Speed and Urgency:
The Twin Engines of Transformation
Why the organizations and individuals who move first capture most of the value — and what the research actually says about it.
Speed Is the Modern Competitive Advantage
Speed is not about rushing. It's about responsiveness, decisiveness, and the ability to move before circumstances force your hand. In today's environment, speed signals competence — customers expect instant answers, rapid delivery, and real-time support. Companies that move slowly don't just frustrate customers. They lose them.
Across industries, fast-moving organizations consistently outperform slower ones. They seize opportunities early, adapt before competitors react, and iterate quickly enough to learn faster than the market moves. Speed is also the engine of innovation — fast movers test ideas and refine solutions while slower organizations are still debating whether to begin.
Pia Silva, writing in Forbes from the perspective of a small agency owner, puts it plainly: customers today don't view speed as a differentiator — they consider it the standard. Fail to meet that standard and they simply go elsewhere, often to a competitor who isn't cheaper, just faster.
02
What McKinsey's Research Actually Shows
The clearest empirical case for speed in transformation comes from McKinsey research published in May 2023 by Senior Partner Louisa Greco and Partner Zachary Silverman. Their analysis of corporate transformations found a consistent and striking pattern in how value is captured over time:
This is not just a statistic — it describes a structural reality. The bulk of transformation value is front-loaded. Organizations that sprint at the start generate quick wins that cement commitment, build cultural energy, and fund longer-term ambitions. Slow starts, by contrast, drain enthusiasm and create space for resistance to organize.
McKinsey's research adds a finding that is equally important: organizations that identify barriers to speed in advance are four times more likely to rate their change programs as a success than those that don't. Preparation for speed is itself a competitive act.
There is also a warning embedded in the data: nearly half of all possible financial benefits are lost if an organization shifts to a slower pace mid-transformation. The potential for value creation starts declining from day one. Speed isn't merely helpful — its absence is actively destructive to the effort.
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Decision Speed and Profitability
The link between speed and financial performance extends beyond large-scale transformations into everyday decision-making. Research by Orgvue, conducted with Vanson Bourne, found that organizations with strong data access had a 16% higher profit growth opportunity — and that 71% of business leaders reported regretting decisions they had made too slowly.
This finding matters because it challenges a common assumption: that slower decisions are more careful and therefore better. Management research consistently shows that when organizations have clear data and well-defined decision rights, faster decisions are not lower-quality decisions. Speed and quality rise together. The enemy of good decisions is not speed — it is ambiguity, unclear accountability, and poor information.
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Urgency: The Emotional Engine That Starts the Machine
Speed, however powerful, does not appear on its own. It requires a trigger — and that trigger is urgency. Brigita Tomas, in her TEDx talk on personal and organizational change, identifies urgency as the psychological ingredient most often missing from failed transformation efforts.
"Successful people get a sense of urgency from the inside. Unsuccessful people wait for outside events to invoke it."
— Brigita Tomas, TEDxHer core observation is that most people and organizations only act when life forces them to — through a health scare, a job loss, a financial crisis, or a competitive threat. This is reactive urgency, what Tomas calls the "outside sledgehammer." It works, but it is costly and unpredictable. The goal is proactive urgency: cultivating a genuine sense of importance and momentum before the crisis arrives.
Urgency, she argues, is not an intellectual construct. You cannot reason your way into it. It is emotional — found not in analysis but in connecting deeply with what genuinely matters.
"You won't find urgency in your brain. You need to search for it in your heart."
— Brigita Tomas, TEDx05
Kotter's Framework: Urgency as Step One
Tomas' insight is supported by one of the most rigorously tested models in organizational change management. Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, whose 8-step change model has been validated across decades of corporate transformations, identifies "establishing a sense of urgency" as the essential first step — before strategy, before structure, before communication.
Kotter's research found that more than 70% of change efforts fail, and that the single most common reason is that leaders underestimate how much urgency is required just to overcome the emotional inertia of the status quo. Without urgency, people default to existing habits and routines. Committees form, studies are commissioned, and the transformation dissolves into drift.
This is the organizational version of what Tomas describes at the personal level: without a genuine emotional reason to move, people simply don't.
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Why Transformation Efforts Fail: The Consistent Pattern
Synthesizing McKinsey's data, Kotter's research, and Tomas' psychological framework, the failure pattern is remarkably consistent across organizations of every size:
This chain is not theoretical. It is documented in McKinsey's data on how value erodes when transformations slow down, in Kotter's analysis of why 70% of change programs fail, and in the behavioral research on how urgency determines whether individuals and organizations ever begin at all.
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The Three Levers That Sustain Speed
Tomas draws from corporate change management to identify three levers that determine whether urgency and speed can be sustained over time. They apply at every level — organizational, team, and individual.
The norms, values, and routines that either support or suffocate urgency. In individuals: beliefs, fears, and habits — invisible and automatic, but changeable.
In organizations: clarity and alignment. In individuals: self-talk, relationships, and the environment you inhabit. How you speak shapes how fast you move.
Decision rights, empowerment, and accountability in teams. In individuals: self-governance — the willingness to lead yourself without waiting for permission.
McKinsey's research reinforces the culture lever in a specific way: organizations where more than 30% of employees are engaged in capability-building programs deliver roughly 40% more total shareholder return than those with no such programs. Culture isn't soft — it has a measurable financial signature.
