In startup culture, “move fast” is often treated as gospel. Launch quickly, break things, iterate. It works great—for maintenance. But for creation—the fragile, messy, nonlinear work of discovering something truly new—moving fast can do more harm than good.
I learned this lesson both in the cockpit and in the boardroom. And nowhere has it been clearer than in Boston, where I’ve seen companies thrive by slowing down in discovery and only speeding up once they truly know what they’re maintaining.
Why “Move Fast” Is a Maintenance Strategy
When systems are already built, speed is leverage.
- You’ve got infrastructure in place.
- You’ve validated demand.
- The risks are operational, not existential.
In that context, moving fast is efficiency. It’s patching bugs, upgrading processes, shaving seconds off delivery routes. Speed compounds value.
But in creation—in early-stage product design, in civic revitalization, even in community-building—rushing can kill the very thing you’re trying to nurture. You can’t sprint through ambiguity. You can’t brute-force trust.
The Fragility of Discovery
Discovery requires patience because:
- Signals are faint. The data isn’t clean yet. You’re listening for whispers, not tracking dashboards.
- Trust is slow. Whether it’s early customers, a neighborhood in Boston, or a nonprofit partner, you earn trust by showing up consistently, not by forcing acceleration.
- False positives abound. Moving too fast in discovery can lock you into the wrong path—building the wrong product, serving the wrong need, chasing the wrong metric.
Think of it like aviation: once the plane is in the air, you can make adjustments quickly. But in the hangar, when you’re designing the aircraft? Rushing the blueprint is reckless.
Boston as a Case Study
Boston is often seen as a “fast” city—finance, biotech, venture capital, world-class universities all driving rapid cycles of innovation. But look closer, and you’ll see a paradox: the best breakthroughs here often came from deliberate slowness.
- Biotech startups spend years in labs before IPOs. The slowness of discovery is what makes the speed of scaling possible later.
- Neighborhood revitalizations in places like East Boston or Somerville didn’t happen overnight—they came from years of small, trust-building steps with communities.
- Universities like MIT and Harvard nurture research over decades before it explodes into world-changing companies.
Boston teaches us: move slow to discover, then fast to scale. Both tempos matter—but in sequence, not simultaneously.
How I Apply This Today
In my work with startups and real estate development, I separate two phases:
- Discovery = Slow, Observant, Patient
- Interview users deeply.
- Spend time in communities.
- Build paper prototypes before code.
- Watch patterns emerge instead of forcing them.
- Maintenance = Fast, Iterative, Relentless
- Once the model works, optimize ruthlessly.
- Automate what you can.
- Shorten cycles, speed decisions, trust playbooks.
Confusing the two is dangerous. It’s like trying to fly before you’ve finished tightening the bolts.
Closing Thought
“Move fast” isn’t bad advice—it’s just incomplete. Speed is fuel, but fuel without a sound structure is an explosion. The art of leadership is knowing when slowness is the strategy.
Creation deserves patience. Maintenance deserves speed.
And the leaders who master that rhythm—like so many I’ve learned from in Boston—are the ones who build things that last.
