Why You Shouldn’t Move Fast and Break Things
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In business and in politics most people want to change things quickly. They want to cause disruption and fuel the white hot fire of change to achieve their goals, rather than making incremental changes and building a solid base. It’s understandable. What if change doesn’t happen within our lifetime? What if someone in power strikes it down in the middle of the process?
Short-term thinking is understandable, and arguably justifiable.
But, it’s misguided.
Robert Greene, the author of The 48 Laws of Power writes that “we all understand the need for change” (392) but too much change can lead to rebellion against he cause; “too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt”.
Why do people rebel when change is pushed upon them? Change is uncomfortable, it forces us to get out of our comfort zones and accept new realities. Striving to disrupt the status quo through a new venture is risky as well.
Still, there’s more to the story. We tend to be more traditional and cautious in our beliefs than we let on. Historically, our parents and grandparents taught us to be careful, so we are prudent. We yearn for the seeming simplicity of a bygone age that breeds nostalgia within us. So, when someone proposes a plan to uproot our sense of tradition to propel us into a new age, we get scared and hesitate.
So to combat this fear, we need to play to their sense of nostalgia. Respect tradition change is made, let people know that change is what their grandparents would have wanted so that society can progress.
While staving off revolt or rebellion is a good reason to build slowly or change the status quo incrementally, there is another great reason.
Slow, incremental, compounding change builds a stronghold against competition and plays in tune with time.
Simon Sinek often discusses finite and infinite games. Sports are a finite game, there is a clear winner and a clear end time. The infinite game; one in which there is no winner, presents us with the opportunity to play the game as long as possible. In finite terms, you win the infinite game by outlasting everyone else. Business and politics fall into this category.
Centuries of slow growth — as Kongo Gumi achieved before it was purchased in the mid 2000’s — provide an opportunity to solidify our ideals in very fabric of history. Our business, or our movements become so ingrained in society that they cannot get rid of us.
King Arthur flour is another example of this very idea. They play to prolong their existence, thereby monopolizing their industries as competitors who don’t play by the same rules come and go.
Chamath Palihapitiya displays his theory, and articulates the importance of slowly building change really well in this video:
He communicates that the amount of time it takes a business to build is their half-life. They will fail in the same amount of time. The reason why this is, is because a business — or a movement for that matter — that generates incredible growth in such a short amount of time is not stable.
They don’t have the processes in place to deal with accelerated growth, they don’t have the team in place to deal with pushback. Plus, they are conditioned to be short-term focused by their short-term success, as well as market pressures.
Therefore, if we want our projects to stand the test of time, we must become slow builders. We must be willing to accept short sighted defeats as we build toward our long term vision.
we must be little-concerned with short-term wins like Jeff Bezos at Amazon or the Chinese government over the last 70 years (and really the last couple thousand) and spend that time building something truly great to satisfy the long-term vision. Since we are focused on the long-term, we can focus on preparing to protect ourselves from harm, focus on prolonging our project’s existence, and ultimately — in finite game terminology — win the game.
