"Speed has quietly become the stand-in for intelligence.".
I notice that lately, a lot of executives love to talk about velocity — how fast teams move, how quickly things ship, how rapidly new systems get rolled out.
Speed has quietly become the stand-in for intelligence.
That sounds reasonable until you test it against anything that has to keep working over time.
Example #1: The Truck
Imagine running a trucking company.
One driver brags:
“I made it from Chicago to Dallas faster than anyone else.”
But when you look closer, you find out he:
Skipped inspections
Ignored weight limits
Ran the brakes thin
Yes, he got there fast.
But the truck is now unsafe, the next trip is dangerous, and the company is exposed to a serious accident.
No sane operator would call that competence.
Yet in IT, we routinely reward this exact behavior — as long as nothing breaks yet.
Example #2: The Bridge
Now imagine a bridge builder saying:
“We poured and opened this bridge in half the time.”
But:
Concrete curing was rushed
Load tolerances weren’t respected
Stress testing was skipped
The bridge may stand for a while.
But when winter hits, or a heavy truck rolls across it, reality shows up.
Speed didn’t improve the bridge.
It just delayed the consequences.
In technology, we do the same thing — and then give it a polite name.
We call it technical debt.
In reality, it’s usually something more specific.
It’s the premature destruction of escape routes.
Systems that survive over time don’t move fast by committing early.
They move safely by iterating in small, end-to-end steps—keeping alternate paths alive until reality proves which ones matter.
Years ago, a mentor and former partner of mine and I simply called this “long and thin” development.
Velocity worship does the opposite.
It collapses options early, mistakes cleanliness for correctness, and calls the loss of resilience “progress.”
So if you test against anything that has to keep working over time — there is a different question to ask.
The Question That Actually Matters
Here’s the question velocity worship never asks but surely should:
How fast can we move without breaking what keeps us alive?
That’s the question:
Farmers ask before harvesting early
Bridge builders ask before opening to traffic
Pilots ask before takeoff
Open-heart surgeons ask before cutting
Nuclear operators ask before bringing a reactor online
Every serious discipline asks it.
Only software leadership increasingly pretends it doesn’t apply.
Why This Way of Thinking Took Hold
This isn’t just a leadership fad.
It’s the downstream effect of educational drift.
Many younger executives were trained in environments that quietly redefined how truth is established — where internal narrative coherence mattered more than external constraint.
They were rewarded for:
immediate outcomes over underlying mechanisms
short feedback loops over long horizons
“shipping” over understanding
narratives over constraints
In those systems, disagreement was no longer treated as a test of rigor.
It was treated as hostility.
Challenges to assumptions weren’t evaluated — they were shut down.
Questions about constraints weren’t explored — they were reframed as obstruction.
And skepticism, the engine of science, was increasingly interpreted as a social or moral failing.
The result isn’t bad intent.
It’s a generation trained to confuse consensus with correctness and confidence with truth — in systems where the consequences of being wrong arrive late and far worse, they compound quietly.
Why This Used to Be Survivable
For a long time, this mindset didn’t immediately collapse companies.
Why?
Because humans were still the brake.
Even when software moved fast:
Velocity created messes — but humans absorbed the shock.
Why It’s Becoming Dangerous Now
That buffer is disappearing.
Modern systems — especially AI-enabled ones — don’t just suggest anymore.
They act.
They:
When executives demand faster rollout to “keep up,” they are often delegating authority faster than they understand it.
This is where impatience stops being a personality trait and becomes a systems risk.
There is no human reflex fast enough to catch a bad decision once it propagates at machine speed.
What Velocity Optimizes For — and What It Erodes
Velocity is easy to measure.
Resiliency is not.
So organizations drift toward:
And away from:
Velocity optimizes motion.
Resiliency preserves survivability.
Confusing the two is not bold leadership.
It’s immature systems thinking.
The Hard Truth
Speed is a tuning knob.
Resiliency is a survival requirement.
Fast systems that cannot refuse unsafe actions are not impressive — they are the organizational equivalent of a teenager flooring the accelerator because patience was never required of them.
Final Line
Velocity tells you how fast you’re moving.
Resiliency tells you whether you’ll still be here tomorrow.
One flatters impatience.
The other rewards adulthood.
Chris Ciappa
Founder, Samirac Partners
I work on resilient system architecture — across data platforms, AI systems, and long-lived infrastructure.
samirac.com
