Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

Move with a sense of urgency. Have a purpose. Do the thing as fast as you can. But not faster.

The expression is frequently attributed to the U.S. Navy SEALs, but the concept itself comes from nature, and I'm most interested in applying the principle to software engineering leadership. I've delivered many projects throughout my career, in roles ranging from individual contributor to CEO, and it's certainly an invariant that time is of the essence. All other things being equal, delivering sooner is always better.

But all other things are not equal. There are almost always tradeoffs, usually fairly obvious and intentional ones, but sometimes they're more insideous and troublesome.

One of the more typical and well-known tradoffs is schedule vs quality. Unfortunately, "quality" is a vague and subjective concept, and therefore very difficult to reason about. Quality of the end user deliverable and quality of the workmanship that goes into it are entirely different concepts, and are barely even related. You can easily trade off bugs and missing features against schedule, but it gets complicated and counterproductive real fast if you try to trade off code quality and engineering process shortcuts against schedule.

The impact of bugs and missing features is relatively easily quantified. The impact of crappy code and shoddy engineering practice is not. I can tell you this, however -- if the team is checking in code that is difficult to understand and maintain, and cutting other corners in the process, all in an attempt to move fast -- you're actually moving slowly. Quite possibly backward.

Why? Because SOME of that crappy code or skipped steps will, in fact, never matter, and it's really easy to focus on that. But SOME of it will matter immediately. That shortcut that someone took? That's cognitive load that someone has to deal with as soon as you discover some previously unknown bug or critical missing piece. Those discoveries happen MORE frequently as you near delivery, not less. So that hypothetical "later" frequently turns out to be "right now", and dealing with the cognitive load will therefore slow you down "right now", too.

So how does going "slow" ultimately make us "fast"? Emphasis goes to the word "smooth". A big clue to that point is that it's repeated twice in the expression. The word "slow" is just shorthand for "only as quickly as you actually can smoothly". If the wheels are about to fly off the cart, if you're flailing, if people are showing signs of distress, then you're going too fast. Take a step back, breathe, and ground yourself, then proceed smoothly.

In some ways, this SHOULD be obvious, but it's also not easy to tell when the wheels are about to go flying off the cart. Flailing doesn't always LOOK like flailing. Bottom line is that it is really hard to tell a healthy sense of urgency from counter-productive rushing just by looking.

Here's one of my favorite examples -- a couple of Marines racing to see who can disassemble and reassemble the M240B machine gun more quickly.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast

It doesn't really look like the Marine in the foreground is flailing, does it? Or even rushing, for that matter. He seems to be moving with a sense of urgency, right? But if you didn't catch this the first time through, go back and watch carefully. You don't have anything "smooth" to compare against until about the 20 second mark, where the difference starts to become more and more obvious once the Marine in the background joins the race.

Those guys are Marines, and I mentioned the expression is popularly attributed to the U.S. Navy SEALs, but I also mentioned that the concept itself comes from nature. There's literally a term for it in fluid dynamics: laminar flow.

Laminar flow is the smooth, parallel movement of fluid particles in layers, which is the opposite of chaotic, turbulent flow. It occurs at low speeds and in viscous fluids, where particles move in straight, parallel lines without mixing. Laminar flow is tremendously more efficient than turbulent flow. For a given amount of applied energy, a system optimized for laminar flow will result in more throughput, and the fluid in the center of the pipe, analogous to the main features of the software, will reach the end of the pipeline tremendously more quickly and predictably with laminar flow than with turbulent flow. Literally slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

So the next time you need to be faster, don't just look for ways to be faster. Look for ways to be smoother. Faster WILL follow. Accept that you may need to slow down a bit to do so. Move with a sense of urgency. Have a purpose. Do the thing as fast as you can -- but not faster. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.