Soundings
Our Perspectives and Insights
Speed Is Not Velocity: The Case for Decision Velocity
Ask a roomful of executives what they want more of, and “speed” comes up every time. Almost none of them want what they just asked for. Speed is a scalar: it has magnitude and nothing else. Velocity is a vector: magnitude and direction together. A company that confuses the two will move quickly, confidently, and nowhere it meant to go.
I have spent years working inside a lot of companies, and the same pattern keeps catching my eye: decisions that should add up to progress quietly work against each other instead. I tend to look at it the way an engineer looks at a system, not as a people problem or a process problem, but as a question of how decision-making is supposed to work, where it actually breaks, and why so much motion produces neither speed nor the right result. This piece is what I keep finding at those failure points.
The Number Most Companies Mismeasure
The unit of corporate motion isn’t activity, and it isn’t effort. It’s the decision. The measure that actually matters is decision velocity: the speed of a decision multiplied by its direction, where direction is how correct the call was given the information available at the time. Two numbers, not one.
This is why one number alone always disappoints. A fast decision in the wrong direction is waste. A right decision made too slowly is a missed window. A right decision, made quickly and acted on, is the only kind that moves the business. You need both, or you get the benefit of neither.
Direction Is Graded at the Time, Not in Hindsight
Here is where most post-mortems go wrong. They grade a decision by how it turned out, not by whether it was sound with what was knowable when it was made. Those are different questions. You can make a well-directed decision that bad luck spoils, and a badly-directed one that good luck rescues. If you reward outcomes instead of reasoning, you train your best people to be cautious instead of correct.
Jeff Bezos put a number on the speed side of this:
“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.”
Waiting for certainty is just slowness wearing a lab coat. The discipline is to decide with the information you have, judge the call against that information, and move.
Decisions Are Vectors. They Add Up.
A single decision doesn’t live alone. It’s a vector, and the next decision starts where the last one left off. Aligned decisions compound: each one adds its length to the same heading, and the organization accelerates without anyone working harder. Misaligned decisions cancel: two smart calls pulling against each other net out to motion you paid for and did not get.
That is the real cost of drift. It is not that a bad decision slows you down once. It is that every decision built on top of it inherits the wrong heading. Velocity compounds, and so does its absence.
A Decision Nobody Hears Is a Tree Falling in an Empty Forest
There is a third factor hiding in the equation, and it quietly zeros out the other two: communication. A decision that is never communicated has no velocity at all.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If a decision is made and no one hears it, it does not move the business, and worse, it cannot be built on. The next decision cannot start from a vector nobody knows exists. So the team either stalls, waiting for direction that was technically already set, or it guesses, and adds a vector of its own pointing somewhere else.
If your team can’t name the decision, they can’t act on it. If they can’t act on it, they can’t build on it. If they can’t build on it, it never happened. An uncommunicated decision isn’t a slow decision. It’s a zero. And zero times any amount of speed and direction is still zero.
A Framework for Raising Decision Velocity
Five habits move the number in the right direction.
- Decide with the information you have, not the information you want. Seventy percent is usually enough. Certainty is expensive and often arrives too late to matter.
- Set the heading before you touch the throttle. A fast call in the wrong direction costs more than a slow one in the right direction. Confirm where you are going first.
- Grade decisions at the time, not in hindsight. Judge the reasoning and the information available, or you will teach your people to avoid risk instead of reading it.
- Communicate the decision as part of making it. A decision is not finished when you decide. It is finished when the people who act on it know what was decided and why.
- Keep the vectors aligned. Make sure this quarter’s decisions point the same way, or you will spend your velocity canceling yourself out.
The Bottom Line: Agility Is Just Decision Velocity, Repeated
Every company says it wants to be agile. Agility is not standups, sprints, or a framework you install. Agility is decision velocity, sustained: the ability to make well-directed decisions quickly, communicate them, and build the next one on top.
Move fast in the wrong direction and you are not agile, you are reckless. Move in the right direction slowly and you are not agile, you are careful. Agile is both, on purpose, again and again. Speed gets you moving. Direction decides whether moving was worth it.