Sessions with System & Soul

Reflection: When Moving Too Slow Costs More Than Mistakes

• Benj Miller, McKenzie Decker • Season 1 • Episode 19

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In this Reflection episode of Sessions with System & Soul, Benj Miller and McKenzie Decker explore a challenge every leader faces: how do you balance progress with perfection?

They unpack why moving too slow often costs more than mistakes, how hesitation drains culture and alignment, and why leaders learn faster by staying in motion.

You will discover:

  • Why momentum is a leader’s greatest growth tool
  • The hidden cost of slow decisions on team culture
  • How perfectionism stalls clarity and execution
  • When excellence matters more than speed
  • A mindset shift that helps leaders scale with confidence

Whether you are a founder, a COO, or a team lead, this conversation will help you reframe how you think about speed, progress, and leadership.

Sessions is hosted by Benj Miller and McKenzie Decker

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McKenzie Decker:

Hey there. Welcome back to Sessions with System and Soul. I'm Mackenzie. I'm here with Benj

Benj Miller:

What's up?

McKenzie Decker:

Benj has got good energy today. We today, we've got a, what we call a reflection episode for you. What this, what that means is we're gonna talk through some things that we notice that are just general, a general feeling, a general vibe, a general challenge that we see as we work with clients and that we experience ourselves. So we're working through it with you. We're gonna have a conversation today around it. Before we start, I wanna thank fist bumps. So fist bumps is the team that puts this amazing this amazing show on for us. If you need help with a really authentic message and really authentic content, they are your people. getfistbumps.com Okay. Benj.

Benj Miller:

I can feel you bracing yourself for this conversation.

McKenzie Decker:

I, you know what I am Actually, can I tell you, okay. So this morning I was thinking about this. I'm like, how do we wanna address this like pace of change idea? And I found myself like this is probably just like how I operate, but I found myself being irritated because I'm like, I think one of the things that's really hard about this conversation is. There's a lot of in my opinion, there's like a lot of competing wisdom around it. There's a lot of so here I wrote down what I feel like I've heard all these people say all these phrases. That are supposed to be like, I guess they're supposed to be advice when you're trying to decide are we moving at the right pace? Is the pace of change fast enough? Are we being thoughtful enough? Whatever it is. I'm so curious

Benj Miller:

what's on the list?

McKenzie Decker:

Okay, so my first one, okay, by the way, don't know who said any of these things, so that's how valid they are.

Benj Miller:

We will work it out

" McKenzie Decker:

Slow is fast and fast is smooth", "Move fast and break things"."Keep the one thing", which, it's a pace thing.

Benj Miller:

Okay, hold on. So the first one's a military phrase. You don't have it perfect, but it's a military phrase. And I love that one. The second one's from Zuckerberg, that was his whole thing at Facebook for the first 20 years. And the third one I'm pretty sure is from the movie City Slickers But keep going.

McKenzie Decker:

Okay. So we're fact checking as we go.

Benj Miller:

Yeah, I got you.

McKenzie Decker:

And "We have a strategy: it's called Doing Things". That's the other one I'm thinking of. And I think that one's about pace, because I think you say that when it's okay, we just need to, we need to go, like we need to be. And that one is Herb Keller, which is legit.

Benj Miller:

Yeah.

McKenzie Decker:

Can you think of as I like as I say all those, do you, can you think of one that you

Benj Miller:

oh, probably, I don't know. Not on the spot, but I do love I do love a few of those. And Herb Keller's especially, because what it reminds me is the the strategy, like people get so wrapped up in strategy, which is not really what we're talking about today, but the reality of what strategy is like it should tell us what we're gonna do and what we're not gonna do. That's like at its core, it should give us insight to that and then, and in what we're gonna do."Keep the main thing". Move fast.... "move fast and break things" is great for stage one companies. I'm not sure it's the right advice for all companies.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah.

