We don’t often think of our lives as temporal and spatial flows. However, as we transition from birth to death, we age, we learn, we flow in and out

Flowing through time: the need for a certain slowness

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2024-07-11 10:30:03

We don’t often think of our lives as temporal and spatial flows. However, as we transition from birth to death, we age, we learn, we flow in and out of relationships, we move from place to place: we flow through time. Life is one great flow. It is curious then that we seem so pre-occupied with speed. We want everything to be not only fast but better yet instant. We want everything “on-demand”.

In business, in the so-called VUCA world, the mantra is also “go faster”. When I ask senior leaders why they’ve embarked on Agile Transformation processes, the answer I hear most often is “we need to be faster”. Agile teams (mostly Scrum) are under continuous pressure to improve their “velocity”, i.e. their ability to increase the amount of work they can deliver in the same amount of time.

As strategic agility is becoming the goal for most organisations, and Agile practices or New Ways of Working (NWOW) are spilling into the rest of our organisations, questioning this pre-occupation with speed becomes even more critical. In one organisation I work with, the need for speed is driving very disfunctional behaviours. Management has mandated that special teams need to deliver high-value products every 12 weeks. In a culture where failure is not an option and managers rule by fear, team members cannot raise concerns about unrealistic expectations and timelines. So they send in “the cannon fodder”, contractors who are expendible. This organisation has an extremely high churn in contractors, and many refuse to work their anymore. This need for speed has made an already dysfunctional culture, toxic.