Time to read: 3 minutes
Article at a glance:
- Slowing down leads to better outcomes. Taking time for trust, clarity, and understanding upfront prevents missteps and friction later.
- Not all slowness is equal. There’s a difference between thoughtful pacing and dragging your feet out of fear or uncertainty.
- Learning guides momentum. Ask: “What’s the next step we need to take to learn the next thing we need to learn?”
- “Slow is fast” means wise timing. It’s about doing the right things at the right speed and knowing when to pause or move.
If you’ve been at Redmond for a while, especially if you’ve attended the 7 Habits seminar, you’ve probably heard the phrase “Slow is fast, and fast is slow.”
And you might have wondered: What the heck does that even mean?
Let’s take a closer look.
The Principle: Why “Slow is Fast”
This phrase is a reminder that slowing down to do something well up front often saves time, energy, and friction down the road.
In practice, it shows up most clearly in our relationships and upstream work. You can’t rush trust. You can’t shortcut understanding and clarity. You can’t “optimize” a meaningful conversation with your kid or partner. (And we don’t recommend trying!)
Attempting to be efficient with people often creates more problems than it solves, because people aren’t items on a to-do list.
A Redmond Angle: The Einstein Approach
We also apply this mindset to how we solve problems. There’s a quote often attributed to Einstein:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend the first 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking of solutions.”
We aim before we shoot. We seek to understand before we fix. We resist the impulse to jump to answers just to “get it done.” We’re not perfect at it, but this is the goal!
Because what’s the point of quickly solving the wrong problem?
Some things just take time.
- Building trust
- Getting to truly know yourself and others
- Discovering your unique contribution
- Reflecting on what's working well and why
- Understand what's right in front of us
These aren’t detours. They are the path.
We love the analogy of the bamboo tree: you don’t see growth above the surface for a while, but beneath, deep roots are forming. Then one day that tree shoots up and grows exponentially.
Is slow ever just SLOW?
Slow is slow when we’re hesitant to just try. If we’re seeking certainty instead of clarity, we might be dragging our feet because certainty just isn’t a thing.
Here’s a little nugget to remember: While learning takes time, we never want to slow down the learning process. If we’ll learn quicker through exploring, we should explore. If we’ll learn quicker by doing, we should act.
“What’s the next step we need to take to learn the next thing we need to learn?” - Rhett Roberts
We just don’t want to skip learning by acting too quickly.
Finding clarity can take time, but once we reach that point, we should act.
So, What Do We Do With This?
Ask yourself:
- Am I rushing through something that actually needs depth?
- Am I dragging my feet on something that could just get done?
- What’s the next best way to learn the next thing?
And ask your team:
- Where are we going too fast?
- Where are we confusing activity with progress?
- Where could slowing down now help us go faster later?
In the End
“Slow is fast” isn’t about doing everything slowly.
It’s about doing the right things at the right speed and having the wisdom to know the difference.
So slow down when it matters. Speed up when it makes sense. And remember: even slowness can be a form of momentum.
