Do we need a Slow Project movement?
What if ‘quick wins’ are the project equivalent of fast food?
In most organisations, quick wins are celebrated as proof of momentum. They are polished and presented for business cases, highlighted in status reports, and offered as evidence that transformation is well underway.
But I have been wondering whether our attachment (and obsession) to ‘quick wins’ has a broader impact.
Projects are hard, particularly complex ones. They involve ambiguity, trade-offs, and outcomes that cannot be fully predicted in advance. Complex projects require judgement over process. They demand a combination of patience and deliberate action for clarity to emerge. All of which can be really uncomfortable.
Quick wins, on the other hand, are neat. They give us a sense of visible control and allow us to say, “We are moving.” But movement is not the same as progress.
The Lowering of Standards
Fast food isn’t evil. It solves an immediate need. But if it becomes the default, you adjust your standards and can forget what real nourishment feels like.
Quick wins might operate in the same way.
They satisfy the immediate craving for visible results and reduce short-term anxiety. But they can also lower the bar for what we consider a worthwhile outcome when all we care about is the appearance of traction.
A design is signed off because it is “good enough.” A decision is made quickly to maintain momentum, or an unresolved issue is pushed into production with the hollow confidence that it can be “cleaned up later”. And you know it never will be.
Over time, the organisation becomes conditioned to incrementalism. As a result, the deeper work never gets done. In complexity, early shortcuts embed long-term constraints. What looks efficient now can become expensive later.
Avoiding the Hard Work
In projects, quick wins can become a form of avoidance where we act without understanding and deliver without redesigning. They give us something to report without forcing us to confront the harder trade-offs.
The ‘real work’ is slower and more cognitively demanding. It involves sitting with ambiguity, surfacing disagreement, and developing a deeper understanding of how the system is connected. It forces us to ask: “What needs to fundamentally change?”
Do we need a Slow Project movement?
In the late 1980s, the Slow Food movement began in Italy as a reaction to the spread of fast food. It wasn’t against progress, it was about quality, craft and experience. It argued that how something is created matters just as much as how quickly it is consumed.
Perhaps complex projects need a similar counterweight. Not slowness for the sake of delay, but valuing the time required to think and connect.
A Slow Project would:
• Create space for understanding before making commitments
• Prioritise long-term impact over short-term optics
• Treat design decisions as foundational, not ‘fixable’ later
• Recognise that how the team works shapes what they produce
This embraces the idea of “think slow, act fast” (from Bent Flyvbjerg, How Big Things Get Done). A “slow project” doesn’t get lost in the analysis, it takes deliberate action with a focus on learning. It builds a deep appreciation of the interconnections and the second-order consequences before locking in a direction.
Have We Lost Sight of What is Good?
Speed without depth creates fragility. It leads to weak systems, exhausted teams and incremental outcomes.
So, the questions become:
Are quick wins accelerating the future we want or making that future impossible?
What if the love of quick wins is occasionally a resistance to doing the real work?
Are quick wins a sign that we have lowered our ambitions?
A phrase often used in special forces training is “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Deliberate, controlled movement under pressure leads to fewer mistakes, and fewer mistakes ultimately produce faster overall outcomes.
Maybe we need to shift from “How fast can we deliver this?” to “What are we really creating, and will it endure?”
In a world obsessed with immediacy, maybe being deliberate and intimate is the radical shift we need.
I’m interested in your thoughts on this one.
