Everyone wants to move fast. Too few understand what drives speed.
Watch an NBA game. It looks almost effortless. Everyone moving. No one hesitating. The whole thing seems to run on instinct.
What we don’t see is the hundreds of hours of drills that got them there. The plays so carefully designed and choreographed and rehearsed. The hyper-clarity of every role on that court.
We think we’re watching pure speed and agility. But really, it’s structure moving fast.
Speed without structure isn’t agility. It’s just panic with better marketing.
Enter the modern-day workplace.
Today we’re all chasing agility. Constant movement. But not all movement drives us forward. Sometimes we’re spinning — and exhausted.
Leaders are yelling for faster and everyone’s moving. And yet. We sit in countless meetings debating the approach because the actual desired outcomes is unclear. A VP says yes on Tuesday, the SVP says no on Thursday and nobody knows which answer counts. Someone asks for clarity and receives unclear direction in return.
Sometimes what looks like speed is really chaos in disguise. And mistrust and disengagement in the making.
The most agile organizations are the most disciplined ones. They’ve done the tedious work of building foundations. Clear roles, rehearsed processes, operating rhythms, decision frameworks. So when the moment demands speed, people can actually move instead of stopping to negotiate basics.
Real agility is earned in the unsexy. The prep, the plans, the rehearsals.
When we bypass the unsexy, we leave our teams in chaos. And they end up running on cortisol — not momentum.
And trading trust for momentum rarely delivers wins.
Every time you push for speed without the setup work, you’re spending credibility you don’t have. People learn that “urgent” means “figure it out yourself.” They learn that asking clarifying questions slows things down. They learn to just say yes and deal with the fallout later.
When a coach demands speed and agility from the sideline, they’ve earned it. They ran the drills. They designed the plays. They doubled down on roles until everyone knew exactly where to be. And they call timeouts, strategically, because sometimes that quick reset can infuse the clarity and coordination the moment is calling for.
Senior leaders need to be doing the same. To be earning the speed they’re demanding.
You’ve gotta do the slow and unsexy. Things like…
- Assessing whether the CEO’s offhand musing in a meeting is actually worth sending teams scrambling, or whether it was just thinking out loud
- Confirming that chasing that squirrel should genuinely pull resources from the steady, less sexy path already underway
- Getting aligned with your fellow senior leaders on goals, priorities, and approach before you unleash teams and tell them to “figure it out” when conflict inevitably arises
- Pausing to ask whether the answer you’re giving today contradicts the one you gave yesterday, because that contradiction is about to cascade into confusion
- Checking in regularly with key team members — and honestly discussing (rather than hiding) risks, and obstacles
Small misalignments at the top compound dramatically the further down the organization you go. A five-degree difference at the executive table becomes a ninety-degree split on the frontlines.
That’s the biggest obstacle to speed and agility, even though repairing it feels like slowing down.
The slowdown is the point. Until you’ve done it, you haven’t earned the right to ask for speed and expect success.
Need a speaker?
Rachel is now being represented by the Macmillan Speakers Bureau! If you need a speaker for your next event, offsite, sales kickoff — you name it! — Rachel would love to be there.