Benj Miller:

And I actually have your first quote on my I got a new laptop, but it was on my, it was the only thing on my old laptop. And it says "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast". And so the idea is I want to go fast, but the way to go fast is to go smooth. And the way to go smooth is to go slow. And it's it's more I think of a mindset than it is a actual pace. Because if you're in the middle of a war zone, like you gotta go fast, right? It's not Hey, let's just sit back here and bunker and drink some tea and think about what we're gonna do. You've gotta go, there's still movement. But make your movements smooth.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah, I think you're helping me place some of these things, but I do think that a lot of the pace conversation is, this is another, I think this is an Andy Stanley thing, but it's "A tension to be managed". Like not a problem to solve, but a tension to manage, which, and that's what I wanna talk to you about today in a couple of different ways, because I think oftentimes we're like, it's as simple as this. Like we like, but there is more of a, there's more of like a sliding scale of dealing with. Change how fast we move, how we make decisions, how we bring people along for those decisions. So that's what we're gonna talk about today.

Benj Miller:

Let's go. It's definitely a tension. We feel it too.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah. And we can talk through that. Maybe we can get some work done while we're on this call. The first, so the first kind of tension category of tension that we deal with this is this idea of like progress and perfection. Which I think there's a, another way to say it might be like iteration versus the highest quality outcome. Like really this battle between we're learning as we go. We're giving our space, we're giving ourselves space to unlearn, we're giving ourselves space to create feedback loops.

Benj Miller:

Yeah.

McKenzie Decker:

And then moving towards the quickest, most. High quality most, directed action and getting it right the first time, second time, third time.

Benj Miller:

Let me just tell you my reaction to that 'cause I have a deep bias when it comes to this and that it's that learning happens in action. And so like when people get paralyzed by perfection, it feels like something's sitting on the shelf because we're afraid of failure. And. There's actually a mentality that you can have over the speed of failure, and so it's not about not failing because you will fail. Things will be less than perfect. So how fast can we get through the reps, the awkward reps? And a lot of this comes down. Some of us are wired. I'm a perfectionist. I'm, I, excellence is all that matters. I don't want to be seen as somebody that makes a mistake or an error. So I reread my email five times and I, my bent's like way on the other side you're gonna get an email from me. It might not have capitalization, it might not have punctuation. I'm gonna do dot seven times in one very long sentence because that's how my mind thinks. So you might get that from me, but I'm gonna get that off and it's gonna be done, and it's gonna be outta my mind and outta my space, and so my ability to get more done. Maybe not perfect, but more done. I just don't know how much value perfection actually has. Now on this other side of that, like I don't want us launching features in our software that have bugs and let users have a bad experience, right? So it's knowing like where's that is the tension, right? Where is the line? But I think learning happens in action. And if we're waiting for something to be perfect. Then we're like to launch, like then we're not getting customer feedback. We're not seeing where things break fast enough and just learning happens in action. But I know that's a tension.'Cause you do things really well and you want them to be really well. So how do you manage that?

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah I was gonna say, I don't, and in response to what you just said, I don't think that. I totally agree with. I think I was gonna say like in more of a growth stage business, but I think in any business I've been in the progress over perfection. It's true. No matter what stage you're at, I think it is. I think it's focusing the two things. I think it's focusing on what things require perfection, which is one of the things that you just mentioned. So I think that's one bucket. What requires perfection and are we creating the correct feedback loops so that if we're living in the journey of progress, are we making sure that we're learning from it? I think that's where, I think that's where that falls off the rails and people wanna use that as we're just, we've gotta learn, which I think is absolutely true. A hundred percent. We've got a beta test, we've gotta get MVPs out there. We have to do that, but we also have to make sure that we're looking at what we learned and iterating on that. When I say we need to focus, perfection, what you just said about so we have a software and it would not be acceptable for us to be releasing features that are half baked. It doesn't create the customer experience that we know we need in order to. Serve our customers in the way that we want to. So I think that perfection piece, there's gonna be a progress to get to that perfection. But there's a certain number of things in any business where you say, these are non-negotiable. These are the things we're gonna do extraordinarily well, and we're probably actually gonna be spending more and more time. Making progress on making that thing better over time. So that could be customer service, that could be speed to delivery, that could be communication. There's probably a handful of things that are, that require that perfection and maybe we give it the space to or we just acknowledge that we give it we acknowledge the thing that requires a perfection. We let everything else live in progress.

Benj Miller:

I like feel myself tightening up on the inside even. When you say there's some things that require perfection. So go back to the software example. We don't get perfection. There's gonna be some weird edge case use case that we didn't expect and a customer's gonna find it. So in that case, it's get it to the place where we're comfortable with for the majority of the users. Put it out there and then our job is to be like, how fast can we respond and fix that?

