A recent interview with Stripe co-founder, John Collison, has plenty of food for thought (link end) especially around what makes successful start-ups, businesses and what we can learn from congleremates, being an outsider to America and technology. One item raised, I’d like to discuss is:
Speed
This is the idea of speed as an under-recognised competitive advantage and a defensible one. Collison applies to business and start-ups but I think it can be applied to make areas of life. In particular, I am thinking of theatre making and personal life decision making.
Jeff Besos has articulated a related idea on what he calls Type 1/Type 2 decision making. A few decisions are heavy weight, very hard to reverse course and require considerable due diligence before making. These decisions are rare and more rare than most believe. (In this framework) Most decisions should be made fast because they are not heavy weight, not hard to reverse and the answers may only come from experimenting with the choice. (This leads to the notion of “Disagree but commit” another Besos/Amazon idea that you might disagree but that shouldn’t impede the decision being made fast.)
Collison makes a point I believe to be true but is seldom raised.
“Speed” is attractive to a certain type of person. This type of person - and for business this is typically an employee - can have particular creative qualities (and often not fit in well with the bearocratic nature of big companies - and slow moving nature of some).
While Collison talks about start-ups and business I think you can apply this to the arts and theatre making. Some theatre makers like to be speedy, make fast decisions, create work quickly and show it fast and early. Others are slower in approach. This extends to organisations.
The rule of thumb might be that larger organisations are less speedy but Collison makes the point that this is not necessarily so. Collison argues that Facebook and Google/Alphabet can very fast when they commit. Amazon as well.
However, it does seem true to me that many large organisations do lose this quality. There are intersectional reasons for this: culture, growing risk aversion, complexity, number of humans involved and differing goals.
But for large organisations that can keep this ability and have it infused in their culture, it can be an important advantage. This idea is related to Jeff Besos stating his wish for Amazon to always be a “Day 1” company.
If we believe it’s not merely size of company, can we highlight other aspects? I mentioned culture (set by the top people and embodied by all people) as important but more complex to set. I think size of team is a controllable item.
Collison also suggests this. He argues that a small team (even a solo person) can often make breakthroughs or create solutions where 300 person teams fail. The academic work on the nature of innovation - incremental or step change - and size of team is mixed but I think Collison has observed a general truth about small teams.
Certain managers in certain large organisations understand this, they assemble small teams typically with people who tend towards the effective and speedy spectrum, and they task them with solving something important.
That’s not to confuse when a heavy weight decision needs to be made. But, a decision on whether to marry is seldom, a yes/no on a short drink date should probably be made fast and not agonised over.
Processes in many organisations are not geared to helping speed. Mostly they are geared to minimising risk. And while risk mitigation is a consideration an error of omission is many times a more serious error.
One example is how Netflix simplified the expense policy for the goals of speed and simplicity.
“…
Our policy for travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expenses is 5 words long: “act in Netflix’s best interest.”
Our vacation policy is “take vacation.” We don’t have any rules or forms around how many weeks per year. Frankly, we intermix work and personal time quite a bit, doing email at odd hours, taking off a weekday afternoon, etc. Our leaders make sure they set good examples by taking vacations, often coming back with fresh ideas, and encourage the rest of the team to do the same.
Our parental leave policy is: “take care of your baby and yourself.” New parents generally take 4-8 months.
…”
A complicated expense policy is mostly there to try and mitigate risk rather than increase the time and productivity of its people.
Small organisations mostly do not bother with an expense policy and rely on trust and common sense.
I find this a telling observation. Small teams and small organisations can rely on trust and knowing. Big organisations lose that ability and rely on “policy”.
It’s false reassurance. Policy won’t save you, if you don’t have the trust of people.
If you understand yourself enough to know what frustrates you and how much you like speed or not, this can set you up for the type of work and creative environments you should try and find. Perhaps that’s why hubs like around San Francisco are full of people who think like this.
There is so much about life which is due to uncontrollable chance factors or factors which may as well be chance. Again, if you understand or accept that view that about life then that may weigh on how you make decisions and view of risk.
When creating theatre, I think it does say something about the management of people and size of team that can be speedily managed or not.
If you are in the mode of creating a business, you might want to spare some thoughts to the culture you want to be developing and whether speed will be one of your advantages and if speed is part of your advantage, how to keep it.
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