Leading with Velocity

Modern organisations are full of movement. Calendars are crowded, inboxes overflow and teams move from one deadline to the next with little space to breathe. People are often working as fast as they can. Yet, despite all this activity, many organisations end a year feeling remarkably close to where they began.

This creates an important leadership challenge. If people are already moving quickly, asking them to move faster is unlikely to produce sustainable improvement. It may simply create fatigue, shortcuts and more organisational noise. The better question is not, “How do we increase speed?” It is, “How do we create greater impact?”

Busyness is not speed. Speed is not velocity. Activity is not progress.

Reflection: Where in your organisation are people moving quickly but making surprisingly little meaningful progress?

Speed is not velocity

In everyday conversation, speed and velocity are often treated as the same thing. In physics they are different. Speed describes how fast something is moving. Velocity describes both speed and direction.

A person can travel at 100 kilometres per hour, complete a long journey and return to the exact point from which they started. They have travelled quickly and covered considerable distance, but their average velocity across the journey is zero because their overall displacement is zero.

Organisations can do the same. They can answer emails, complete reports, attend meetings, launch initiatives and work long hours without making purposeful progress toward a valued outcome. Leaders therefore need to distinguish between movement and movement in a meaningful direction.

Vision establishes direction. Strategy proposes a route. Leadership responds to the terrain.

This matters because organisational plans are often drawn as a straight, uninterrupted path from Point A to Point B. Reality is different. Markets shift, assumptions prove false, clients respond unexpectedly and new obstacles emerge. A change of route is not necessarily a failure of planning. It may be evidence that the organisation is learning.

Good leaders remain committed to the destination without becoming emotionally attached to the original route. They establish direction, take a meaningful step, gather feedback and adjust while continuing to move.

Reflection: Is your organisation committed to a meaningful destination, or merely attached to an ageing plan?

Direction is not automatically growth

When leaders are asked where their organisation is heading, the answer is often “growth”. Yet growth is not a direction; it is a change in scale. A firm can grow revenue, headcount, offices, clients and service lines without becoming more valuable, resilient or purposeful. It may simply become heavier.

The more useful questions are: Growth in what? For whom? At what cost? Toward what purpose? Growth should support a chosen direction rather than substitute for one.

For a professional firm, a meaningful direction might be to become the most trusted adviser to a particular client group; to increase the value created in each relationship; to develop exceptional leaders; to build international collaboration; or to create better careers without requiring unsustainable hours. Growth may follow, but it is not the only evidence of progress.

Some growth builds capability. Other growth merely accumulates weight.

Reflection: If your firm became twice as large but no better at serving clients, developing people or adapting to change, would that count as success?

Momentum: the capacity to create impact

Newtonian physics offers a useful leadership metaphor:

p = mv

In physics, momentum (p) is the product of mass (m) and velocity (v). A fly and a truck can travel at the same speed and in the same direction, but they have radically different capacity to affect what they encounter. The difference is mass.

As a leadership metaphor, organisational momentum can be understood as an organisation’s capacity to create meaningful impact. Mass represents the capability and accumulated weight the organisation carries. Velocity represents the rate and direction of meaningful progress.

The metaphor is not intended to turn organisations into a two-dimensional physics problem. External forces such as regulation, competition, economic uncertainty, technology and client expectations introduce friction and drag. The equation is valuable because it gives leaders a simple diagnostic question: if we want greater impact without simply asking people to move faster, which part of the system deserves attention?

Reflection: Does your organisation lack capability, lack direction, or carry too much weight?

Productive and unproductive mass

Organisational mass is not simply size. A large organisation can be agile, while a small firm can be astonishingly heavy. Mass is everything that must be moved, consulted, protected, maintained or carried when the organisation changes direction.

Productive mass: capability	Unproductive mass: weight
Expertise and judgment Trust and reputation Client relationships Leadership capability Technology and systems Financial resources Networks and partnerships Institutional knowledge	Excessive approval layers Duplicated work and systems Too many priorities Low-value meetings and reports Legacy processes Unclear decision rights Silos and internal politics Projects nobody will stop

The leadership task is not to remove all mass. Productive mass gives the firm substance and the ability to make a difference. The task is to preserve and mobilise capability while shedding weight that no longer contributes to impact.

This distinction also protects against a simplistic “cutting” mindset. Trust, mentoring, relationships, institutional knowledge and professional judgment can be difficult to measure, yet they may be among the organisation’s most valuable assets. Leaders must be careful not to remove productive mass while chasing short-term efficiency.

Reflection: What productive mass should your organisation deliberately strengthen—and what unproductive mass should it courageously stop carrying?

Increase velocity through learning, not pressure

If velocity is purposeful progress, it improves when organisations learn and adjust more effectively. This is different from simply increasing the pace of work. Higher velocity may come from clearer priorities, faster decisions, shorter feedback loops, better access to information, delegated authority and small-scale experimentation.

The operating rhythm is straightforward: establish direction, take a meaningful step, gather feedback and adjust. The plan becomes a hypothesis rather than a promise that the future will unfold exactly as expected.

This requires psychological safety and disciplined curiosity. People must be able to question assumptions, surface inconvenient information and report that an experiment did not work without being treated as the problem. Organisations lose velocity when they defend yesterday’s plan more energetically than they explore today’s reality.

Velocity is not created by holding a perfectly straight line. It is created by repeatedly correcting direction while continuing to move.

Reflection: How quickly does your organisation turn new information into a better decision or a changed course?

Breakthrough questions: 10x impact without 10x weight

The ideas popularised in 10x Is Easier Than 2x invite leaders to consider questions ambitious enough to challenge the current operating model. Two-times thinking often asks, “How can we do more of what we already do?” Ten-times thinking asks, “What would have to become fundamentally different?”

The least imaginative interpretation of 10x is to become ten times larger. The more useful interpretation is to create dramatically greater value without adding proportionate people, effort or complexity.

A strong breakthrough question challenges orthodoxy, remains open ended and cannot be answered immediately. It creates a field for exploration rather than a target for micromanagement. Examples include: How might we complete this work in days rather than months? What if the client could safely complete part of the process themselves? How might we create ten times the impact without ten times the workload?

The breakthrough question should remain alive long enough for teams to experiment, learn and discover possibilities that would never emerge from incremental planning alone.

Reflection: What assumption is your organisation or profession making that may be preventing a breakthrough?

Five leadership practices for greater impact

1. Reconnect people to direction. Spend more time clarifying where you are going, why it matters and what progress looks like—and less time simply urging people to move faster.
2. Mobilise productive mass. Use the expertise, trust, relationships, reputation, technology and capability already present in the organisation.
3. Shed unproductive mass. Stop, simplify or remove bureaucracy, duplication, unnecessary meetings, approval layers and low-value work.
4. Learn and adjust as you move. Shorten feedback loops, run small experiments and remain committed to the destination without becoming attached to the original route.
5. Hold a breakthrough question. Explore a question ambitious enough to challenge the current model and unlock greater impact without proportionate weight.

The leadership challenge is not to make people run faster. It is to create greater clarity, remove unnecessary weight and help the organisation make more purposeful progress.

The final question for every leader is therefore simple: Where can I sharpen direction, mobilise capability, remove friction or create an experiment that allows this organisation to have greater impact?

Four questions to carry forward

• What meaningful impact are we trying to create?
• What productive mass should we mobilise or strengthen?
• What unproductive mass are we willing to shed?
• What is the next experiment that will help us learn and adjust?