McKenzie Decker:

It's not perfection. It's not perfection. It's excellence.

Benj Miller:

Yeah. It's a standard, and different things have different bars for what that can be, and different people have different bars, and I think that's where it can create organizational frustration. I was in a session yesterday and people were like, why hasn't this launched? And it took us forever to get to like kind of the root problem. And there were a couple things that. It people like didn't believe were ready. And it's that, it's what you're saying, like they didn't feel like it was to the excellence standard that the organization has. And so internally it was hard to get buy-in to then take externally and that was a huge roadblock. And so we had to go, okay, what things don't feel excellent and are these really deal breakers that are gonna stop us from launching or, so we made like an absolute list and a coming soon list. So where is the line? That we feel good enough we can take this to market to start to get some feedback, to get more data. Like action creates learning, right? So there's gonna be something else that comes up that's ooh, this is not to our level of excellence. But we wouldn't have known that if it was sitting on the shelf. But it took a lot for them to get to that root in the room, especially 'cause it involves the whole organization. So everybody had their different perspective on their part of. The pieces and what should be perfect and what was good and what wasn't. So it took us a long time to get there and realize that's what was happening.

McKenzie Decker:

I, I think that's such an important step. I had a real, it's funny, I had a similar conversation internally yesterday in, inside of our team around the same thing. There's, we're working on a project and as we we decided this project, I guess at this point, six weeks ago. So we're halfway through the time allotted for it. And as we, over this six weeks, we've learned a ton and it's changed. Everything that we planned for has changed and we're looking at it and I'm talking to this team member and it's oh, like this kind of feels like a failure because everything we thought is not true and we're not gonna hit the goal. So we're like what could we do differently? And the two things we landed on were when we talk about this on the front end, maybe there's some like reality check. We need to pause and do what you did with that team, which is what's negotiable? What's non-negotiable?

Benj Miller:

Yeah,

McKenzie Decker:

there's that. And then there's also just giving ourselves the space for iteration and learning. And maybe that's truly like we need to allot more days of time or weeks of time.'cause there's a lot of unknowns that we need to account for. One of the things as you were talking that I was thinking of is, I think a lot of times, and maybe this is a me problem, but like I'll get frustrated at times when I see slowness.

Benj Miller:

Yeah.

McKenzie Decker:

When we've made a decision. We're gonna, it's like we, we decided that we're moving in that direction. Why isn't everybody. Why aren't we there? And I think there's so much in wrapped up in that, in, in leading people through change. But I think one of the things that you just said related to that team is that they were unclear there. It wasn't that people are being slow, it's that there was something that wasn't clear about what the deliverable was, what our standard of excellence is. And that's, I think. The slowness is probably an indicator less of like disengagement or disinterest or procrastination. It's more of a signal of care because people are like, I wanna do my job. So I think that conversation's really important to have

Benj Miller:

it. It is. I will say it also felt like a leadership fail because these are senior leaders and nobody like just raised their hand and said. I have trouble backing this, or my team has trouble backing this because X, Y, Z. So the fact that we had to have the conversation and go those layers deep without somebody just raising their hand or multiple people raising their hand, that felt like, ooh, we've got some, we've got some, leadership inner work to do because we can't just my coach has a, let's see if I can get this quote be careful of disagreement, masquerading as confusion. And I see that a lot too as oh, I wasn't sure about this and this. No, you just disagreed. Or you didn't like the answer or you weren't you didn't do your job, so you just act confused about what was supposed to happen. I don't know why my team did this and this. Okay, maybe it's 'cause you didn't lead them well and give them the directive to get it done or the urgency. And I think I know what project pro project you're referring to internally for us. And I smile going "man. I don't know that we could have done any better on the front side." And that's the point, is we all love the quote, the saying everybody's got a plan until you get punched in the face. You can add that.

McKenzie Decker:

Mike Tyson.

