The Patience That Makes Speed Possible

Almost 60 years ago, Charles Hummel wrote a pamphlet titled “The Tyranny of the Urgent.”1 He noted how the urgent crowds out the important. The demands that shout loudest for our attention are rarely the things that matter most, and we end up neglecting genuinely important work because it never announces itself with the same insistence. Thus, urgent emails, back-to-back meetings, and crisis management crowd out leadership teams’ attention to strategic thinking.

In some respects, it’s hard to blame leaders for their neglect. Boards, shareholders, and other stakeholders tend to prioritize near-term goals. Tactical actions feel like safer bets. Compensation systems can create disincentives to make long-term investments of talent and capital.

There’s also a credibility problem. Many strategic planning workshops produce aspirational visions and abstract frameworks with little buy-in or accountability for execution. Consequently, plans collect dust on shelves.

It can become a vicious cycle. Daily operational pressures leave little time for thinking and planning. Short-term incentives make long-term thinking feel risky. Past experiences of ineffective planning processes erode the motivation to try again.

It’s a tough cycle to break, which is why a recent article by Francis Wade caught my eye.2 He advocates a two-phased approach to developing a long-horizon strategy that enhances buy-in, accountability, and the potential for acceleration.

Wade notes, “most organizations try to do too much in a single planning meeting.” His remedy is a design that calls for “two distinct meetings, held weeks apart.” He elaborates, “The first meeting has one non-negotiable design principle: the CEO sponsors but does not lead. Or facilitate.”

The goals of the initial meeting are twofold. First, the team, excluding the meeting’s sponsor, constructs the long-term vision, establishes a timeline, and defines the resources required to accomplish it. Second, the team lays out a plan for the entire time horizon.3

The sponsor’s role is to hold the urgent at bay and to refrain from imposing their perspective on the team. The facilitator guides the session.

Note how this first meeting can give the team space to orient.4 Not only does that lay the foundation for deciding on a course of action, but it also produces, as Wade notes, “genuine co-ownership.” The back-and-forth of orientation, the negotiation of assumptions, and the collective commitment to a plan presage a “difference [that] shows up in execution.”

The next thing that happens is important and often neglected: the team sits with their plan for a few weeks. It allows for crucial soak time.5

In Wade’s design, the CEO plays a more active role in the second meeting, which is organized around a single question:

Using the same logic we built together, how much faster could we realistically get there?

Because the team defined the desired end state and made their assumptions about causality and delays explicit, they’re in the best position to re-examine those assumptions to identify ways to achieve their goal faster.

Planning is different from prediction. The kind of planning and stress-testing Wade is advocating — making assumptions explicit and, thus, testable — helps organizations respond to reality as it unfolds more adroitly.

I’m intrigued by Wade’s two-meeting approach, and I suspect it improves the odds of superior buy-in, accountability, and execution of ambitious long-term goals. Still, a worry nags me: what if the second “compression” meeting exacerbates premature convergence?

The sponsor’s “silence” in the first meeting — guided by facilitation — undoubtedly helps diminish the social pressures that muffle dissenting views. However, the sponsor is still in the room, and there is still time pressure. Consequently, there may well be incentives to “perform” and to be agreeable. It’s not a given that participants will be completely candid in their deliberations.

If the first meeting’s deliberations are shaped more by social pressure than genuine inquiry, the second meeting doesn’t accelerate a well-formed plan; it accelerates a flawed one. Shortening the timeline on a plan based on incomplete situational awareness may provide an illusory sense of progress.

Wade’s article is silent on techniques for gathering pre-meeting intelligence, such as individual interviews. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t use and advocate them. But it's worth being honest about the ceiling on such preparation: it reduces the risk that something important goes unsaid; it can't eliminate it. The same is true of our own Reflect & Engage methodology. I don't know how much candor any pre-meeting process actually recovers, only that it recovers some, and that its costs are visible while its benefits are not. This returns me to where I started: the feeling of progress is exactly what a leader besieged by the urgent most wants, and that desire is hardest to resist at the moment situational awareness is thinnest.