Fast & Now: Or, You are Trying to Catch Lionel Messi
Decision makers offer public experts only a tiny window for influence.
Life’s a marathon, not a sprint—everybody knows that. What about your career? That’s a marathon, too; so pace yourself, don’t get too high or low. And changing anything, especially through research? You won’t believe how long that takes. Everything’s a slog. Long way to go, my friend. You’ve got plenty of time.
Except it’s not. There isn’t. And you—as a public expert—don’t.
For a senior leader, says Sasha Dichter, the most important job is to make quick decisions on the most important things. That’s how you scale your impact as a leader—decisions that work through the scale of your organization. And how exactly do you do that? By embracing a process he calls fast and now:
The senior leader is faced with the following question in every moment of the day:
Of the million things that are going on right now (that I’m aware of) which of these needs my attention and my voice right now?…
To do this, both her decision-making and her meta-cognition need to operate at a very high level.
The only way she can survive and consistently add value in this maelstrom is if she:
Has easy access to the right information (from dashboards; from colleagues; etc.) She is IN the information flow and has open, trusting relationships with the right folks in the organization.
Processes all of this information quickly and acts decisively (“I can ignore all of this things, and these things need my attention right now.”)
Her job is to constantly be getting new information and successfully deciding: where to act; how loudly her voice should be heard; when to ensure that things are continuing or accelerating; and when to redirect or even stop.
There is no way she will pull this off if she is not both fast and deciding now.
I often remind myself and my team that, to make lasting change, our work is a marathon, not a sprint.
However, the requirement of “fast and now” brings to mind the capabilities of a soccer player, not a marathoner.
As leaders, we need to be able to accelerate quickly for a short distance, over and over again. This skill allows us to achieve a high throughput on all the inputs we see, so that we can add value when and where it’s most needed.
So decision makers aren’t marathoners after all. They’re Lionel Messi.
Have you seen Messi play? That’s the target for you, the researcher who wants to make public impact. Make in-his-prime-Messi pay attention to your insights.
To do that, your public expert content must be optimized for fast and now. Not only does it have to present quickly actionable information, it also has to break through their attention filters. Are you confident it’s doing all that? What would make you more confident?
And as a public expert, you also must practice fast and now—in your leadership within your organization, but equally for your content. That doesn’t mean posting immediate hot takes. It means: Do you have “easy access to the right information”? Are you delaying posting timely insights because your information processing or your risk evaluation are kludgy? Are you afraid of making a permanent mistake?
“It helps to remind ourselves,” finishes Dichter, “that most of the decisions we make are Type 2 decisions—they are relatively easy to reverse—and that the enemy of progress is lack of clarity and the unwillingness to take a stand.”
What’s a Type 2 decision? It’s the opposite of a Type 1 decision, as defined by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a letter some years ago to Amazon’s shareholders. Type 1 decisions are irreversible, and thus worthy of length deliberations, while Type 2 decisions are experiments, and (as Bezos put it in his shareholders’ letter):
“can and should be made by high judgement individuals or small groups. As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavyweight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention. We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.”
I don’t know many researchers who would get excited about following advice from Jeff Bezos. But here’s the thing: The Type 1/Type 2 framework is incredibly useful for the public expert. Because content is almost always a Type 2 decision. Content is almost always revisable.
Researchers usually don’t think about their public-facing content this way. It might be because post-publication revision is rare in research, a sign something was deficient with the original. It’s not that way for public expert content. It’s also almost always a piece of a larger project to understand something, a project that’s in some kind of progress.
This was driven home for me by a recent very short Substack post from Timothy Burke, professor of history at Swarthmore College:
I should have a new piece on an old subject (the “crisis of the humanities”) later today, but I did want to let all my subscribers know that I did some substantial revision this morning of yesterday’s essay, which was a bit of a mess from being composed too hastily after a very exhausting couple of days. If you had trouble figuring out what I was trying to say about what diplomats say and don’t say, give it another go.
Nobody died.
Revise often. First be fast and now.