Why You Often Need To Start Slow In Order To Go Fast
Pixar founder Ed Catmull once wrote that “early on, all of our movies suck.” The trick, he pointed out, was to get them to go “from suck to not-suck.” It’s a quote that I’ve always loved not only because it’s honest, but because it’s so revealing of how the creative process works. Ideas don’t start out fully baked. They begin incomplete.
The simple truth is that to bring about anything new and different, you need to supplant something old and entrenched. Ideas that change the world always arrive out of context, for the simple reason that the world hasn’t changed yet. Breakthrough concepts arrive as ugly babies that need to be protected and nurtured, which takes care and patience.
That’s one reason that most organizations can’t innovate. They are designed to optimize, to reliably and predictably execute complex processes, which is a great thing. It takes talent, skill and dedication. However, it’s a different thing than creating something new. When you’re operating in the realm of the new and different, you need to move slow to go fast.
The S-Curve
One of the most consistent findings over decades of research is that change follows an S-curve, meaning that it starts out slowly, hits an inflection point and then begins to accelerate exponentially. The same research shows…
