Moving at the Speed of the Problem

Building creative processes that bend with pressure—without breaking under it.

Speed is the default. Deadlines stack up. Metrics loom. Ideas are pushed from kickoff to launch with hardly a breath between.

Inside that machine, creativity is expected to behave—to speed up, to perform on demand. And it tries. We sprint. We brainstorm. We fill whiteboards in rooms with bad ventilation (or more realistically at home and over good wifi with cats and children sauntering about.)

The best work I’ve seen, though—and the best teams I’ve led—don’t win simply by moving faster.

It’s not about rejecting speed—they don’t ignore business goals or timelines or OKRs—but they bend the rhythm. It’s about learning when to slow down, when to swarm and when to sharpen.

Leadership, here, is not about control. It’s translation. The leader watches the rhythm, adjusts it, clears space, filters noise—so the team can think more clearly, build more deliberately. Follow their lead.

This isn’t a theory. It’s a practice.

A practice of tuning.

A practice of translation.

A practice of treating creative work as serious work—not precious, not fragile, but capable of surviving pressure because it was built to scale and evolve.

You don’t have to break the system to do better work—you have to build the spaces inside it where better work has a chance to thrive.