Speed Isn’t Strategy: Rethinking Hustle Culture in Transformation

In the business transformation world, this manifests itself into this sprint mentality, this agile approach, which says that, you know, you have to break things and move fast in order to remain relevant.

It conditions us to believe that speed is a strategy and that those constant pivots are a sign of agility and adaptability.

But there is a lesson that so many leaders haven't yet learnt.

If you move fast and constantly break things, you'll end up with a broken business.

This hustle culture is creating this massive tax burden on organizations.

I see it all the time in transformation.

There's this change fatigue because we're not catching a breath.

We're moving from transformation A to restructure B to software implementation C, and it's just constant.

The tension is that whilst the spreadsheet looks really busy, your people are drowning.

They are struggling because they've got too much on.

They are rowing the boat really hard, but every second the direction is changing, and in the end, they're not actually ending up anywhere in particular.

We're losing our talent, and we're losing ideas.

The insight we need to embrace is that speed is not a replacement for direction.

In fact, the faster you go in the wrong direction, the more expensive it is for your organization, the more tax you're essentially creating.

It's an expensive mistake.

Sustainable transformation is about pace.

It's about intentionality, making sure that you're focusing on the right things, not just doing loads of things at once and then not really going anywhere.

I've worked with many organizations, and I've seen that hustle culture manifest itself and the impacts it has on people, the impacts it has on all of the transformation initiatives that they plan.

And with those organizations, when you go back maybe two years later, four years later, even ten years later, you find that they haven't actually moved much further into a different direction.

They're still battling with a lot of the same issues they had several years ago because essentially they haven't taken the time to do those things right, and instead they've already jumped into the next project.

But equally, I've been lucky enough to work with organizations that have closed the door on that hustle culture and have actually said, "Do you know what? Let's just do one thing well and do it right." And they've got more governance, they've got more structure to how they're operating, but essentially they're making decisions based on what's right for the business, what's right for their people, what's right for their clients, and they're not trying to cram everything in at once.

They've got a really nice pace, and I see the benefits of that.

If you continue down that route of doing constant exhaustive sprints, you're going to end up collapsing at the finish line.

Sustainable transformation is about having that right pace, not rewarding the daily grind, rewarding impact and outcomes, and protecting the steady.

If you have that hustle culture in your organization, I challenge you to take a step back, reflect on the way in which things are operating, and perhaps look at instilling a bit of governance, a bit of structure, and make sure that you've got clear direction so that you can actually start to see some of that ROI come through and that you're not burning out all of your great people and the great ideas that they come with.