Go Slow To Go Fast

working draft

Sometimes it's better to go slow, and have a solid grasp of the situation, context and nuance. To not make progress for the sake of progress. When you start taking action, doing it with better preparation and understanding, you will go much faster than trying to figure things out on the way.

This is a hard earned lesson after getting influenced by the fail fast culture very common in investment fuelled, high cash burn, early to market philosophies for startups. The notion of building startups being like jumping from a height and assembling the airplane around you sounds very romantic unless you've done it for yourself, very rarely, if ever is it a good idea to knowingly do that.

Eventually, you start seeing patterns repeat where taking action for the sake of action isn't the most productive. Action and learning often behave as a closed-loop control system. The higher the quality of feedback the better the actions. The few times where action makes sense withouth understanding is when you are in a fog of war and don't know what you are dealing with, or to kick start the process of gathering information. While it's true quite often with big shifts startups operate in that regime, but it's also points to cultures and behaviors where that is taken as an excuse to not do deep thinking and fix skill gaps.

The amount of we'll figure it out on the way is almost proportional to how little you understand what you are doing. There is a good argument about volatility and not being able to predict long term or needing shorter feedback cycles for iterative development, but the way to deal with that is layering understanding of different components, hypothesis and certainity and being able to scale up and down the level of experimentation based on how certain and clear the parameters of each layer are.