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Shifting Personal Culture: Practical Starting Points
Organizational culture is hard to change. Personal culture — the beliefs, fears, and habits that live inside you — can be even harder, because it lacks the external accountability structures that organizations provide. But it can shift, and often faster than people expect, if approached deliberately.
- Replace one slow habitIdentify a single behavior that reinforces delay — avoiding decisions, waiting for motivation, deferring emails. Replace it with the faster version of that same action.
- Add one accountability mechanismA coach, a partner, a public commitment, or a hard deadline. External pressure accelerates internal change because it makes the cost of inaction visible.
- Redesign your environment for speedEnvironment beats willpower. Remove friction from one recurring task. Pre-decide one routine. Automate one process. Each reduction in friction is a reduction in the energy required to move.
- Practice micro-urgencySet a five-minute timer and complete something immediately. Urgency is a trainable muscle. Small repetitions build the capacity for larger movements.
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Three Things to Do This Week
- Shorten one cycle time by 20%Pick one recurring process — a response, a review, a delivery — and commit to completing it 20% faster this week. Measure the result.
- Make one decision you've been delayingIdentify a decision you have been postponing. Give yourself 24 hours to make it. The cost of most delayed decisions exceeds the cost of an imperfect choice made quickly.
- Create one visible early winMomentum is built, not found. Start with something small and completable that demonstrates progress. The psychological effect of a visible win — however modest — is disproportionate to its size.
Rigorous AnalysisEvidence & Source Review
Each major claim in this article has been checked against its primary source. Below you'll find what the research actually says — including where the evidence is strong, where it requires context, and where claims have been reframed to accurately reflect their origins.
This figure appears verbatim in the McKinsey article "Ready, Set, Go, and Keep Going: Why Speed Is Key to a Successful Transformation" (May 4, 2023), authored by Senior Partner Louisa Greco and Partner Zachary Silverman. The data is drawn from McKinsey's proprietary transformation database and is referenced with an exhibit in the article. The original article is publicly accessible at mckinsey.com.
Important nuance: these figures describe successful transformations — they are not averages across all efforts. They tell you what winning looks like, not what typically happens. The article also notes that value creation potential begins declining from day one if pace slows, and that nearly half of possible benefits are lost when organizations shift to a slower pace.
This finding also appears directly in the same McKinsey article. It is one of the most actionable — and underreported — findings in the piece. Preparation for speed, not just speed itself, is a measurable predictor of transformation success.
John Kotter's 8-step change model, first published in his 1996 book Leading Change and refined over subsequent decades, identifies "establishing a sense of urgency" as Step 1. His original research, based on observation of more than 100 companies attempting major change, found that the majority failed — and that complacency (the absence of urgency) was the most consistent first cause. This is one of the most cited frameworks in organizational change literature.
The exact "70%" figure has been widely reported and repeated, but Kotter's original text speaks more qualitatively about "most" efforts. The figure has become a widely accepted shorthand in the field, though it should be understood as an approximation rather than a precise measurement.
This data comes from commissioned research by Orgvue (a workforce analytics firm) conducted with Vanson Bourne (a specialist technology research firm). The findings are consistent with a broader body of management research showing that decision speed improves when organizations have better data and clearer decision rights. The directional conclusion — that slow decisions carry real financial cost — is well-supported across multiple independent studies.
Commissioned research by a vendor should be read with appropriate skepticism, as the findings may be shaped to support the commissioning organization's product narrative. The conclusions are plausible and directionally consistent with independent research, but independent replication would strengthen the case.
The Forbes piece cited in earlier versions of this article is a contributor column by Pia Silva, a small agency owner and branding consultant. It contains no statistics, no cited research, and no empirical claims. It is a practitioner's perspective — well-reasoned and experientially grounded, but not a data source. The directional argument (faster delivery improves cash flow and client retention) is reasonable and consistent with general business logic, but it should be cited as perspective, not evidence.
This is an important distinction. "Forbes says speed drives profitability" implies institutional research. The reality is a contributor essay. Both can be valuable — but they carry very different epistemic weight, and conflating them understates the uncertainty in the claim.
The "80% failure rate" figure Tomas cites is widely used in change management contexts and is broadly consistent with Kotter's findings, though its precise origin varies by source and methodology. Her core psychological claim — that proactive, internally-generated urgency distinguishes high performers from those who wait for external crises — is consistent with research in self-determination theory and motivational psychology, even if her talk itself is not a peer-reviewed source.
TEDx talks are not peer-reviewed and should not be treated as primary research. Tomas' framework is valuable as a synthesis and a practical lens, and it is well-supported by the adjacent academic literature — but readers should understand it as an applied framework rather than an empirical study in its own right.
Primary Sources
- Greco, L. & Silverman, Z. (May 4, 2023). "Ready, Set, Go, and Keep Going: Why Speed Is Key to a Successful Transformation." McKinsey & Company. mckinsey.com
- Kotter, J.P. (1996, updated 2012). Leading Change. Harvard Business School Press.
- Silva, P. (June 1, 2021). "Speed Is The Most Important Thing For Your Business' Profitability." Forbes (Contributor Opinion).
- Tomas, B. TEDx Talk on urgency and personal change. TEDx.
- Orgvue / Vanson Bourne. Research on decision speed and organizational performance.
The future belongs to those
who move before they must.
Speed doesn't require perfection. Urgency doesn't require crisis. Transformation doesn't require waiting for the outside sledgehammer. It requires a decision — made now — to move.
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