(01)
The top team: feeling frantic, not fast
There isn't a senior leader we've spoken to recently, reports CEO Jason Baer, who isn't feeling a version of the same tension. They are urging (and expensively equipping) their organizations to move faster and getting busyness instead of progress. "It's like cells under a microscope," Jason says, "with frantic activity at the micro level, but zoom out and there's no discernible forward movement at all."
One thing we've seen that reliably makes an enormous difference in creating speed: shared sensemaking, not just shared analysis.
Analysis tells a leadership team what's true. Sensemaking decides what it means for them and what they'll do about it. Most top teams rush the second step and end up with agreement that holds in the room but evaporates outside it.
Try this test: Ask each member of your top team, separately and without the deck, to explain where the company is going and why. If you hear one story, you're aligned. If you hear eight, you've approved a document. Eight stories means eight directions, which is exactly what frantic looks like from above.
(02)
(M)VPs are playing to not lose
"The problem is the next layer down" is not a new refrain, but Managing Partner Nikki Cicerani is hearing at least one new request a week to help the VPs move faster. But when we dig in, what looks like an ability gap or active resistance is often a rational response to a contradiction: A bold growth ambition, paired with no relief on quarterly targets.
Here's how it tends to play out: a major customer is ready to walk. Product says the fix isn't on the roadmap, engineering needs six months, and an AI workaround is promising but unproven. The VP's instinct is that this is too important to get wrong. So she takes control. She calls for more analysis, brings in more functions, convenes a senior meeting, and puts everything on hold. Six months later, the account is saved, and nothing else has changed. There's no new solution, no new way of working.
"That doesn't look like failure, which is exactly the problem," says Cicerani. The VPs are protecting the business, the way they have always been rewarded for doing.
Now replay it on offense instead of defense. The VP notices her urge to take control and asks a different question: "What could we make true for this customer in 30 days?" She gives a cross-functional team 48 hours, a clear outcome, and firm risk boundaries. Within days, there's a testable path.
The account might be saved either way. But only one version builds the capacity to advance tomorrow's ambition. The difference isn't skill. It's what leaders believe they're accountable for.
A question for your next leadership meeting: What have we done lately that taught our leaders defense is the safer bet?
(03)
Everyone stuck at the speed limit
Senior Partner Carina Cortese is hearing it from employees. They're moving as fast as they can and still hitting a limit set by the organization around them.
Often, change has been formulated—roles rewritten, mandates issued and operating models redesigned–but it's slamming up against the tacit human systems that define what Carina calls the 'organizational speed limit.' "It's like telling everyone to drive at highway speed when the road is full of intersections and stop signs. You have to create the conditions for the speed you're asking for."
In one global healthcare client, leaders kept telling teams to move faster, but employees saw decisions questioned or remade unless they were supported by exhaustive analysis and broad pre-approval. People rationally responded with overpreparation, oversized meetings, and escalation—slowing the very decisions leaders wanted to speed up.
Another team expressed frustration that they worked exceptionally fast to bring a proposal to the exec team, who loved it and declared it a priority. A month later they were still waiting to get on the individual's calendars for the follow up meeting.
"Look for where the waiting is happening," says Carina. Leaders tend to think of the organization as a car: press the accelerator and steer. It's more useful to think of the organization as traffic, whose speed is the sum of thousands of micro-decisions and interactions by individual actors. That means thinking less like drivers and more like traffic planners.
A question for your next leadership meeting: Where did our last big priority spend most of its time waiting, and who was it waiting on?
(04)
And now for something completely different
This story is apropos of nothing—and that's kind of the point. The unexpected, the idiosyncratic, the flat-out weird is having a moment, says Principal Ellie Jabbour, pointing to a recent article in Architectural Digest, "Good taste is getting weirder."
As designer cache (faux, real, or AI-generated) becomes more accessible, what's aspirational has shifted to something an AI would never put together. Interest in surrealist art and fashion is surging. High-end marketplace 1stDibs has launched a 'wonderfully weird' collection. Good taste is no longer running away from the "aberrations of humanity," to borrow an SYP collaborator's wonderful phrase. It's embracing them.
Ellie sees a parallel in writing and other kinds of work product that are proliferating and flattening out in the age of AI. A run-on sentence, odd construction or verbal flail in the Substack, a bum note or wall of noise in the music track, the wobbly line, the bump, the lump, the clash—they pass the sniff-test for being imperfect, therefore human, therefore precious.
Cultural shifts show up in fashion, design, and art before they hit the water cooler. But sooner or later, they do hit. "Embrace your organization's weirdness," Ellie advises. (Or, at least, be careful how much of it you sacrifice for the sake of speed.)
