The short
- Belief: Fast decisions signal confidence.
- Reality: Speed reduces feedback quality.
- Risk: Errors surface late and compound.
- Trade-off: Velocity versus reversibility.
- Lesson: Learning debt accumulates quietly.
Why speed became moralised
Speed is easy to admire. It looks like clarity, conviction, and leadership.
In competitive environments, hesitation is framed as weakness. Delay becomes synonymous with incompetence.
Over time, speed stops being a tactic and becomes a virtue.
What speed actually removes
Fast decisions compress time. That compression removes space for:
- feedback,
- second-order effects,
- and dissent.
The decision feels clean. Its consequences are not.
How errors hide inside velocity
In slow systems, mistakes are visible early. They trigger correction.
In fast systems, mistakes travel downstream. They surface only after integration, scale, or dependency.
By then, reversal is expensive.
Reversibility matters more than speed
Good decisions are not always correct. They are correctable.
Reversible choices allow learning. Irreversible ones demand certainty that rarely exists.
Speed prioritises commitment. Wisdom prioritises escape routes.
The accumulation of learning debt
Every fast decision made without feedback borrows from the future.
- Assumptions go untested.
- Signals are ignored.
- Corrections are postponed.
Eventually, learning debt demands repayment — with interest.
The takeaway
Speed is not intelligence. It is pressure.
In complex environments, the best decisions are not the fastest — they are the ones that can survive being wrong.