Stop Glorifying ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ — Smart Founders Know to Do This Instead

The first time I gave chest compressions, it was on a mother of three while her young children were ushered quickly to the next room. To the uninitiated, and especially to family members, a cardiac resuscitation can look like chaos. Hands, drip lines, and cords overlapping a person fighting for their life as simultaneous commands are being delegated to a team of first responders. With my adrenaline pumping, I remember observing our paramedic calmly standing slightly off to the side, confidently calling out orders at exactly the pace each one deserved. Start a line. Attach the monitor. Push Epi. Resume compressions. Some moved in a split second, while others waited for an EKG reading or one of our team to provide their observation. Nothing was rushed and nothing was slow. That calm coordination I observed was the result of decades of training and experience, knowing which actions had to happen right now and which ones warranted a tactical pause.

I only volunteered as a firefighter/EMT for a short chapter of my life, but that one call has stuck with me far more than I ever expected. It lingers partly because of our patient and who was in the next room, and mostly because it is the bar I have measured against in nearly every job I have held since. Hard decisions get made every day in every industry, and across very different ones, the successful individuals I have met share one trait: they calibrate the speed of their execution to the impact of each decision.

Controlling the Pace

In the years after that call, my winding career path has run through a handful of different industries, mostly healthcare IT and later software safety on large space and defense programs. These office settings could not have been more different from the back of an emergent ambulance, but the discipline was identical. When a new issue or symptom surfaced, a number of experts would rally together and decide what to do about it. The questions always boiled down to the same sort of analysis. What is the worst-case impact to our patients or warfighters? And how likely is someone to encounter it? The answer to these two questions determined the tempo of our next steps.

A faded banner on an admin page could likely wait until the next release, whereas a medication quietly dropping from a patient’s med list demanded an immediate response. What that paramedic was doing on instinct and training, we were documenting in a calculated response to a reported issue. The work was the same in both contexts, even when the stakes weren’t measured in seconds, and the honesty of our assessment was what made or broke every decision we landed on.

Understanding Impact

The lens those years gave me is the one I lean on most days. Most entrepreneurs obsess over the likelihood a thing will work or not. A new marketing campaign, a new hire, or a pricing change. We instinctively assess the odds and act on the answer. The question we tend not to ask with the same urgency is, what happens if it doesn’t? This isn’t to say that entrepreneurs are blind to impact, as we generally think about it constantly. We just often discount it, because some amount of optimism is a survival trait when you are running a company. If you actually felt the weight of every downside of every decision, you probably would never start a company in the first place, and you would live in a constant state of paralysis by analysis. That discount is what keeps you moving forward and I do believe you genuinely need it to function. The trouble starts when you apply it uniformly across the whole to-do list, because there are almost always one or two items that will not be as forgiving if gone wrong.

Choosing the artwork for a new office and responding to a customer concern might sit on the same Monday morning list. Get the artwork wrong and you live with an ugly wall. Get the customer wrong and you may have just decided whether they tell ten people to trust you or ten people not to. Same list, completely different consequences. You do not need to work in medicine or defense for this to matter. Look at the list of decisions in front of you this week. Most of them reward speed, and you should rip through them with little hesitation. The monthly investor update, the social copy that needs to go out Thursday, the response to an inquiry on LinkedIn, or the colors on a new SKU. These are the items that punish overthinking far more than they punish a quick decision. Somewhere on that same list, though, are probably one or two that quietly deserve more consideration. The new hire you are about to make. The first enterprise contract you are about to sign. The pricing increase you are about to push across the entire product line. They sit next to the easy ones, look about the same size, and feel like a simple sign-off, but they can punish you in ways the others won’t if you don’t handle them carefully. The hard part of running a business is spotting them sooner rather than later.

Three Questions That Inform Smart Decisions

For me, I run through a quick triage on virtually every decision that lands with me. Three questions, usually answered in my head in seconds, but every once in a while, worthy of doing on paper. Who or what does this decision affect, and how good or bad can this go? How likely is each of those outcomes? And given those answers, when do I need to make or delegate this decision?

Most of the time the answer is to just immediately execute best judgment and move to the next. Occasionally, though, the right answer is to slow down to the pace the decision deserves. I don’t personally subscribe to the notion of “move fast and break things.” For some companies with deep pockets, or low-stakes consequences, it may be the right ethos. For me, that thought process is too linear for the curves entrepreneurship throws at you. The skill I want my organization to embody is the same one I watched a paramedic practice on that call many years ago: knowing when to slow down and how to quickly accelerate out of the curves.