The Speed Paradox
"I'm going 120 kilometres an hour. I know it. I can't stop."
He said it with something close to pride. A director in manufacturing. Built his reputation on speed — fast decisions, fast execution, the person you want in a crisis because he's already three moves ahead.
His team had stopped telling him things.
Not because they were afraid of him. Because there was no point.
He'd asked them to come to him with problems. They did. And every time, before they'd finished the sentence, he'd solved it. Out loud. In real time. "Here's what you do —" and the answer was usually right, which made it worse, because they couldn't even argue with the solution. They could only execute it.
So they stopped coming. Not dramatically. Gradually. The way water finds a different path when one is blocked. They brought the small things. They handled the big things themselves — badly, sometimes, but at least it was theirs.
He never noticed. He was going 120 kilometres an hour.
"I'm used to solving problems quickly. Myself. I trust myself," he told me. Then the pause. "But the others — they think less. Contribute less."
He said it like a discovery. It wasn't. His 360 had said the same thing two years earlier. His wife had said it longer ago than that.
The data was everywhere. But acting on it required something the data couldn't provide: the ability to sit still while someone else fumbles toward an answer you already have. For a person wired like him, that isn't patience. It's physical pain. The pause feels like negligence. Like watching someone drown when you know how to swim.
I asked him: if you're not the fastest person in the room, who are you?
He stared at me for a long time.
We worked on one thing. Not delegation frameworks. Not "empowerment." One thing: what happens in his body in the three seconds after someone raises a problem and before he opens his mouth.
He hated it. The first week he called it "unbearable." The second week, "pointless." The third week he came in and said his junior engineer had proposed a solution to a production line problem that he wouldn't have thought of.
"I would never have heard it," he said. "I would have been talking."
His team came back. Not with complaints — with solutions they'd been holding because there was never room to offer them. They were more capable than either side had realised. They'd just learned to match his rhythm: bring the problem, wait for the answer, execute. A perfectly efficient system. And a developmental dead end.
Going slower didn't make him less effective. It made everything around him faster.
Your speed might be the thing slowing everyone else down. And nobody will tell you, because you're already gone.
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