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In the last couple of decades, all business literature, all consulting firm reports, all business themed Youtube videos, lectures, workshops, wherever you look into, the 2 most told recommendations were and still are:
Invest in Data & AI
Be Agile: Try fast, Fail fast, Learn fast. Repeat. along with some other suggestions depending on the industry.
Actually, these 2 become like axioms of modern business. And they defined not only the current discourse of business, but especially the “fast-culture” invaded our lives too.
Fast. Faster. Learn Fast. Read Fast. Digest Fast. Think Fast. Decide Fast. Act Fast. Shit Fast.
Breathe.
This is exhausting and confusing.
Because when our mind tells us to stop and think, we are pushed to do faster. The verb understand itself tells you to stand, not run. I’m totally aware that we are living through this constantly demanding world. I’m not naive to tell you to do the opposite. But it seems like, we need to overcome this dilemma, either by promoting slowness which seems long shot, or building some methods to minimize the discrepancy between the perceived required speed and true speed or natural speed. But I want to ask a question first. Does being agile really mean being fast? or is it some sort of hype that we collectively use to hide our fast culture behind it?
When you research the etymology of the word agile, linguists hypothesized that it is derived from the proto-Indo-European root “ag” which means to drive, to move and/or to draw out. Actually if this is true, the root has nothing to do with being fast but rather insists a prolonged and steady action. And if you look to the very essence of agile methodology, it simply tells you to be consistent and keep action: design something as prototype, try it, learn from your failures and try better the next time.
so why we rush? how did we create this paradigm?
Creation of Fast Culture Paradigm
Actually, I can ruminate a thousand of reasons for why, and probably all will be inconclusive. Because, simply, we don’t know. We can try to construct an iceberg model but we don’t have enough data and information, all we can do is to speculate about mental models. If you have not heard iceberg model, check this video/essay after this one. Speculating about mental models does not have to mean fiddling thinking spree, it can help finding a serviceable path to navigate and also can help creating a strategy around it to outfox this fast culture. So, here are some potential reasons:
First, we have evolved a mindset that evaluated time as a resource.
This seems reasonable because of our limited life time. We are not immortal. We want to accomplish as much as possible in our indefinite and limited time.
Second one is our scarcity mindset.
We have developed this mindset collectively through our entire evolution, hardened with competition, countless famines, wars, etc.
And this also feeds the first reason. Because time is the only resource we have that cannot be replenished.
Third one is our linear mindset.
That is, we tend to understand reality in linear or planar forms. What does it mean? Well, we think that time is linear, unbendable. We think that growth is a steady upward movement. We associate progress with a straight one-directional path. Even the word “plan” like in business plan, strategic plan, means “putting all on a surface, on a plane”. We love to simplify complex things into a linear or planar forms, possibly because our minds favor order, it is easier to process.
The fourth and last one: the search for purpose. We deeply yearn to make sense of what we do.
This one is quite obvious, I suppose. We want to know what our purpose in this life is and to find it we give purpose to things we do; we justify them. We create stories of how we find our true purpose in this life by knitting those achievements one by one. But, with the consumerism, an inseparable component of fast culture, we start to shift our goals to material things and started to define ourselves with things like car we use, things we wear, vacations we take. And this shift, apparently, distracted our search for purpose because material things cannot be a purpose. You cannot weave them together to form your identity. This disparity between where you are and where your true self lays create a brutal force of anxiety. This anxiety creates even more pressure to speed up.
These 4 mental structures separately and collectively urge us to rush.
We see time as a resource and in order to use it well, we tend to speed up.
We believe time is scarcest resource we have, this also force us to speed.
We think in linear structures, any deviation from the line intimidates us, we rush to go back to line. This 3 mindsets form a mental model for our time perception.
And around this mental model we orbit to find a purpose. (Actually, search for purpose is another mental model of ours) And if we can’t find, we get anxious and rotate faster and faster.
Ok now we have an initial and workable model of mental structures that feed this system of fast culture, a system that cause us to rush for everything in our day-to-day life.
Understanding False Urgencies
Since we are not policy makers, we cannot force interventions to fast-culture system. But we, being the agents of this system, can alter our own mental models because now we are aware of them. Awareness is a critical step. As we become aware of the problem, it forces us to avoid doing it and alter our behavior. But, once you toggle on the awareness, you need a mechanism to deal intentionally.
