Speed arguably matters more than ever. But today’s top-performing organizations aren’t just faster, they’re more selective. As market signals get harder to read and the pace of disruption accelerates, long-term plans are becoming outdated before they’re even in motion.
In response, many leaders are shifting to shorter, three- to six-month planning cycles, placing smaller bets more often to improve the odds.
One operations executive described how her team shifted from multiyear projects to rapid, “no excuses” initiatives: short cycles tied to clear, non-optional priorities. “It’s not a nice-to-have. You can’t not do it,” she explained.
These rapid loops are valuable for their pace but also for how they help organizations learn faster, align quicker, and build toward future advantage. The key is reinvesting those gains into reskilling talent, redesigning how work gets done, and evolving operating models that scale more intelligently across functions.
But agility comes with a trade-off: what you build today might be obsolete tomorrow. As Amalia Goodwin, Slalom managing director and global outcome lead of adaptive organizations, put it: “We often talk about continuous reinvention as a positive. But the other side of that coin is planned obsolescence.”
Leaders must increasingly embrace the idea that some investments may be intentionally short-term: designed to solve a problem quickly, deliver value now, and then be retired or replaced. For example, a team might implement an AI coding assistant to speed development in the near term, knowing it may be overtaken by better capabilities next quarter.
Speed follows clarity. High-performing teams are using short-cycle planning, OKRs, and heatmaps to zero in on what really matters. It’s a different kind of discipline: one that treats speed not as the goal but as a mechanism for momentum and strategic reset.