The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

I have a small allergy to the word "versus" in work: speed versus quality, or growth versus profitability, or efficiency versus resilience, or x vs. y. Put two things, perfectly good on their own, on opposite sides of a slide or a two-by-two and all of a sudden they are boxers coming at each other from two different corners, with different groups cheering for one or the other. One of them is suddenly bleeding. Oh my god, someone call this off.

Even more annoying to me: sometimes the oppositional exercise is quite useful, the only way to get anywhere.

But take speed versus quality. A group of people doing some kind of work can absolutely be too slow, throw up roadblock after rational-sounding roadblock. I've been in places where another meeting, another review, another person wanting to "pressure test" the thing meant in reality no one was really doing anything, or if they were, it would show up next year or way too late or whatever. I wanted to grab the dial and turn it toward SPEED. I wanted to cut the Gordian Knot.

I reach for the right metaphor for what I know can happen, probably will happen: the medicine becomes the diet.

Too much speed? You wanted it, you have it, and now everything is breaking. Too much efficiency? You wanted it, you have it, and now one unplanned thing throws a wrench in the gears of everything.

The original problem may be gone, but now you're just somewhere else on the two-by-two, and you need the other medicine.

Unlike with a real prescription, which in a lot of cases will run out, in an organization almost nobody writes down when to stop taking it. "We need to move faster." Okay, fine and agreed, but: (1) how fast, (2) for how long, and (3) what is too far, and (4) what will tell us we are at "too far" and need to slow again? Is there any point where someone will say, "yes, the speed has done its job, all done with speed for now. Time for slow," and the organization's metaphorical feet come off the gas?

Because the words in opposition are usually good and almost impossible to disagree with. We always actually want both things. So saying only one of them should probably make us suspicious.

Let me torture the medicine thing: medicine is usually poison too, in the wrong dosage.^[1] Or another way to put it: what we're really reaching for is just a correction, a turning of some dial the other way.

But dials turn back. It's why they are dials.