Velocity is a liar. You see a company moving fast, burning through "to-do" lists, and you think they’ve cracked the code. They haven't. Most of the time, they’re just vibrating in place. If you really want to know how do you solve for speed, you have to stop looking at how fast people are typing and start looking at how long it takes for a single idea to become a dollar.
It’s about the physics of the organization.
I’ve seen billion-dollar projects die not because the engineers were slow, but because the legal department took six weeks to sign a document that everyone already agreed on. That’s the friction. Friction is the enemy of speed. You can’t out-hustle a bad process. You just can’t.
The Brutal Math of Decision Latency
Most managers think speed is about effort. It’s not. It’s about the gap between when a decision is needed and when it’s actually made. We call this decision latency.
Think about a typical corporate environment. You have a great idea. You email your boss. They’re in offsites all week. They reply on Friday asking for a slide deck. You spend Monday making the deck. You present on Wednesday. They say, "Looks good, let’s run it by Finance." Finance takes a week. Suddenly, twenty days have passed. You haven't actually done anything yet. You’ve just been waiting.
If you want to solve for speed, you have to kill the waiting.
Amazon uses a framework called "Two-Way Doors." Jeff Bezos famously categorized decisions into Type 1 (irreversible) and Type 2 (reversible). If it’s a Type 2 decision—like changing the color of a button or testing a new ad copy—you don't wait for permission. You just go. If you’re wrong, you walk back through the door. This single shift in mindset creates more speed than any productivity hack or "sprint" methodology ever could.
Why Small Teams Win Every Time
Have you ever noticed how a three-person startup can out-pivot a massive corporation with a $50 million R&D budget? It’s not because they’re smarter. It’s because their communication overhead is basically zero.
As a team grows, the number of communication pathways grows exponentially. It’s a formula: $n(n-1)/2$. A team of three has 3 pathways. A team of ten has 45. A team of fifty has 1,225.
Every new pathway is a potential for a misunderstanding, a "sync" meeting, or a "just catching you up" email. To solve for speed, you have to keep teams small. Keep them so small they can be fed by two large pizzas. If the team is too big, you’re not building a product; you’re managing a bureaucracy.
The Technical Debt Trap
You can’t go fast on a broken road.
In software, and honestly in business operations too, we talk about "technical debt." This is the "we’ll fix it later" stuff. We use a manual spreadsheet instead of building a database because it’s faster today. But three months from now, that spreadsheet is a mess. It takes five hours a week to update.
That’s a speed tax.
Companies that actually solve for speed are obsessive about "refactoring." They spend 20% of their time fixing the tools they use to work. It feels like slowing down. It feels like you’re not making progress. But it’s the only way to maintain a high terminal velocity. If you don't pay the tax, the interest eventually halts your progress entirely.
Getting Out of the "Meeting Culture" Grave
Meetings are where speed goes to die.
Most meetings are just people reading status updates to each other. It’s a waste of human life. If you want to know how do you solve for speed, start by canceling every meeting that doesn't have a clear "decision" at the end.
Try asynchronous communication. Use tools like Slack, Notion, or even just shared Google Docs. Instead of a thirty-minute meeting to discuss a project, write a one-page memo. Let everyone comment on it. By the time you actually get together, the consensus is already there. You spend ten minutes deciding and fifty minutes actually working.
The most productive people I know are "unavailable" for 6 hours a day. They’re doing the work. You can’t solve for speed if your calendar looks like a game of Tetris played by a toddler.
The Role of Automation
I'm not talking about AI-everything. I'm talking about basic, boring automation.
- If you find yourself copying and pasting data more than three times a week, automate it.
- If you're sending the same "onboarding" email to every new client, automate it.
- If you're manually checking if a server is up, automate it.
Every manual task is a context switch. And context switching is the silent killer of focus. It takes an average of 23 minutes to get back into a "flow state" after being interrupted. If you automate the little things, you protect the big things.
Psychological Safety and the Fear of Being Wrong
This is the part most "efficiency experts" miss.
People move slowly when they are afraid. If your company culture punishes mistakes, your employees will move at a glacial pace. Why? Because they’re double-checking every comma. They’re getting three levels of approval for a $50 expense. They’re protecting their jobs, not growing the business.
Psychological safety is a prerequisite for speed.
Google’s Project Aristotle found that the highest-performing teams weren't the ones with the best resumes. They were the ones where people felt safe to take risks. When you solve for speed, you’re really solving for trust. You have to trust your people to make the right call, and you have to be okay with them being wrong occasionally.
If the cost of a mistake is a firing, people will move slowly. If the cost of a mistake is a "learning session," they’ll fly.
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Practical Steps to Accelerate Immediately
Stop trying to find a magic bullet. It’s about the grind of removing obstacles.
- Audit your last three projects. Look at the timeline. Where did the project sit idle? Was it waiting for a signature? A design asset? A meeting? That’s where your speed is hiding.
- Implement the 24-hour rule. No internal decision should take more than 24 hours to resolve. If it can’t be decided in a day, it needs to be broken down into smaller pieces that can be.
- Kill the "CC" culture. Stop CC'ing everyone on every email. It creates a false sense of involvement and slows down the people who actually need to act.
- Define "Done" clearly. Half the reason things take forever is that the finish line keeps moving. Set a hard boundary. What does "shipped" look like?
- Reward the "No." Encourage people to say no to projects that don't move the needle. You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. Speed requires focus.
The truth is, how do you solve for speed is often a question of what you are willing to give up. Are you willing to give up total control? Are you willing to give up "perfect" for "good enough"?
If the answer is no, you’ll always be slow. No matter how many "productivity" apps you install.
Real speed comes from clarity of purpose and the courage to let go of the brakes. It’s about moving the goalposts closer so you can kick more goals. Stop planning for the marathon and start running the 100-meter dash over and over again. That’s how you win.
Next Steps for Implementation
Start by identifying one recurring decision that currently requires more than two people to approve. Today, delegate that decision-making power to a single person closest to the work. Set a budget limit—say $500 or $1,000—where they have total autonomy. Watch what happens to the turnaround time for that specific task over the next two weeks.
Once that trust is established, look at your "waiting" periods. Use a simple tracking sheet to note every time a project stops because it's "pending" something else. After seven days, you will have a map of the bottlenecks in your specific workflow. Attack the longest "wait" first. Speed isn't about moving your feet faster; it's about clearing the rubble off the track so you can actually run.
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Building a culture of speed is a perpetual process of pruning. You aren't adding features to your workflow; you are removing the barriers that prevent your team's natural talent from reaching the finish line.
Keep your teams small, your decisions fast, and your tolerance for "waiting" zero. That is how you solve for speed in an era where the slow are quickly forgotten.