likelihood of sharing unique knowledge, experiences, and perspectives, which leads to a performance edge. When people contribute their unique insights, teams make better decisions, innovate more effectively, and perform strongly.

 

2. Evaluate Your Position on the Inclusivity Scale: There are four levels of inclusivity: safe, welcomed, celebrated, and advocated. To gauge organizational inclusivity, use surveys to assess employees’ positions within these four levels. Moving beyond the “safe” level is necessary for employees to feel truly valued and for their contributions to be recognized.

 

3. Ensure Physical and Emotional Safety: Employees need to feel physically and emotionally safe at work, free from bullying, harassment, injuries, or severe health risks. Safety is the foundation of inclusivity; without it, progress to higher levels is impossible.

 

4. Promote Psychological Safety: Create an environment where employees can express ideas, ask questions, or share concerns without fear of punishment. Psychological safety is critical for teams to be innovative and effective.

 

5. Embrace Everyone, with Diversity in Mind: Ensure employees feel welcomed and able to express their differences to contribute at work. This relates closely to fairness and equality, guaranteeing that each person has an equal opportunity.

 

6. Celebrate Diversity Within the Team: Embrace the mindset that diversity is a source of strength and innovation. Value each person’s unique contributions within the team, encouraging creativity and fresh ideas.

 

7. Advocate for Diversity Across the Organization: Make inclusivity a core part of the organizational culture. Demonstrate that everyone’s differences contribute to the organization’s success. Establishing a culture of inclusivity creates a sustainable and effective workplace.

 

8. Engage Yourself: Bring your authentic self to work and encourage others to do the same. By expressing yourself as you truly are, you build trust with others.

 

Why Do People Differ? Consider the alphabet—imagine having only one letter; how could you write or communicate? The crucial point is for everyone to acknowledge and embrace these differences, understanding that each individual relies on others to be the best version of themselves within the team.

 

Thursdays: Tell a Compelling Story

 

Approximately 70% of organizational change initiatives fail for various reasons. But now, we are aware of the problem, equipped with an evidence-based plan, and our team feels safe, valued, and supported. It’s time for phase four: to drive action.

 

According to the authors, your mission today is to craft a story so powerful, clear, and engaging that it frees up the organization’s energy and directs it toward change. This story must explain not only “why” change is necessary, but also “how” it will unfold and what the future will look like—in vivid, relatable terms.

 

Thursday’s Agenda:

 

1. Understand Deeply, Explain Simply: To tell an impactful story, the authors emphasize the importance of thoroughly understanding the subject and conveying it simply for everyone, without overwhelming the audience with complexity or jargon.

 

2. Honor the Past (Strengths): For change to make sense, it’s crucial to recognize and honor the organization’s past successes. Highlighting that the core strengths of the organization will be maintained helps generate support for the change.

 

3. Honor the Past (Mistakes): It’s also crucial to acknowledge past mistakes and the valuable lessons they offer.

 

4. Provide a Clear and Persuasive Change Motto: Communicate the need for change in the organization clearly and persuasively. A great example of this approach can be found in Domino’s Pizza’s “Pizza Turnaround” campaign, where they openly admitted the taste issues with their product.

 

5. Assemble Your Story in Parts: Organize your story into a three-part structure: “The Good Old Days,” “The Change Motto,” and “An Optimistic Path Forward.” This ensures your message is both clear and attractive.

 

6. Repeat Yourself: Consistently repeat your story, as it is key to ensuring your message is embraced and internalized.

 

7. Define and Use Emotions: Emotions play a significant role in leading change. For instance, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi’s letters of appreciation to employees’ parents became well-known for effectively boosting employee engagement and motivation.

 

Fridays: Act as Quickly as Possible

 

The authors discuss the value of speed at every opportunity. When you think about it, you will likely recall numerous missed opportunities as a nation, even in recent history.

 

For me, the deadline for every job is always “yesterday.” During my years in active operations, there was a huge potential in the country, with tremendous growth and opportunities that could be seized by acting quickly. Speed and innovation were crucial. In the preceding era, however, resource scarcity in markets exhausted by two World Wars posed a major obstacle. Accuracy was more important than speed—just like a soldier with a single bullet! Today, on the other hand, genuinely effective innovation takes the lead.

 

But, of course, some may worry that haste could lead to waste, and they are not wrong. Much like driving a car, where the vehicle, road conditions, and the driver’s skill define your limits, the same principles apply to your organization and work.

 

Rushing without careful execution or falling behind for any reason leads to regret and lost opportunities. While there’s always a lesson to be learned from these experiences, I find satisfaction in knowing I’ve given my all and done my absolute best, acknowledging that it’s my destiny… Otherwise, I will keep pushing for improvement and development.

