Building Moonshots

WAY 53Scale Fast and Slow: Knowing when to run or crawl is crucial on the journey from concept to market.

About the Way

The journey from first inkling to game‐changing launch is long and twisty, challenging for even a more prescient team to imagine in detail on day one. Valleys of death exist at every phase of the innovation pipeline, during well‐documented phases—including scientific discovery, technology invention, and customer‐focused transformation—and the ongoing handoffs between phases, teams, and deliverables. During these lulls, teams can become split by the desire to just keep pushing forward and the siren call to give up or even pivot. Instead of ending the journey in tears or spinning off abruptly in a different direction, often the wiser choice is to potentially go slow and reassess what matters.

Teams can borrow a lesson from the tortoise's playbook in Aesop's fable. The bestseller entitled Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, describes two modes of thinking that are fast and slow. The fast mode rewards instinctive, emotional decision‐making that seeks to continuously ask and answer questions to keep moving. The slow mode of thinking asks more deliberate questions, taking time to calculate logical decisions.

In reality, imagining, inventing, and shipping an amazing future doesn't progress at a constant breakneck speed. In these moments when a team's grand vision looks just out of reach, the option ...