Smooth is Fast is an elegant and concise article by Alan Cooper.
You probably hear a lot about Agile processes. The word itself seems to imply that it’s about going fast. Cooper suggests, a little paradoxically, that Agile is intrinsically slow:
“Most notably, agile programming is done in pairs, where two programmers sit together and design and write code as a small, tightly knit team. This, of course, slows the coding process way down because everything is verbalized and because everything is given consideration. In essence, pair programming transforms what traditionally was an internal monologue into an external dialog.”
The translation for facilitators would be: thinking together needs to be slower than the thinking we do in our heads. Most meetings run to tight schedules where impatience is the norm. We often see brainy people rushing to explain their thinking and being exasperated when challenged to slow down. They miss that thinking together is not simply saying out loud the contents of our brains and expecting others to pick up and carry on.
Tactical sloth
Cooper explains how in software development, Agile should focus not on quick results but on avoiding the mistakes that cause enormous delays much further down the line. We love how he sums this up:
“The tactical sloth of agile yields significant advantages in strategic speed.”
This is why we often talk of facilitation as an unhurried process: in our work, we’re aware of how often too much insistence on fast results can eat away at the relationships and coherence that are the basis of better quality outcomes. We often explicitly start meetings by emphasising a goal of better understanding, with actions and results as contingent upon that.
Fighter pilots’ wisdom
Cooper’s paradoxical thinking reaches its height when he shares some wisdom from jet fighter pilots. These probably sound like the least likely people to respect slowness. And yet their motto is: slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
“That is, if you try to go fast, you’ll just slam the throttle around, generate drag from overextended control surfaces, overshoot or undershoot your turns, and generally waste energy recovering from your mistakes. But remarkably, if you try to fly as smoothly as possible, applying only the gentlest pressure to the control surfaces and moving the throttle in small increments, you will speed up.”
We’re going to use that story at the start some of our more challenging upcoming gigs.
It’s a great article, worth a few minutes of your time to read in full.