Benj Miller:

Yep. There you go. Thank you. Fact check. But like this is that we created a plan and then we got punched in the face. Oh my gosh, this is so much bigger. There's a better way to actually go about the whole thing. Different people need to be involved in different parts of the process in a different way, and so we learned a lot. We iterated, we switched, and it's gonna be so much better because of all the switches that we've made. So I don't know, but you're, what you're talking about goes to this. The other thing that we we talk about internally, I don't know if we've ever used this language outside, but it's like your gut versus gravity. My guts always says we should be moving faster. Always. But there's a gravity in every organization to both how you've always done it. And a pace that you're comfortable with, like people seek comfort. And so very rarely, most founders are very okay with being uncomfortable. That's like the number one trait because there's nothing comfortable about being a founder. But then you're surrounded by a bunch of people in an organization that seek comfort and they, the leaders have gut saying this should be this way and this should go faster, and why aren't we doing this? There's a gravity to the people in the organization pulling you down. And I laughed, what was it this week or last week when we were around a table and you said, but I just don't know if we're going fast enough. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is the moment. Write it down. Like it's usually me saying that to you and you being the gravity, and I'm like. This is awesome. And then I was the gravity in that moment. I'm like, yeah, but I honestly am not sure what we even do to be able to go faster. But I feel you. I feel you. So there's like the gut, the feeling and then the reality. So how are you handling your frustration of your gut that we should be going faster? And our pace, our and the gravity of resources and time and people and all of the realities.

McKenzie Decker:

Okay. I have two thoughts and I wanna push your question the side and go back to what you were saying about the speed versus comfort thing. There's part of me that agrees with it, and then there's part of me that's oh wait, let me do this. Yes and yes, and meaning I agree. And also I don't know that it's always a comfort thing. As much as it is, we have people on our team with different, we call 'em geniuses. Their genius requires a pace that let, lets them sit in something, comb through something, marinate and pull out oh yeah, did we think of this? Did we, oh, I if they have a few hours instead of a few minutes, they're able to look at something differently objectively, or. They can make that connection. I'm a little more like that, so I tend to be and I'm a more cautious person. So the caution is probably the comfort piece. It's makes me feel comfortable when we're moving cautiously. But I do think, and we've encountered this internally, it's like your pace is I can give feedback in five minutes and there's other people on our team, they need five hours. And their return in that five hours is gonna be exponentially better for the way that they operate. And I think we have to keep that in mind as well. Just as a dignifying piece. A dignifying

Benj Miller:

Yeah, absolutely.

McKenzie Decker:

It gets us what we want. I'll give you,

Benj Miller:

I'll give you a very real example of that. There were a couple actual objectives that were on our list for the quarter. One specifically that you had, and it's big and you are gonna have to have a couple meetings, and I'm sure if you stuck with that, whatever you came back would be like masterful. And there'd be a document and there'd be a flow chart, and there'd be like the level of detail would've been way deeper than I was capable of. I am capable of, because of what you're talking about your ability to go deep into. The thinking. We decided, a week or two ago, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take that for now, and I just stewed on it in my subconscious and it actually drove me crazy for a little while. But then I came back and what I brought back to you was like. The work output of maybe 20 minutes at a computer, right? Maybe it was more than that. But there was all the thinking that went into it. And then the 20 minutes at the computer, your work would've been days. But it would've been way deeper and way better. But you also would've gotten to a point where because you would've wanted it to be so good. Had you been wrong in any of your decision points along the way, you would've done a lot of work that couldn't, that we would have to go backwards on. And so I took it and two days later I'm like, when can I present this to you and Chris, right? Like to make sure I'm on the right path. And I don't know if I am or not, but that's an example of what you're talking about. Like I'm gonna go really fast, but it might not have a depth and an accuracy to it that you or some of our other people on the team would have, which makes, I think it makes a good partnership, but it is also still a tension because. I know when you give me something you're like, I don't know what I'm gonna get back. It's gonna end up back on my plate. I'm gonna have to do the deep work. So that, am I right? Is that real?

McKenzie Decker:

Sometimes, yeah. Sorry, my mind's going a bunch of directions I wanna talk about. I think sometimes yes. It's again, we're in attention. That's why this is there's not a one answer.'cause there's sometimes I fully agree with you. It's we don't need, we don't need, and I need to make sure that I'm not communicating to our team in a way that when I give them something to do, they go and they spend 17 hours instead of seven minutes when all we need is the seven minutes. We don't need 17 hours yet.

Benj Miller:

Yeah.

