Overview

The English travel writer Bruce Chatwin wrote about a group of white explorers who were trying to force the pace of their African porters. The porters, within sight of their destination for the day, sat down and refused to move. As they explained to their frustrated employers, we are waiting for our spirits to catch up with our bodies. ^[1]

Have we reached a similar juncture, when it comes to speed? For generations, speed and constant acceleration have defined the way we communicate, eat, travel around, and innovate products. Our designed world reinforces the value we place on speed. We produce and consume at an ever-increasing pace, and speed is worshipped uncritically as an engine of investment and innovation. Michael Dell s proclamation is typical: Velocity, the compression of time and distance backward into the supply chain, and forward to the customer, is the ultimate source of competitive advantage, he said in 1999. ^[2] Or as Hitachi more punchily put it in the 1990s, Speed is God, Time is the Devil. ^[3] (Hitachi s current slogan is Inspire the Next. )

But the signs are that speed is a cultural paradigm whose time is up. Economic growth, and a constant acceleration in production, have run up against the limited carrying capacity of the planet. The carrying capacity of business is also under pressure. When continuous acceleration is the default tempo of innovation, it leads to feature bloat in products and the phenomenon, which we are seeing now, of customers who...