INSIGHT: Doing Things Right vs. Fast
“Beware of the man who won’t be bothered with details.” — William Feather
Speed or Quality
Pick one.
One of the lessons a child teaches you is that there is a very real life dichotomy between right and fast. My seven-year-old son thinks mastery equals doing something very quickly, with no hesitation. He doesn’t grasp the concept of efficiency yet, but he will rush through just about anything — homework, soccer drills, karate forms — very quickly, turning around once finished and smiling, as if he’s saying, “Check out that mojo, Dad. I flew.”
What I’m always trying to teach him is that I’d rather have him do something right instead of fast. It’s a hard lesson to impart, because when you’re seven and a single bowl of oatmeal gives you enough energy to power a battleship, the nuances of details and work quality are totally lost.
Maybe it’s not meant for a kid to understand at a young age. Maybe it’s a life lesson that needs to be learned as you develop, fail, adjust and learn.
As I’ve said several times on this blog, “The gods live in the details.” This is true no matter what you’re doing: finishing a bathroom, learning a new lift in the gym, writing an RFP response to a big project. I recently did a pretty sweet number on my lower back because I failed to strech and warm up properly before some box jumps. I’ve done thousands of box jumps before, but this one got me because I had not taken the time to open up the tissues that were going to be working. And just like that — boom, injury.
And just like that, you can fill in the blank for almost any endavor.
Boom, you skip over details in your project plan.
You underestimate grout color.
You transpose numbers.
You hear what you want to hear. And then you know only what you hear.
You miss a subtle cue in a film.
You don’t adjust for the inevitable budget slippage for your household project.
The list goes on. But you understand.
In our management meetings, we talk about quality all the time. We’re not a product company, so quality in our business means something else. It means mindfulness, listening, pausing, then responding. It means being impeccable with our words, written and spoken. It means telling customers the (sometimes difficult) truth, even when they want to hear something different. Even when their boss wants to hear something different.
It means being present.
It’s an easy topic to write about, because the problem is everywhere. With our iPhones buzzing and email chirping and Facebook beckoning all day, your mind gets grooved to fast. Do things fast. Cover more ground. Multitask, man. Everyone is doing it. What are you, slow? You’ll be passed, son. Step on it.
And so you do. I do. Everyone does. And in the process, we start missing details. We slip. We write an email response that is taken out of context because we couldn’t bother to set it up properly.
Doing things right is an exercise in mindfulness. It means we step off the afterburners for a second in the name of quality.
In our years serving the Oracle/PeopleSoft markets, we’ve made a name for ourselves for our attention to detail. It’s sometimes an annoying thing to deal with — nobody likes backing the truck up to a place everyone thought we were past — but the dividends are massive.
Take a few moments to think about if your team is doing things fast. If so, fantastic. Are they also doing things right?
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More links:
MIPRO Consulting main website.