One of the first strategies I have tried in the past, and still kept using it, is expansion through balancing the perception of time model. Because, I need to reverse my current time perception to slow down, and it would be hard to change the feeding mindsets within it. But adding some balancing forces can help me to deal with it. The mindsets I usually recall to expand and balance my time perception are Long term mindset, optimality mindset and circular mindset.
First, Long Term mindset, simply helps you re-understand time as a whole and reminds you to think future consequences.
Second, Optimality mindset, also supports Long-Term mindset and helps you approach scarcities from the perspective of solution, because you can optimize things, right? you don’t need to pump fears into your mechanism. You can solve it.
Third, Circular mindset helps you to see cycles in the irregularities of reality because you force them to be linear either by oversimplifying or fighting against them.
As you dilute your current mental model of time with new balancing mindsets, you expand your perception of time. And the forces created by old mental model loses its power and this helps “search for purpose” to orbit a larger circle with new possibilities.
Ok, how can you recall all these, when you are confused and frustrated. And how can we be agile while fighting against fast culture? Let me walk you through a business example.
Assume you are in a monthly review meeting. And you are discussing your persistent market share loss to a new competitor which brought a selection of new features to the market a few months ago. At the beginning, team was talking about how good the competitor’s product is, then suddenly someone fires a debate on how you missed some opportunities that could have made your product better. And criticizes the leadership for their priorities. Unsurprisingly, the first half of the meeting turns into a sh*t show of blames. Customer team complains about Tech and their slow development cycles, Product team complains about lack of its resources, Marketing blames its vendors because of delayed campaign and so on. It is not uncommon to see blame mechanisms in losing organizations. As the blaming fury turns down with the question of “what should we do?”, someone suggests developing competitor’s features and adds “After all, we are still the market leader and consumers will be back to us once we provide them what they want. We need to listen our customers.”
This suggestion is actually a textbook demonstration of fast culture Why? You simply jump into the conclusion without understanding the mechanism that brought you there. You are still miles away from the very reasons that cost you to lose your market share. How do I know? If you were a true listener, you wouldn’t lose that market share to your competitor at the first place. By declaring that suggestion, you ironically confess this fact.
Anyway, let’s go back to our meeting room. Once this suggestion drops into the meeting, that is “developing competitor’s features”, the genie is out of the bottle now and everyone starts to race for hows and whats: how to develop those features, how to prioritize them, what are the required resources, etc. Things will quickly drift away as people focus more on the answers of how and what. And You’ll all miss the opportunity to develop proactive solutions and will continue to react to the competition from then on until things get worse and worse. Eventually, the company will be consumed by fast culture.
Cancelling out Fast-Culture Gently
Ok, how can you be aware of fast culture?
First step is looking for clues and signs embedded in the communication style of fast culture.
Like TikTok videos, Reels or Shorts they give you the action without reasoning or with false reasons. Because fast culture feeds our logical biases and fallacies.
Like fast-food, they are quick, they look good, they taste good especially when you are craving, but they lack nutrients and you’ll become even more hungry sooner than you expected. What does all mean? When you first heard them, they sound good, they feed you with the hows and whats and doing them helps you feel like you are having a progress, but once you are done, you find your yourself in even more trouble.
Second step is immediately asking yourself the purpose. Because fast culture promotes materialistic purposes rather than a mental purpose.
So, in our example, someone says: “We should develop competitor’s features to compete with them. After all, we are still the market leader and consumers will be back to us once we provide them what they want. We need to listen our customers.” 1st clue is: suggesting actions with logical fallacies. No one really asked to the customers or performed any market research. 2nd clue is: defining goal (purpose) as getting market share back. This is materialistic view of business, if we had a mental view, we’d probably define our goal as creating value for customers. 3rd clue is: Discussions on hows and whats based on assumed whys in the 1st clue.
So, you got the clues, how’d you stop this? You need to grab their attention. One of the best alternatives you have is interrupting the discussion and asking for why. Simply state in your own words that you see and understand that discussing how and what is important, but you are having trouble to understand why developing the same features to compete is company’s winning formula.
