Faster Is Best

I had the pleasure of listening to Stefanie Posavec speak recently, and one story from her talk has been rattling around in my head ever since. In 2014 she and a fellow information designer, Giorgia Lupi, who had met only twice before, decided to write to each other for a year, Stefanie from London and Giorgia from New York, and instead of using email they used postcards.

Each week, they tracked something about their own life: how often they checked the time, every door they passed, a week of complaints, a week of small kindnesses. Then they turned the data into a hand-drawn picture on a card the size of a postcard, and dropped it in a postbox. It crossed the Atlantic the slow way, arriving days later carrying whatever scuffs the crossing had left on it. Fifty-two weeks of postcards, one each way every week, for a year. It became a book, Dear Data, published in 2016.

Lupi has a name for what they were doing: slow data. And the thing worth noticing is that nobody set out to build a slow method. They were two people on opposite sides of an ocean who wanted to work together and didn't have an easy fast option. The postcard was the constraint, not the plan. What they found inside the constraint was the surprise: turning a week of your own life into something you have to sit down and draw by hand changes what you notice about the week. It stops being data capture and becomes something closer to reflection. They described the project as a personal documentary rather than a quantified-self exercise. The point was never to measure themselves better. It was to see themselves more clearly, and the slowness is what did that.

The paradigm nobody chose, exactly

Speed is the default setting of almost every business conversation happening right now. Remove friction. Cut the steps. Ship faster, decide faster, scale faster. Nobody argued their way into this position. It simply became the water everyone swims in, to the point where suggesting a process should be slower can sound, in most rooms, like admitting defeat.

Daniel Kahneman gave us a useful piece of language for why this happens without anyone deciding it should: what you see is all there is. Judgement runs on the evidence in front of you, not the evidence that was never collected. Speed's benefits are collected by default. Cycle time, time to market, throughput: these sit on dashboards because somebody built the dashboard. Slow's benefits are not collected, because nobody has ever built the instrument for them. You cannot miss what you never had a column for. The absence isn't proof that slow has nothing to offer. It's proof that nobody has been counting.

That is the actual argument here, and it is worth being precise about it, because the temptation is to turn this into "slow is better," which is just the fast paradigm wearing a cardigan. The claim is narrower and, I think, more useful: the comparison has barely been run. Most organisations have never deliberately slowed a process down and measured what happened next. They have sped things up, constantly, and measured that. One side of the ledger is full. The other is blank, not because it's empty, but because nobody has opened the book.

The organisation that found this by accident, in a whole country's health system

Jos de Blok had spent years as a home care nurse in the Netherlands before he decided the system he worked in was doing real harm. By the mid-2000s, an elderly patient with a modest set of needs might be seen by up to forty different carers in a month, each one following a schedule set by a head office optimising for efficient routing. De Blok called the result what it looked like: a factory.

In 2006 he founded Buurtzorg, Dutch for neighbourhood care, with a team of four nurses in a small Dutch town. The idea was not a cost strategy. It was closer to a protest. Strip out the management layer. Let small teams of nurses, no more than a dozen each, plan their own visits and decide for themselves how long a patient needed. The unofficial motto became "coffee first, then care": spend a few unhurried minutes with the person before doing anything clinical. Slower per visit. Fewer administrators watching the clock.

Nobody at Buurtzorg was chasing a budget line when they built this. But a 2009 Ernst and Young study found its patients were getting what they needed from about 40 per cent of the care hours they were authorised for, against roughly 70 per cent at other providers, and a 2015 KPMG study for the Dutch health ministry found about a third fewer home-care hours per client and home-care costs roughly a fifth lower. The wider picture is more mixed, because once hospital and doctor costs were included KPMG found total costs per client only about 3 per cent below the national average. Overhead today is 6.7 per cent of costs, against around 17 per cent at comparable organisations, and client satisfaction sits well above the sector average. Buurtzorg now employs around fifteen thousand people, looks after more than seventy thousand clients a year, and has inspired similar models in more than twenty countries.

The saving wasn't the goal. It was the thing that showed up once someone finally ran the version of the experiment where care wasn't optimised for speed. De Blok didn't know how much care could be delivered in fewer hours until he stopped organising for efficiency and started organising for the actual relationship between a nurse and a patient. The measurement only existed because somebody had, for once, built a slow version worth measuring against.

The smaller signals pointing the same way

Brunello Cucinelli runs a listed cashmere business out of Solomeo, a hamlet in Umbria, on what he calls humanistic capitalism. Staff stop work at half past five, take a ninety-minute lunch, and are asked not to send business emails after hours, while much of the making stays in and around Solomeo. None of this reads like a growth strategy on paper. It is a deliberate decision about how fast the organisation itself should move, in a category that runs on speed.

Toyota's approach to decisions, which Jeffrey Liker sets out in The Toyota Way as deciding slowly by consensus and then implementing rapidly, leans on nemawashi, the Japanese practice of building agreement quietly, one conversation at a time, before a decision is made formally. It is not a Toyota invention, since the word comes from gardening and describes preparing a tree's roots before it is moved, but Toyota built it into how the company decides. It is, by design, the slower route to a decision. The payoff is meant to arrive afterwards: once everyone affected has been heard, implementation should meet less of the resistance that otherwise surfaces months later. The company didn't remove friction. It moved the friction to the front of the process, where it is cheaper to pay.

What this doesn't claim

None of this is an argument that slow is secretly always right, and it would be misleading to leave that implication unchallenged. Plenty of slow things are just slow, carrying no hidden upside at all, and plenty of speed genuinely is the correct call. The claim is narrower than that, and I think it's the more useful one: most organisations have never actually tested the alternative. They have optimised one side of a comparison for so long that the other side has become invisible, not proven inferior. Posavec and Lupi didn't discover that postcards beat email. They discovered that they had never previously found out what a postcard could do, because nobody had ever been forced to try it.

The question worth carrying out of this isn't whether to slow down. It's narrower and more useful than that: which part of what you do has never once been deliberately slowed down and watched, simply because speeding it up was the only option anyone thought to build a dashboard for?

Sources: Dear Data, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec (Princeton Architectural Press / Particular Books, 2016); "Can you get to know a person through data alone?", The Guardian, 21 August 2016; The Commonwealth Fund, "Home Care by Self-Governing Nursing Teams: The Netherlands' Buurtzorg Model" (2015), summarising the 2009 Ernst & Young and January 2015 KPMG studies; Buurtzorg Nederland, Kwaliteitsbeeld 2025; Euronews, "Buurtzorg: the Dutch proximity health care revolution" (26 June 2026); Business of Fashion, profile of Brunello Cucinelli; David Perell, "Lessons from Bruno Cucinelli"; Toyota UK, "What is nemawashi?"; The Toyota Way, Jeffrey Liker, Principle 13; Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).

Article 2 of the "But Is It Though?" series | redebuter.com

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