Productivity is overrated

It takes courage to go slow to win

I was reminded of this classic cartoon and it prompted me to think, “what if productivity is overrated?”

Controversial at first blush, but the cartoon makes exactly this point. The more you and your team are motivated to efficietly focus on pulling the cart, the less likely things are to get better.

There’ll be some optimisation, sure, but real improvement? Innovation, step-change, breakthrough? These are out of reach by design (presumably unintentional design).

If you’ve come across the concept of “red work and blue work” — one focusing intensely on tasks, activity and delivery, the other zooming out to widen your perspective, to slow down and notice, you’ll see it in this image.

I’ve been toying with the idea of “slow software” — mainly because it’s so heretical to what I’ve been taught. I figure there’s value in exploring the apparently absurd — it usually reveals what we’ve been ignoring. In racing there’s a concept of “go slow to go fast”, so clearly there’s recognised efficiency in this idea.

In the software world that looks like taking “too long” to build something right, or to automate a repetitive process so you won’t have to rework, or repeat the thing over and over, eating up valuable future time and building more and more pressure to go faster, ironically reducing your capacity to build the capability to go faster. It constrains your future freedom to win.

Doing one important thing right is worth ten shortcut results. Borrowing from the future to deliver today is expensive — it comes with a slew of hidden charges, not least a drain on your and your team’s energy. Ten ticks look great on a to-do list, but I suspect doing the one thing that mattered looks great on a balance sheet 10 years from now. Pragmatism matters, but so does the courage and vulnerability of taking a risk on the long-term.

To mis-quote the now classic Mumford & Sons: “work with urgency, not with haste”.