 

Friday’s Agenda:

 

1. Get Out of Your Own Way: To move quickly, decentralize decision-making, and entrust more responsibilities.
2. Compromise on Perfection for Certain Things: Let go of perfection in some areas to act swiftly.
3. Be a Cultural Warrior: Shape organizational culture around the belief in the importance of speed.
4. Enhance Meetings: Make meetings more efficient. Set clear goals for the meetings, share materials in advance, structure the agenda to fit the objectives, and avoid taking on all the responsibility as the leader.
5. Simplify the Work Process: Little’s Law helps us understand how workflows through a system. According to this law, the average number of items (L) in a system depends on the average time items spend in the system (W) and the arrival rate of items into the system (λ). As this law suggests, the more tasks there are, and the longer they stay in the system, the more backlog builds up. (L=λ×W) Eliminate unnecessary projects and focus on top priorities.
6. Create a Path to Accelerate Projects: In this section, the authors refer to Silverman’s “ambulance” strategy, developed to determine where and how ambulances should be positioned and deployed in areas with a limited number of ambulances. The goal is to respond to emergencies as quickly as possible and minimize the average response time. This strategy is built on three main principles:

• Dynamic Task Assignment: Developers and test engineers continuously shift their focus to areas where user demand is highest, rather than working on a fixed issue or feature.
• Prioritization and Forecasting: Based on past data, the company predicts which types of errors or feature requests will be more common during certain time frames. The team then ensures better preparation and more efficient resource allocation.
• Flexible Resource Allocation: Developers and test engineers move quickly between tasks, adapting to the project’s changing needs, rather than staying fixed on a single task. This flexibility eliminates bottlenecks in the project and ensures stable development.

7. Manage Conflict: Conflict management is a critical skill for organizational speed. Research by Francesca Gino shows that workplace disagreements are often unwelcome and can hamper productivity. Managing conflicts constructively fosters trust and unleashes energy.

 

Conclusion: You Have Earned the Weekend

 

Let’s wrap up this week…

 

1. Monday: You identified the real problem. You asked tough questions, assembled a team of problem-solvers, uncovered a major obstacle to progress, gathered new data, and listened with a leader’s responsibility.

 

2. Tuesday: You handled the trust issue. Confident that you were addressing the right problem, you conducted smart experiments to build trust within your company and strengthen relationships with key stakeholders.

 

3. Wednesday: You made new friends. You created appealing conditions for the people to thrive through their differences, incorporated diverse perspectives, and built a better change plan and team.

 

4. Thursday: You told a compelling story. You honored the past (both its strengths and weaknesses), highlighted the need for an effective change, and painted a hopeful vision for the future. You repeated your story, infusing it with emotion.

 

5. Friday: You moved as quickly as possible, leading change with speed, empowering others to act swiftly with minimal risk, becoming a cultural champion, and embracing the willingness to sacrifice perfection for momentum.

 

So, what’s next? The authors remind us of the equal importance of rest and recovery alongside hard work and effort.

 

Now, let me share a personal example. The main character here is someone you’re all familiar with: HALLEY. I often say that the recipes and flavors of our products have remained unchanged since day one, but with Halley, that wasn’t exactly the case. When Halley was first introduced, it was coated with kokolin, a chocolate-like substitute. After a hugely successful launch, it quickly became a prime target for competitors. Before long, dozens of imitators flooded the market. While they couldn’t replicate the taste or quality, they created confusion among consumers, and competitors started attracting customers with tempting offers. There was a solution: REAL CHOCOLATE HALLEY. We had tackled the First Phase. However, in the Second Phase, I lacked the experience and authority to instill the confidence needed to “sell” this concept, especially to the sales team, as I was just starting in my career and was only an R&D manager with little seniority. By the Third Phase, I believed I had explained the why and how to the team, but clearly, I hadn’t convinced them. As a result, the Fourth Phase lacked a compelling narrative. But in the Fifth Phase, I fought hard – I was young, bold, fearless, and ready to take on anyone if necessary.

 

And, in fact, I did.

 

Here’s what happened: First, we produced and sampled the real chocolate, Halley. Everything was going smoothly. We even printed “Real Chocolate” in bold on the packaging. However, the sales team didn’t put faith in the strategy; they were hesitant about this new launch, requiring careful handling, and naturally priced it higher. A few weeks later, a truckload of unsold Halley was returned. They hadn’t been able to sell it—not even tried!

 

So, I restarted the fight from scratch. Persuasion was no longer an option. With upper management and marketing on my side, we burned our bridges and pushed forward. I can almost hear you saying, “Good thing you did.” Today, Halley continues its path, unrivaled. Grateful for that.

 

Move Fast & Fix Things offers a comprehensive and practical guide on organizational change processes, from identifying real problems to building trust, improving teamwork, and crafting compelling narratives. Yet, before adopting this approach with our eyes closed, there are certain points to keep in mind:

 

• The challenges your organization faces might be too complex or extensive to resolve within just five days, so it’s essential to adapt your approach.
• Accelerating change processes might not be the right fit for every organization.
• Some problems require deeper analysis and careful planning before their identification and resolution.
• Certain tools and methods discussed in the book might not be applicable in your context.

 

In summary, while this book serves as an invaluable guide for change management, I believe readers should tailor these strategies to suit the unique context of their organization.

 

Note: This open-source article does not require copyright and can be quoted by citing the author.