The Religion of Speed
At some point, “moving fast” stopped being a practical concern and became a moral position. You see it damn near everywhere now.
How fast can we ship this? How fast can we respond? How fast can we hire? How fast can we scale? How fast can we pivot? How fast can we get something, anything, in front of people so we can say we’re making progress?
It’s treated like proof of seriousness. If you’re moving fast, you’re ambitious. If you’re cautious, you’re scared. If you ask to slow down and think, you’re blocking momentum. If you point out that the current plan has all the structural integrity of wet cardboard, you’re being negative.
This is how a lot of bad work gets protected.
Not because it’s good, useful, or even halfway thought through, but because it’s fast. Speed has become a kind of institutional narcotic.
It gives people the feeling of motion without requiring the discipline of judgment.
“Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.” — Alfred A. Montapert
Everyone gets to feel busy. Everyone gets to feel urgent. Everyone gets to point at the smoke coming off the machine and say, “See? We’re doing something.” The problem is that a lot of what gets called speed is just impatience with a different name.
Real speed exists. Real speed is what happens when the work is understood, the constraints are clear, the people involved know what they’re doing, and the decisions have been made cleanly enough that execution can happen without constant re-litigation.
That kind of speed is rare. Most speed is vague requirements, half-decisions, unexamined dependencies, missing context, and a room full of people quietly hoping the next person in the chain figures out what was never actually decided. Then, when the thing breaks, everyone acts surprised.
Of course it broke. It was built under the assumption that thinking was the expensive part.
This shows up constantly in the software industry, but software is often just the place where the wreckage becomes visible to most people.
The same thing happens in operations, management, hiring, logistics, customer service, product development, and damn near everything else where people mistake activity for progress.
People rush through the part where understanding is supposed to happen, then spend ten times longer cleaning up the consequences. The original rushed work gets recorded as “fast.” The cleanup gets recorded as “unexpected.” The rework gets recorded as “iteration.” The confusion gets recorded as “alignment.” The preventable failure gets recorded as “learning.”
This is how organizations end up with systems nobody trusts, processes nobody understands, meetings nobody wants, dashboards nobody believes, and workarounds that become load-bearing pieces of the business.
Nobody set out to build that. They just kept choosing speed over comprehension, one small decision at a time, until the whole place became a series of monuments to things resembling productivity but having no actual productive worth. Then some poor bastard gets hired to “modernize” it, which usually means replacing the visible mess while leaving the original religion intact.
The funny part is that slowing down usually does not mean moving slowly. That’s the part people miss.
Slowing down means refusing to skip the part where the work becomes legible. What are we actually trying to produce? Who depends on it? What breaks if this assumption is wrong? What do we already know? What are we pretending not to know? Where has this failed before? What has to be true for this to work?
Boring, load-bearing questions that keep our work from turning into Waco. But those questions feel slow because they remove the little dopamine hit people get from motion.
You can’t posture your way through them. You can’t hide inside urgency. You can’t turn the conversation into a PowerPoint deck and call it progress.
You have to actually understand the work, which is the part a lot of people are trying to avoid.
Speed is attractive because it lets people stay slightly abstract. It lets them keep decisions fuzzy. It lets them avoid responsibility for details until those details become someone else’s emergency.
And when the emergency arrives, speed becomes the answer again. Move faster. Fix faster. Hire faster. Replace faster. Ship faster. The same disease silently becomes the cure.
There is a difference between urgency and haste. Urgency is appropriate when something matters and time is real. Haste is what happens when people want the emotional relief of action without the burden of clarity.
"Make haste slowly."
— Baltasar Gracián
The older I get, the less impressed I am by speed as a standalone virtue. I care whether the work holds up. I care whether the person doing it understands the shape of the problem. I care whether the decision survives contact with reality. I care whether we are creating fewer problems than we solve.
That doesn’t require theatrical slowness.
Nobody needs to sit around writing their own deployment infra for six months to prove they’re thoughtful. This isn’t an argument for dragging your feet or turning every decision into an excuse for yet-another-meeting. It’s an argument for respecting the work enough to do it properly the first time.
Understand first, decide second, and only when you've done the proper due diligence, then you can/should move.
When those steps get reversed, the bill always comes due. Sometimes the bill is a broken system. Sometimes it’s a burned-out team. Sometimes it’s a customer who quietly leaves. Sometimes it’s years of operational scar tissue that everyone works around because nobody has the patience to go back and understand what actually happened.
The Religion of Speed survives because it gives people a clean excuse. It lets them say the world is changing too fast, the market is too competitive, the customer is too demanding, the team is too small, the budget is too tight, and the window is closing...blah blah blah.
Sometimes those things are true. Often, they are just cover for the fact that nobody wants to do the slower, harder work of making sense before moving.
The better work is usually calmer than people expect. It still moves. It still ships. It still makes decisions. But it does not confuse panic with seriousness. It does not treat every pause as weakness. It does not worship motion for its own sake. It accepts the deeply unfashionable idea that some things get faster only after you stop rushing them.
That is the part the speed cult never seems to understand.
You can move fast for a while by skipping thought, skipping clarity, skipping context, and skipping responsibility. But the work remembers. The system remembers. The people stuck maintaining it remember.
Eventually, reality collects what it's due. And reality is very patient.