Recently I’ve been reading a lot about the management and the leadership philosophy of social media companies and in particular the one who’s motto is ‘move fast and break things’.
Moving fast and breaking things may be a good thing when an organisation is new and just starting out and needs to adapt quickly as it takes shape. However I’m sceptical about the role of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ in both the public and private sector, if we want our businesses, communities, customers and citizens to be able to live meaningful and fulfilled lives.
Perhaps it’s time to stop moving fast and breaking things without any idea about whether the consequences of our actions will be positive or negative and to learn to move gracefully and create things instead.
Moving gracefully doesn’t mean that we can’t move fast to change things, however it does mean that we have to move at more than one speed in any process of change. There will be times when we need to make quick decisions, implement those decisions and then reflect on the outcomes of those decisions. At other times we may need to slow down. We may need to take more time over decisions and doing things we hadn’t otherwise anticipated that we would have to do.
This could be for a number of reasons. It could be that our team isn’t sure that the decisions that we have made are the right ones. Or it could be that there are other changes going on in other organisations that we’re not aware of, or that we have misunderstood, or that we have some understanding of but as yet have no idea what the consequences might be of those changes on our team, the teams that we work with, our organisation, our workforce and the people we support.
It’s then that we need to be able to move gracefully. To be able to change direction, without attributing blame, to be able to humbly accept when we were wrong, to bravely point out to those in more senior roles when they are wrong, and to support and empower the people we manage or lead to have confidence to tell us when they get things wrong. Yes we will still end up breaking things. However we will be in a much better position to break the things that we need to break and to leave the things that we don’t need to break alone.
I’ve never really been into purposefully breaking things. At times I have witnessed others breaking things and moving on, leaving people to work out how to put things back together again. Breaking things often makes an organisation, the workforce and the people they support so stressed out, overwhelmed and unconsciously angry that it can completely disable people from thinking straight, from innovating and from creating things that work.
I once led the reorganisation of a whole health and social care system. I got the different parties involved to a point where they could all see the value in what we were trying to do. They all felt they had ownership of what we were doing and they all felt brave enough to be able to point out where they felt we were going wrong, where we were going right and where we needed to change.
Shortly after we had implemented the changes, a new chief executive came into post and without any warning decided to completely change the whole structure of the organisation so that it matched the structure of the organisation the chief executive had previously been running.
This out of the blue ‘we are going to do it my way and that’s it’, caused enormous stress, enormous pressure and enormous anger across the entire service system. It made it very hard for people to get anything done as nobody was quite sure whether or not they would still be in post the following week, or whether or not any of the people they currently led or managed would still be there either.
Luckily, because we had already done long-term work with the organisation on enabling people to move gracefully, to have confidence in the way in which we had created new ways of working and to believe in the structure that we had put together, people began to fight back. This wasn’t an all out war, it was a graceful and thoughtful approach in trying to understand what the new chief executive was hoping to accomplish and at the same time trying to help the chief executive to understand the journey that the organisation had already been on and why a breaking things approach to change wasn’t going to improve outcomes.
Eventually a compromise was reached. The chief executive was able to change course without feeling that they had lost face and people in the organisation began to feel in control again. And this is an important point about tackling people who are determined to move fast and break things. We have to understand their point of view and work gracefully to explain what may or may not work about their ideas and to be prepared to continuously pushback and to not accept that just because the chief executive is in a more senior role than our’s, that they are naturally the one who knows what they are doing. This can make us very unpopular with senior leaders, however it can also enhance our reputation as well. This will depend on whether or not the leader feels secure in themselves as an individual and secure in their own mind, thus enabling them to be graceful and creative too.
I know that not everybody finds creativity easy but I think all of us has a creative side at home and at work. It’s just that each of us has a different way of responding to change, understanding creativity and looking at how we might use our creativity to support and enable ourselves, as well as support and enable those around us.
Being creative in our approach to organisational development is much harder than breaking things but as I have already said, breaking things doesn’t necessarily result in a good outcome for anybody. So how can we harness our own creativity, the creativity of our leaders and managers and the creativity of everyone within our organisation to make a difference to the way we work and to the outcomes for the people we support?
I think the first thing we have to do is to develop our sense of well-being and selflessness. What I mean by this is that we need to be comfortable with who we are as a person. How we show ourselves to our family, our community and the people we work with, and be true to who we are at all times. Now that might mean that we have slightly different personas in different environments (I know I do) and that’s okay. But the more comfortable we are with who we are, the more comfortable others will be with us, and the more confident they will be in going on a journey forward with us to move gracefully and create things. If we aren’t at our best both mentally and physically and the people we work with aren’t either, it can be much harder to creatively change things.
When I think about selflessness, to me it’s the opposite of the individualism of some of our current political leaders and personally I don’t think that individualism has made the world a better place. That’s why I think being selfless is an important part of a manager or a leader’s approach, not only to every day management and leadership, but also to the implementation of any program of change. People have to be clear about why a leader is proposing particular changes and they also have to confidently believe and understand that the leader is not just making these changes in order to enhance their own status or to massage their own ego. Neither of those things are likely to lead to better outcomes for people, the organisation, workforce or for the people that the organisation supports.
I believe it’s time to ditch the idea of moving fast and breaking things and to move gracefully and create things instead. I think we should be less concerned with our performance indicators and more concerned about outcomes that benefit us and benefit others as well.
The easiest place to start is with self reflection. Reflecting on what we do that makes our life easy, what makes our life hard and what makes the lives of those around us easier or harder as well. By understanding this, we can begin to look at any change programme in a more meaningful way. We will also find that people will have much more respect for us and are much more willing to trust our judgement because we are trusting their judgement as well. Having a conversation about change rather than just forcing changes on people, will lead to meaningful change being created together.
Perhaps it’s time to ditch performance management and instead develop a way of working in a graceful and creative way that is focused around the outcomes each of us would like to achieve.
Jim Thomas
2025
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