Go Slow to Go Fast: The Hidden Cost of Just Getting Things Done

Anyone who’s ever worked with me will be familiar with the phrase “go slow to go fast”. Possibly very familiar. Probably sick of hearing it!

And no, despite how it sounds, it doesn’t mean I want people working slowly.

Quite the opposite.

It’s something I’ve said to teams for years, and it comes back to a fairly simple idea: taking a little more time to do something properly today can save a whole lot of time tomorrow.

But there’s more to it than just checking your work.

It’s about understanding how what you do affects other people, questioning why things are done a certain way, and recognising when the quickest solution isn’t necessarily the best one.

Getting It Right the First Time

When things are busy, it’s tempting to focus on getting your part finished and moving on to the next thing.

But what happens after you’ve handed that work over?

Does someone else need to check it, correct it or chase you for missing information? Have you made their job easier, or have you simply moved the problem further down the line?

A few minutes spent checking your work before passing it on can save considerably more time for the next person. Multiply that across an entire team or workflow, and the impact on time, cost and frustration can be significant.

And once we’re consistently getting things right, it’s worth asking whether there’s a better way to do them.

Why are we entering the same information into multiple systems? Why does something need to be checked three times? Are we still doing something purely because “that’s how we’ve always done it”?

Some of the best improvements I’ve seen have come from asking the people doing the work what’s frustrating them.

Often they already know exactly which parts of a process are inefficient. They’ve just become so used to working around the problems that nobody questions them anymore.

But there’s another common shortcut that can be even more costly.

“It’s Quicker If I Just Fix It Myself”

Oh, how often have I heard this one.

And I’ve certainly been guilty of it myself.

Someone makes a mistake. The next person picks it up, spots the problem and quietly fixes it.

Problem solved. Everyone moves on.

Except tomorrow, exactly the same thing happens.

The person making the mistake has no idea there’s an issue. The person correcting it has quietly added another task to their workload. And the business continues absorbing the cost of something that could potentially have been fixed at the source.

It’s understandable why this happens. When you’re busy, it genuinely can be quicker to fix something yourself rather than stop, explain what’s wrong or work through the issue with someone else.

But quicker for whom? And for how long?

And there’s another cost that’s not always as obvious as the additional work.

The Hidden Cost: Frustration Between Teams

I’ve seen how quickly resentment builds when one team feels they’re constantly cleaning up after another.

The conversations start happening within the team rather than between the teams.

Someone complains about having to correct the same thing again. Someone else agrees that it’s ridiculous. Everyone has a good vent, fixes the problem and gets back to work.

Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, the team supposedly causing all the problems might have absolutely no idea there’s even an issue.

Or perhaps they’re dealing with completely different challenges, including unrealistic deadlines, insufficient resources or processes that don’t work particularly well.

What looks like a performance problem might actually be a resourcing, communication or process problem.

But nobody knows, because nobody’s talking.

And sometimes, when you finally look at what’s happening across the entire workflow, the real problem isn’t where anyone thought it was.

A Real Example: When the Problem Wasn’t Where Everyone Thought

I worked with several teams responsible for different stages of the same workflow.

The fifth team in the process was consistently picking up additional work that should have been completed earlier. They were frustrated, under pressure to meet their own deadlines and understandably unhappy about having to finish tasks they believed belonged to someone else.

Much of that frustration was directed at the fourth team, who appeared to be finishing their shifts while work remained untouched.

From the outside, it looked like people weren’t completing their responsibilities and were leaving problems for the next team to deal with.

But when we stepped back and looked at the entire process, from the first team through to the last, a very different picture emerged.

The issue actually started with the first team.

They were completing their tasks within the timeframes they’d been given, but some of that work wasn’t being completed until after the fourth team had finished for the day.

So the fourth team wasn’t ignoring work or leaving jobs unfinished. Those jobs hadn’t even reached their queue before they finished their shifts.

And the first team? They had no idea when the fourth team started or finished, or why the timing of their own tasks mattered so much.

Everyone was focused on their own responsibilities, without understanding how their work fitted into the bigger picture.

The solution wasn’t additional resources, more checking or another layer of management oversight.

It was getting everyone to understand the full workflow, including the timing, dependencies and impact of what they were doing.

Once the first team understood when their work needed to be completed, and more importantly why, the problem was resolved.

No complicated new system. No major process overhaul.

Just better visibility, clearer expectations and a conversation that probably should have happened much earlier!

It’s also a useful reminder of why individual team KPIs don’t always tell the full story.

Each team might be meeting its own targets, while another is quietly absorbing additional work or dealing with problems created earlier in the process.

On paper, everything can look great. But sometimes the only reason the process appears to be working is because people have become very good at compensating for its problems.

Closing the Feedback Loop

This is why taking the time to have a conversation matters.

Not to point fingers, assign blame or send work backwards just to prove a point. But to understand what’s happening and why.

If someone has made a mistake, show them what happened and explain the impact. Give them the opportunity to correct it, learn from it and avoid repeating it.

And just as importantly, give them the opportunity to explain.

Perhaps they weren’t trained properly. Perhaps the instructions weren’t clear. Perhaps the deadlines were unrealistic.

Or perhaps they were doing exactly what they’d been asked to do, without anyone realising the problems it was creating further down the line.

You won’t know unless you ask.

And sometimes the solution is surprisingly simple. Better training, clearer expectations, a small process change or just getting people from different parts of the business together to understand how their work affects each other.

What seems perfectly logical from one side of a workflow can look completely different from the other.

Go Slow to Go Fast

None of this means every mistake needs a meeting, a root cause analysis or a new procedure. I’m certainly not advocating for more meetings for the sake of having meetings!

Sometimes a quick correction is exactly what’s needed.

But when the same issue keeps appearing, it’s worth questioning whether continuing to fix it is really saving time.

Every time something needs to be picked up again, checked, corrected or passed back and forth between people, we’re adding time and cost, creating more opportunities for error and, quite often, frustrating everyone involved.

And that’s before considering what else those people could have been doing with their time.

Taking the time to understand why something keeps going wrong, giving people feedback and looking at the full process might feel slower in the moment. But it’s ultimately far quicker (and a lot less frustrating for everyone!) than having multiple people handle the same piece of work over and over again.

That’s what I’ve always meant by “go slow to go fast”.

Get it right the first time. Question how things are done. Fix recurring problems at the source.

Because the goal isn’t to have everyone working faster. It’s to make sure we’re not creating unnecessary work for ourselves or each other in the first place.

About the author

Gayle Williams | Clear Consulting Partners

Gayle is an experienced finance and operations leader who has spent her career helping businesses build stronger teams, improve processes and make better decisions.

With a background spanning senior finance, operational leadership and business improvement, she brings a practical, hands-on approach to solving problems, developing people and making better use of the systems and resources businesses already have.

Through Clear Consulting Partners, Gayle works with growing businesses to bring greater clarity to their financial information, strengthen internal processes and build the capability of their teams.

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