Over the last while I have being thinking about the statement "if you work faster, you will work differently". I have seen this happen in the real world and how much of a change it create for the better.
Some years ago I worked as a draughtsman and started in a small company. Their then current draughtsman was leaving to work else where. The person I was replacing had about two years experience, while I had near ten years. With the last two years being 100% focused on that one task. Needless to say I was able to produce higher quality, better detailed work faster. With that link in the production chain being some much faster it had a knock on affect to the whole chain. By the time I was leaving every process, section and department had evolved to something that was far removed from where it started. I want to say the we were handling close to twice the workload with the same resources but all that was not down to me. It was down to how one area being faster changed how the whole system worked.
I wish I was the one that coined this phrase but am not. The first person I heard using it was Linus Torvalds in an interview where he was talking about how the introducing of GIT change how the Linux kernel was developed. They were able to merge changes from contributors so much faster it meant they were able to release faster or at least do nightly builds, that were actually nightly.
So this statement "if you work faster, you will work differently", how can we use that to improve what we are doing? I think there is two main points in the statement, working faster and working differently. But one is not equal to the other. Working faster is equal to working differently but working differently is not equal to working faster.
The question then becomes how do we work faster? This is a super hard question to answer. One way is to just work faster, but the use of the word just implies there is more going on. You could try working smarter, making better use of your time. While waiting for one process to finish you can be working on something else. This would work but the gains are not going to be great and you will burn your self out. It also does not help the wider team(s) or departments work any faster.
The better question to ask is: if the process were to be working faster want would be different about how the process worked? It is easier to change how the process works but we most remember that working differently does not equal working faster. There needs to be a willing to try change but also being ok with going back to the old ways which might have being faster.
Having a definition of what working faster would look like can help guide to which areas of the process that should see the change first. There is no good way of doing this, it is a lot of trial and error. Every process is going to be different, so what works for one might not work for others. It might turn out that a failed attempt might make a huge difference if some other changes where in place first. There is something to be learned from every attempt. Try use these learning's in future trials.
