Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy

Something Tim Ferriss shared recently and deeply resonated in me.

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy”

It is a big issue in corporates about Ego and politics.

What does this mean?

When developing software, there is a big push on the speed and “develop it faster” mentality. I have seen this in some QA Team Leads who seem to execute tests without fully understanding the context and putting a lot of pressure on the dev team to prove them wrong in the end.

Speed up the test preparation leads to a waste of time for the entire development team.

This is true for developers and features dev. There are sometimes issues with the prioritizations and the right things are delivered at the wrong time, or wrong features are developed and prioritized in the worst time.

What needs to happen is to have experienced lead/manager who can create a process where it is not about the ego and the individual needs to push things further, but it is about the team to get together and to prioritize the activities and be able to speak their mind when they are not in agreement.

The challenge is that so few people like to hear they are wrong. They will justify their actions absurdly just to keep their ego alive. This, of course, is demotivating for everyone else who wants to do their work correctly.

If you work in an Ego driven team/organization, your challenge will be how to teach the people who you work with that expressing concerns and adjusting the plan has nothing to do with the person, but everything to do with the project and the group success.