McKenzie Decker:

I think we have to, it's, and sometimes you do a really good job of this, where you communicate that on the front end where you're like, let's go work on this, but don't spend here's how much time you should spend on it. I know we could go and become like PhDs on this, but like we need to. Like right size the appetite is the word we use for it, but communicate what the appetite is, I think is really important.

Benj Miller:

Yeah, I was gonna say, you really good at it too. And I think that's something you've

McKenzie Decker:

grown in, you've

Benj Miller:

Learned over the last couple years, that even if we think, this is a 10 minute task, somebody could pick it up thinking that we think it's a, 10 hour task. And so to communicate that you do that exceptionally well.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah. Thank you. There's, so when do

Benj Miller:

we decide whether to push a team to go faster versus slow down and do it well, or just not even, staying neutral to the speed that's happening?

McKenzie Decker:

When do we know when to push a team to go faster? When to slow down or stay neutral? So I'll answer it and I wanna hear your answer. I think when we're trying something new, when we don't have a proof of concept yet, I think we have to move really fast. So we know we have a new product that we wanna release. There's a new business line. There's a new marketing campaign. Marketing activity. I think that requires speed Plus feedback loops. Yeah. Plus iteration. There's gotta be this like process. When do we need to slow down? I think once we found a proof of concept with something, I think then we dial it in. It's like, how do we sharpen what we've learned? We've learned that works. For example, this is inside of our business, so we've got software. We've talked about that. The software is like constantly iterative. There's so much that we have to move really fast. Some of that's the industry pace and some of it is just we have to test things and learn. On the other side of the business. We move a lot slower when it comes to the, we have a coach community, a bunch of business coaches that are part of our community, and we are very intentional and careful about how we add new things to that yeah. Environment. And I think maybe that's an example of. Of how that works.'cause we wanna be very, the word is intentional and how we handle that part of our business. It feels like we've, it's like we've really established a proof of concept. We've got something awesome. We're like, we don't wanna mess it up. Neutral. I don't know. I don't know if I have an answer for neutral.

Benj Miller:

Here's what comes up for me.

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah.

Benj Miller:

Is I think most organizations are moving too slow and I think most organizations, the reason why. Is because we do the work without thinking about the work. And maybe it's just a skillset I have, but I end up in a lot of conversations where I question how we're doing the work and people are like oh yeah, we could do it that way. And now we're doing it in half the time, or we're doing it, and that those kind of conversations have been a lot. And I think it's because most people, when they start doing the work. They don't think about how to do the work. I am I don't know if this is the right word, but I wanna say lazy, that I will spend the time figuring out the easiest way to do the work before I just start doing the work. And I think most organizations don't do that. So if you feel like you're going too slow, you're probably not taking enough time to think about how you're doing the work. That's my big takeaway. What's yours?

McKenzie Decker:

No, I love that. I was gonna say, maybe neutral isn't an option because it should always be a conversation.

Benj Miller:

That's interesting. At least. Yeah. Then you're forcing that, are we doing this the right way?

McKenzie Decker:

Yeah, that's good. And I would say the takeaway, it's advice and a takeaway I guess, but this is attention to be managed, which means this is a conversation at all times. I think there's an emotional aspect to this. One thing we didn't really talk about is I think sometimes we get into this comparison trap with this pace of change for our organization or our stuff versus other people's stuff. And I think we have to have the conversations internally and either, acknowledge that we're trying to compare ourselves to our competitor. We're unclear, we disagree. Like I think the convers it has to be a conversation and it's a huge fail. As you mentioned with the example you gave earlier, it's a huge fail for a leadership team if we're not, someone's not raising their hand to say, I either don't understand this, or we haven't evaluated this, or whatever it is. So I think maybe that's my takeaway.

Benj Miller:

That's good. Hey, thanks for bringing up this conversation. This is good. It feels deep 'cause it feels personal. So hopefully everybody listening can relate to this in one way or another and have something actionable that they can go do, a team that they can go ask about how they're doing the work or challenge them to speed up or maybe slow down. Maybe there's a quality issue there that they're, they are going too fast, which makes me. I'm almost sick to say because I want everything to go faster. But we'll see how fast this next week goes, and we'll see you next week for another episode of Sessions. Thanks again to fist bumps.

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Benj Miller

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McKenzie Decker

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