Speed vs. Velocity

Want to support this newsletter? The best thing you can do is forward it to a friend. New to this email? Welcome! Subscribe here.

What did you accomplish last week?

Be honest with yourself, did you move the ball downfield closer to your most important objective or is your primary success from the week past measured in the number of emails you responded to and meetings you attended?

There is a lot of chatter in professional circles these days about “moving faster” and “doing more with less” (I myself wrote a post titled Speed Up), but each statement is fundamentally flawed. Speed for the sake of speed and more for the sake of being busy add no value to yourself, your team, your organization, or the world.

There is doing work for the sake of appearances and there is doing work for the sake of progress. Don’t confuse the two.

Speed vs. Velocity

One of the most helpful ways I’ve found to think about this idea is to take a step back and ask yourself if your team is operating with speed or velocity.

Queue Freshman year Physics, Speed is defined as, “the rate of change of position of an object in any direction.” Conversely, in Physics, velocity is known as a “physical vector quantity” which means both magnitude (speed) and direction are required.

In business terms:

Speed = Busy

Velocity = Focused

So often teams I’ve been on and, if we’re being honest, ones I’ve led fail when they are going fast (speed) but aren’t focused and in turn lack direction (no velocity).

The key difference between speed and velocity is direction. As a leader, your most important job is to provide clarity to the highest and best use of each team member’s time and ruthlessly keep everything else off of their plate.

Too often leaders think they live in a world where the capacity of their team is unconstrained (more is better). This is not true.

As a general rule of thumb I find that, all else equal, the time it takes to deliver a piece of work increases by 50% for each additional piece of work assigned to that individual or team. E.g. a project which would originally have taken a month will now take six weeks.

You’re doing too much

If you buy the fact that velocity is superior to speed then the question becomes how do you achieve it.

Everything in this section will be advice you’ve heard before but are probably still ignoring (I know I do) and mostly will come down to the fact that you’re doing too much.

There is great, though maybe apocryphal, Warren Buffet advice which says the most direct path to effective prioritization is to list the 25 most important priorities on a piece of paper. Next, circle the five priorities which are the most important. Take those five and add them to another piece of paper.

At this point you have two lists, one with your five primary priorities and another with the remaining 20. The list of 20 becomes your “avoid-at-all-costs” list. Whatever you do, put zero effort into any of the priorities on that list of 20. If a ball drops from this list of 20 and it makes you feel uncomfortable then you know you’re doing it right.

This is the brilliance of Buffet’s approach. Most people are clear on their top five priorities, but somehow let the days, weeks, months, and years pass by giving time and energy to those items on the list of 20.

My only advice to leaders is instead of five items, pick two or better yet just one.

Problems vs. Opportunities

One of the reasons teams move fast and feel busy but struggle to make progress is that they spend time solving problems vs. taking advantage of opportunities. Nothing derails a week like a “fire drill” from the top which re-prioritizes your work to get something done, usually a useless piece of analysis, for someone higher than you on the food chain.

There are two important lessons here. First, the more senior you become the more cognizant you need to be of creating unnecessary work for your team by asking questions which would be nice to know, but aren’t critical. Just know, if you ask a question and you have a good team they will get to work answering it. Nine times out of ten you’re wasting their time and pulling them from more important work. Be explicit, “while that would be nice to know at some point I know you have a lot on your plate so whatever you do don’t waste your time answering it.”

Second, most leaders put their most competent people on their biggest problems rather than on their biggest opportunities. This is a surefire way to stay busy without making progress. At a human level it makes sense, you just want your problems solved and want them solved well so put your best people on them.

Often we call these short term unexpected problems “fire drills” implying they need to be accomplished immediately because the building is burning. Most of the time what we think of as the start of a house fire is a burnt piece of toast at best. That is to say, if it burns a bit longer breakfast might not be tasty, but no one is going to be seriously impacted.

Whatever you do keep these fire drills away from your best team members. The more competent a person is the more time they should spend working on opportunities and the more time you should devote to keeping problems off their plate.

Conclusion

So here’s my challenge for you this week, tomorrow morning write down on a piece of paper your single most important piece of work to get done for the week and ask each of your team members to do the same.

Put a block in your calendar for Friday to check back on whether or not that work got done. If it didn’t you wasted a week being busy (speed). If it did, that means you moved fast in a specific direction (velocity), nice work.

See y’all next week.