Presumably, someone will parrot the same words that this is what customers want and if we have these features, they will come back to us. Remind the talks at the beginning about how good the competitor is and ask why people found that features more valuable than ours. This will shift focus to value creation back. When you continue to ask these sorts of questions, all the sprinters in the room will start to slow down. As you help them to get slow, build Long Term mindset for everyone. Tell them how executing a plan without a true purpose can cause more disturbances based on assumed whys with no data backing them. You can do it by demonstrating a role play assuming 6 months passed, and in the 3 months developed and deployed all these new features but you are still losing customer to the competitor. How will be the air in this room? Do you think everyone lost their motivation at that point? When you are sitting in this room after 6 months will you still think that you used your resources optimally? etc. Once you demonstrate that, someone asks what you suggest.
Well, the scenario from then on can differ a lot from company to company. But I can paint you how to decide what should be the next:
Understanding Dynamics
Instead of deciding fast, acting fast, failing fast, learning fast for all the time for everything, you need to model a system with the goal of value creation that
generates consistent cycles of creation with only 2 goals: Learning and Creating a bit value at each iteration. Each cycle should be long enough to create a piece of value and at the end of each cycle you should aim to learn something new.
and during these iterations, you should optimize where to accelerate and where to slow down based on:
How well you know the game you are playing, that is your knowledge availability
and How much capacity and capability you have already installed, that is your resource availability.
Because today every business operates on Knowledge Economy, and it is a game where:
You use resource stock (hopefully without depleting them)
To acquire Knowledge Stock
Then, you use knowledge to create value for customers and to get returns
and distribute returns back to the resources
Thus, it is a resource to knowledge game. Here is a super high-level dynamics:
The boxes are kind of stocks (like resource stocks, knowledge stocks, etc.) and arrows represent the methods to transform one stock to another in knowledge economy. Please note that each box has its own dynamics inside and lists are not complete, I only curated some useful ones for you:
So, in our scenario, someone asked “what is my suggestion”, well we need to decide 2 things:
What should we create to increase value for customers?
What should we acquire if there is a gap between our knowledge and required knowledge to create that value?
When you asked to the team “why people found those features more valuable than ours?” you actually brainstormed the potential values you can look for. If the team is not sure about, then you may try to conduct a customer focus group or dig in the data you have to find out what they value. Once you decide the values, you need to put them on a timeline based on your knowledge and resource stocks that are related to those values. If you want to create an economic value, then you need to use your knowledge on competition and pricing. If you lack knowledge on them you can buy research services or you can learn by doing through creating pricing tests around it for ex. if you are selling subscriptions, design tests for different levels of discounts to the customers whose renewal time is approaching. But don’t forget long term mindset here, as you decrease the price, you will have lesser profits in return but probably your satisfied customer base will grow, and if you disrupt the balance too much here you will eventually have less return stocks to invest back in resources, don’t forget the circular business dynamics as well while planning your cycles of creation.
We will talk about all these conversion methods and stocks in detail in future videos. So, If you don’t want to miss those contents, please don’t forget to subscribe my channel, and hit the bell button to get notified.
Before closing, I like to emphasize learning by doing a little more because of its relation to fast-culture and agile methodology. Agile methodology is used both as an acquisition method for converting your resources to knowledge and creation method for converting your knowledge to value. And it is one of the best methods for learning by doing. The miracle of it is its effectiveness when performed consistently. It usually costs much less in the long run than other acquisition methods that convert your resources to knowledge. But only in the long run and if done consistently, so it costs you time. There is a delicate balance here you need to keep an eye on. For example, if you lack a huge portion of knowledge or if the market is out competing you unprecedentedly, you should consider to close the knowledge gap by faster methods, once you are sure of what is the gap. You can recruit highly knowledgeable employees to increase human intelligence and let them learn by doing faster than your current resources or you can try learn by partnering if you can address a non-competing partner that can bring its knowledge to the table or alternatively you can transfer tech from them etc.
So, you need to optimize all these conversions wisely. And going fast will not help you, you have to recognize each method naturally expected speeds based your stocks and gaps. If you persist, then all you end up will be some form of turmoil. This is what almost every business experience in one way or another.
Be wise enough to decide when to run and when to walk, but always keep moving.
Thank you.