Why Fast Organisations Don't Always Act Fast
- Aug 21
- 5 min read
Written by Paul Grainger, Founder of Unlock Dynamic
As founder of Unlock Dynamic, Paul Grainger is a trusted strategic partner to Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Operating Officers (COOs), and senior leadership teams navigating pressure, change, and complexity. With over 25 years of experience across startups and multinationals, he helps ambitious organisations thrive by addressing the behavioural realities most leadership programs overlook.
In fast-moving organisations, responsiveness is usually seen as a sign of good leadership. Leaders are expected to act quickly, respond to new information, and keep pace with change. Yet in recent conversations with leadership teams, I’ve started to notice something interesting. What happens when one of an organisation’s greatest strengths begins working against it?
The moment
“Anything new, we’re on it straight away.” This comment came during a recent leadership session as a group of senior leaders explored what most often hijacked their attention. They had identified several familiar culprits: recency bias, ‘quick questions’, the crowd effect, and what they described as the “shiny new thing.”
It was this last example that prompted a particularly interesting observation. One participant described how readily the group responded whenever something new appeared: “Anything new, we’re on it straight away, and we kind of push away other things that we’re prepping for.” There was a brief pause as the recognition seemed to spread around the room.
What’s really happening?
At first glance, there was nothing particularly unusual about what the group had described. Leaders respond to requests, adapt to new information, and pay attention when something urgent arises. In a fast-moving organisation, we would probably be more concerned if they didn't.
What made the conversation interesting was that none of these individual responses appeared to be the problem. Each made sense on its own. The pattern only became visible when they were considered together: something new arrived, attention shifted, and what had already been prioritised became surprisingly easy to displace.
This is where responsiveness can quietly become reactivity. Not because leaders are responding to the wrong things, but because responding itself can become the default. Over time, the organisation becomes increasingly good at reacting to what arrives while becoming less deliberate about deciding what genuinely deserves its attention.
Nothing looks wrong
The difficulty is that an organisation operating this way may still appear to be performing well. Leaders respond quickly, teams stay busy, and new ideas turn into action. From the outside, it can look like exactly the kind of pace and adaptability that fast-moving organisations need.
Yet underneath that activity, priorities can become increasingly fragile. Work that was deliberately agreed upon gets displaced by what has just arrived, attention keeps moving, and energy is repeatedly redirected before existing priorities have had time to deliver. Everything seems to be moving at full speed, but movement can easily be mistaken for progress.
The wrong diagnosis
The problem often becomes visible somewhere else: competing priorities, unfinished initiatives, slower execution, or teams struggling to create space for bigger picture thinking.
When it does, organisations naturally try to fix what they can see. Competing priorities become a prioritisation problem. Overstretched teams suggest a lack of capacity. Initiatives that keep losing momentum point to an execution problem.
Each diagnosis may contain some truth. But sometimes the deeper problem is simpler: the organisation has become too quick to give new things priority in the first place.
What deserves a response?
If responding faster isn’t always the answer, slowing everything down isn’t either. Fast-moving organisations need to respond quickly when the situation demands it. The challenge is knowing when.
That requires a better filter for responsiveness: distinguishing between what needs attention now, what can wait, and what doesn't need attention at all.
The real leadership challenge, therefore, is not simply knowing when to move quickly. It’s knowing what deserves speed in the first place.
How effective organisations respond
Effective organisations don’t try to eliminate the constant flow of requests, ideas, and opportunities. In a fast-moving environment, that would be neither realistic nor desirable. Instead, they become better at filtering what deserves attention before allowing it to redirect existing priorities.
This doesn't mean resisting new ideas or refusing to change direction. During the leadership session, one participant captured the balance well. The “shiny new thing,” he observed, has a place “as long as it is considered strategically, and we implement it carefully.” Genuine emergencies and unexpected opportunities still require a fast response. The difference is that something new arriving isn't, by itself, enough reason to change direction.
The goal isn't to respond less or move more slowly. It's to create enough space between what arrives and what happens next so the response becomes intentional rather than automatic. In essence, effective organisations aren't necessarily less responsive. They are more selective about what they respond to.
The evidence
When organisations want better results, the natural response is often to add something: another priority, another measure, another initiative to move things forward. It feels productive. But the evidence suggests that more can actually make success less likely.
Boston Consulting Group (BCG)’s 2024 research into transformation initiatives found that those using a lower, more manageable number of milestones achieved success rates 15% to 40% higher than those perceived as having too many. With fewer things competing for attention, teams were better able to focus on the actions that mattered most.
That's the danger of the “shiny new thing.” Each addition can seem useful on its own. Yet collectively, they can dilute the very focus needed to deliver. The organisations that keep moving forward may not be those doing the most, but those staying focused on what matters most.
Building a culture of focus
Every time leaders respond to something, they are doing more than making a decision. They are also signalling what deserves attention. If every new idea immediately creates activity, teams quickly learn that generating movement is valuable, even when the idea itself has had little time to develop.
The opposite isn't a culture where teams stop bringing ideas forward. It's one where ideas are expected to earn attention. Teams learn to think them through, involve the right stakeholders, and consider how they fit with what already matters. This improves the quality of ideas being raised while reducing the time and energy spent exploring those that add little value.
Over time, this creates an organisation that is more selective about where it directs its attention. A culture that regularly questions where its time and attention are going becomes much harder to distract from what matters most.
The one question
Once a week, step back from the individual decisions and demands that have filled your team's attention and ask yourself and your team one question: What took more time than it deserved?
The value isn't in identifying one bad decision or wasted hours. It's in noticing the organisational patterns that are difficult to see while you're caught up in them. Over time, those conversations can help teams strengthen their filter for what genuinely deserves attention and what doesn't.
The quality of that filter may be what separates focused organisations from merely busy ones.
Read more from Paul Grainger
Paul Grainger, Founder of Unlock Dynamic
Paul Grainger focuses on helping capable leaders and teams sustain strong performance over time, beyond conventional approaches that frequently fail to hold under daily pressure. Drawing on decades of experience, he blends human insight and modern science to offer a practical alternative to conventional leadership thinking. A consistent theme in his work is identifying the invisible performance drains that quietly cost organizations time, energy, and focus.
