Give It A Minute

Give It a Minute

We spend a lot of time trying to go faster.

Usually for good reason.

Faster information.

Faster analysis.

Faster decisions.

Faster learning.

There’s no particular virtue in taking longer to do something simply because we can.

But I’ve also noticed something.

When I’m moving fast, things start to blur – increasingly so these days.

And blurs don’t seem to stick around very long.

My first response is seldom my best

Not necessarily because it’s wrong.

Sometimes I just haven’t given it enough time to become anything else.

This happened to me recently.

I was asked to estimate the expected lift from a promotion scheduled a couple months out.

We’d run the promotion several times over the years. We know what it typically delivers.

So I pulled the history, did the analysis and had my projection.

Done.

Then I started writing it up.

And something bothered me.

Many of those historical promotions had run at the same time as another complementary promotion. Together, they created something of a rising-tide effect.

But this time, that other promotion wouldn’t be there.

This promotion was going to have to stand on its own.

And it had been more than two years since we’d seen it do that.

My analysis wasn’t wrong.

My projection was.

I had estimated what the promotion historically delivered under conditions that weren’t going to exist this time.

It took me a minute to see it.

Give it another minute

I went back to the problem.

Now I knew what I needed to understand:

What does this promotion actually deliver on its own?

The problem was that we hadn’t observed that cleanly in more than two years.

Or so I thought.

A day later, while I was out running, another thought showed up.

Wait.

For each of the last several executions of this promotion, we had held out roughly 20% of the eligible population from the complementary promotion.

The evidence I needed was already there.

Those holdouts could allow me to isolate what the original promotion actually contributed on its own – across the business, not just within the promotional channel.

I hadn’t collected another piece of data.

I hadn’t run another model.

I wasn’t even working on the problem.

I was running.

The first little bit of time showed me why my answer was wrong.

A little more showed me how I might make it better.

Sometimes the thinking isn’t finished when the analysis is

I didn’t need more sophisticated analytics.

I didn’t need another dataset.

I didn’t need to work faster.

I needed the thought that hadn’t occurred to me yet.

The analysis is finished.

The deck is finished.

The recommendation is finished.

Send.

Next.

But there can be a meaningful difference between:

I have an answer.

and

I’m ready to act on it.

Wait – Oh crap!

Sometimes there’s another thought hiding in that space.

And sometimes giving something time doesn’t just reveal what might be wrong with an answer.

It reveals something we didn’t realize we already knew.

Sometimes, things need to marinate

We use that expression all the time.

Let me think about it.

I want to sleep on it.

Give me a minute.

It can sound like procrastination.

Sometimes it is.

I’ll admit that patience has never been one of my particular strengths.

I like movement.

See the problem.

Work the problem.

Make the decision.

Move.

Most of the time, that instinct has served me pretty well.

And I’ve always viewed course correction as a reasonable option.

Make the best decision you can with what you know.

Move.

Learn.

Adjust.

Sometimes it isn’t.

Some decisions are difficult to unwind.

Sometimes acting changes the very conditions we were trying to understand.

And sometimes by the time we realize what we missed, the cleanest opportunity to learn from it is already gone.

That doesn’t mean we need certainty before we move.

We’re rarely going to have it.

But sometimes the hardest thing for me to do is nothing.

Especially when doing something feels like progress.

I’ve learned that occasionally the next thought needs a little room to show up.

A connection appears.

An assumption becomes visible.

Something that felt important becomes less important.

A question we weren’t asking suddenly becomes obvious.

Nothing new necessarily entered the equation.

We just gave what was already there enough time to develop.

Maybe that’s why an idea can look different the next morning even though nothing about the idea changed overnight.

We did.

Not all waiting is waste

Speed can eliminate an enormous amount of unnecessary waiting.

Good.

Automate repetitive work.

Remove unnecessary steps.

Get the information sooner.

Shorten the feedback loop.

There’s little value in waiting that teaches us nothing.

But sometimes the passage of time is itself part of what we need to observe.

A promotion creates an immediate spike.

Does it persist?

A new product sells well.

Do people buy it again?

A test produces an early lift.

Does the effect hold?

Customers respond.

Was it incremental demand – or did we simply pull future behavior forward?

Sometimes we aren’t waiting because the analysis is slow.

We’re waiting because reality is still producing the evidence.

Sometimes additional time isn’t inefficiency.

It’s information.

The blur

There’s another cost to moving quickly.

Everything starts arriving faster.

Another analysis.

Another meeting.

Another decision.

Another result.

Another presentation.

Next.

Next.

Next.

We can process an extraordinary amount of information this way.

But processing something isn’t necessarily the same as learning from it.

Six months later, the presentation probably still exists.

The analysis probably still exists.

The decision probably exists somewhere.

But what did we learn?

And does anybody remember?

The faster experiences pass by, the easier they may be to experience as a blur.

And blurs seem to have a pretty short half-life.

Maybe speed helps us experience more.

I’m less certain it always helps us retain more.

Faster isn’t the problem

There are plenty of things I want faster.

The question isn’t whether speed is good or bad.

It’s what we’re accelerating.

Removing time that adds no value can create enormous value.

But compressing time that allows us to notice, understand, reconsider or learn may be something else entirely.

Maybe the best use of speed is creating more room for the things that shouldn’t be rushed.

Because you can’t preserve learning you never gave yourself enough time to form.

And sometimes time isn’t the cost of learning.

It’s part of how we learn.

For lack of a conclusion…

My first response is seldom my best.

Patience isn’t one of my particular strengths.

Sometimes I just need to give it a minute.

And occasionally another one.