Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

A quick Google search of this phrase will tell you it has military origins.

I first encountered this phrase when I attended a firearms safety course required to participate in shooting competitions.  The thought was that, we have all seen videos of professional shooters who draw their pistol and shoot at a target lightning fast.  But attempting to do so the first time is both dangerous and futile.

The general idea is to go slow first and build muscle memory.  Practice, safely of course, drawing your pistol from your holster slowly, pivoting your shooting hand towards the target slowly, pushing your pistol forward slowly while joining your weak hand to stabilize, and then acquire your sight picture.  I may be simplifying the steps, but the idea is to start slow, and over time, with repetition, your muscles will learn the move instinctively and you will be able to go faster and faster, and still be safe.

The next time I encountered this phrase was from an autocross driving instructor.  Similar to building muscle memory, approaching a corner in a car with a significantly large rear weight bias, beginners are best advised to brake early, before the turn, and be on the gas as you enter the turn.  This seems counter-intuitive, because in autocross or in any racing situation, you want to go as fast as possible.  But for a rear-engine car and a novice driver, this is the fastest approach.

So how does this all relate to the business at hand?

When we launch new processes along with new applications that replace old processes and old applications, one measure of success is how fast can we go back to normal transaction volume.  This is a valid measure.  However, it must be balanced with how well we are processing the transactions.

The new processes may be more rigorous and require more work upfront to get right.  We may reach normal transaction volumes, but if a large portion of transactions require rework, team morale and customer satisfaction will suffer.  There must be another metric for rework, or repeat transactions, and of course, as appropriate, customer satisfaction survey results.

The goal, of course, is to reduce the rework by taking the time to learn the new process, to go slow the first few times.  Give some time to build muscle memory, especially for new processes and policies.

If a company replaced their aging CRM application with Salesforce, ensure that reports and dashboards measure both transaction volume (Quote Count for example) and rework.   Let's say that to rework a quote, one must withdraw it by changing the status to Withdrawn, making changes, then submitting it again.  An administrator can create workflows that will flag or stamp the quote record with a date and time when these events happen.  He can then create reports and dashboards based off those time stamps.

The administrator can also add a required Reason field whenever a quote is withdrawn.  And then focus on the ones with the highest incidence.  And for those situations, it may be worth slowing down, learning to be smooth, in order to become fast.