Speed in the micro, patient in the macro

Sometimes you’re the tortoise, and sometimes you’re the hare.

The great creative discipline is knowing which animal your moment calls for.

Because both approaches are useful in achieving different goals. As we learned from the old fable, there’s a time to use the hare’s ingenuity and trickery, and there’s also time to use the tortoise’s patience and persistence.

It all depends whether you’re thinking micro or macro.

How effective are you at detecting which cycle to use?

Consider the day to day team environment within an organization. Building a bias for speed is disproportionately useful in the micro. When you learn to start projects quickly without obsessing over the details, your team gathers the necessary momentum to move from idea to implementation. And that ultimately increases the velocity at which your collective creative engine generates meaningful output.

This is why most development teams at tech startups use two to four week sprints. This time boxed iteration of continuous development helps them iterate quickly, get user feedback, and iterate again. Incrementally improving each time they ship.

Score one point for the hare. Speed in the micro wins.

On the other hand, many teams will simply leave projects alone to percolate on their own sweet ass schedule, casually saying that they’ll get around to them whenever they find time. And entropy ensues. This fundamental nature of group dynamics comes into play and things to go from a state of order to disorder. Good ideas stay stuck in idea form for years, if not forever.

And innovation ends up being a nicety, not a necessity. Maybe the tortoise wasn’t the right animal.

Now, that example refers to a day to day team environment. Building a bias for speed clearly gives you leverage.

But what about the macro? Which animal is more useful when your team is looking to the distant horizon months or years into the future?

This is when patience and persistence win. If you’re willing to play the long term statistical averages of the creative process, then the hare doesn’t stand a chance. If your team commits to initiating risky projects, even if that means being misunderstood for extended periods of time, then the payoffs will be that much greater.

This is the tortoise mindset. It’s patience in the macro. Show up, do slow, steady, solid work day after day, and your brand will grow in ways nobody can take away from you. Because you will have trained yourself to find your fulfillment during the process, even when the product isn’t in sight.

Hares don’t have the stamina for that kind of work. They burn themselves out working at an unnatural cadence. Their inherited cultural guilt of not overworking takes precedence over pace and proportion.

Ultimately, speed and patience are dual attributes. Both help your team achieve its creative goals. They secret is knowing which animal to the moment calls for.

Do you need trickery and speed, or patience and persistence?