Sam Kasle

Do you find your time eaten up with putting out fires, always being reactive, rarely having the freedom or space to be proactive? Is your execution fraught with errors from past projects that keep you in place? Feel under-resourced, that there’s not enough time, money or horsepower to get where you need to be?

When our time is eaten up putting out fires, we work hard and late, but the wall of issues is unending. We are left with little or no time to work on the projects that will create real value.

However, being reactive is a very safe place to be, emotionally. Putting out fires is a safe space for our egos. We get to show how hard we’re working, how good we are at extinguishing those flames. We feel important and even successful, especially if someone else or some other thing caused the issue. We can demonstrate our value without taking a risk.

Have you ever tried to move fast and break things? Did you find that the biggest impediment to moving fast after examination was fear? Either yours, others, or institutional fear?

Moving fast and breaking things is a wonderful ideal, but most of the time it is very hard to pull off. We are very loss adverse, afraid of undermining any value we have created, afraid of making a mistake and missing an opportunity, afraid maybe most of the aftermath of failure. We do our best to avoid the slow head shakes and narrowed eyes from your colleagues, friends, and family as they silently chastise us for our incompetence.

When we get scared to the bone, the traditional view was that we either froze in place or ran away. In either case, the goal is to not face the fear, not taking even a single proactive step toward addressing the situation.

To supercharge your execution you need to shift your mindset, become proactive by simplifying your goals and ensuring you take the time needed to complete the task. This method of simplification and moving slow ends in greater and greater proactive velocity.

Moving fast first requires us to go slow as well as to simplify things. We slow down, simplify, while remaining solely focused on achieving our stated goal. Once you or your organization gain the experience of doing a small task right, your confidence will grow in your ability to execute. Fear of being proactive will recede and overtime your confidence will grow as you knock down wall after wall.

This practice, of doing small stuff right, will allow you to go very fast in time. It also provides a great reset when execution seems to be getting away from us. Instead of going faster, we slow down once again, regain our footing, solve the critical problems and right the ship. Instead of hyperventilating, we take a deep calming breath, triage and focus on what is essential and no more.

Simplify

Our minds excel at making simple things complex, or at least appear complex. But execution should not be complex. In fact, complexity is a major drag on velocity. Whether it’s too many chefs in the kitchen or scope creep, taking a scalpel to any project, reducing it down to its core will improve execution and increase velocity.

Can you simply state your goal? Can you see the steps it will take to execute? Do you know what resources you’ll need? Are you confident in your ability to execute? If not, the issue is too complex and needs to be simplified. Whether that’s creating a number of smaller projects from a larger project or reducing the requirements, to be most effective, complexity must be the first fire you put out.

Simplifying any task makes execution easier as we are clear on what needs to be done (just like in our reactive fire drills). This clarity will increase your velocity. Simple choreography makes the steps of the dance obvious and easy to execute.

Go Slow

Go at a pace where you don’t make mistakes in execution. If something feels haphazard, if fear starts to creep back in, take a step back and ensure that you can answer the same simple questions from above. It’s precisely like learning a new dance, given our simple choreography, we learn each move precisely and with patience before stepping on stage with full confidence.

If you or your organization is not executing, it’s likely you’re trying to move too fast and making things more complex than necessary. This complexity implodes and causes fires to break out, then we can cozy up to the familiar flames and avoid the often fear laden effort to move quickly forward and break things.

By moving slow and with simple clarity our innate fears subside. We are no longer afraid of moving forward, but embrace how elegantly we can.

Sam Kasle

Redwood City, California, United States 3K followers 500+ connections

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Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management

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