Quick

Currently speed rules. There are many new management and organisational concepts which focus on speed: scrum, agile project management, design thinking, lean management etc. However, speed threatens to become the new norm and thus the guiding distinction of quality focus is unilaterally threatened in favour of an alternative.

Each working step and every item of work within an organisation must occupy itself with the question: “Is this quickly and timely enough?”. In their work, some wait and are dependent on others adhering to time lines and appointments. No decision in organisations can liberate itself from this aspect. In some sectors, the speed is so fast, that the product is out of date before it has even been made to function properly (such as some software). In such contexts one can clearly see that speed has a unilateral effect on other guiding processes: decisions become riskier, they must rely more on trust, run parallel to each other and therefore decouple, must rely on learning and situation specific actions, focus more on the external environment and change personnel more quickly. Organisations that wish to be, or must be, exclusively and in all respects quick are, in their fixation, on the one hand highly successful in dynamic environments, and, on the other hand, endangered at the same time, when the internal complexity can no longer be coordinated fast enough. This almost always occurs during success and the growth generated by it.