Steven J. Spear wrote The High-Velocity Edge and Wiring the Winning Organization, and he has won the Shingo Prize. I asked him how organizations build Fingerspitzengefühl and Einheit when technology and complexity keep speeding up.
Slowification
Steve’s idea of slowification means designing operations around what human cognition can handle. Teams solve hard problems in a slower, safer setting first. Then they perform at speed. That shift moves an organization out of the danger zone and into the winning zone.
Planning and challenge
We talk about planning in knowledge work and the Battle of Midway. Steve stresses the value of challenging ideas during planning, and the Japanese side’s failure to do so. Case-based reasoning, resilience engineering and high-reliability theory come up, with links to the DevOps community.
Standards and feedback
We close on the US Navy’s nuclear reactor program. Precise standards, tracking progress and tight feedback loops kept that program safe for decades. Steve shows how any organization can learn from it.
Slowification gives a team time to build shared orientation before the pressure arrives.
Where could your team slow down to solve a problem before it has to perform?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.