[weiliddat]

I like this argument, but I don't think the article argues against taking urgency into consideration. Do you have anecdotes about companies or people that actually ignore urgency?

I've experienced enough business-critical incidents (or requests) where people across all seniority are just randomly trying stuff, making a mess, without taking time to coordinate, understand the problem, and solve it. It almost always resulted in more overall time and bigger blast radius than if we did it not out of panick.

OTOH my "slow" (I still did things fast, just not purely for the sake of looking fast) and steady approach always took me less time overall to find a proper fix. I also became known as the person who could always find the best possible fix when there's an incident/time constraint, but I also thought that was systematically bad instead of fixing the culture/process.

It's still faster to take a minute (and deep breath), understand the whole problem (incl. urgency and how that affects your solutions), and then solve it. It doesn't mean you can't keep your customers in the loop and assuage their concerns.

[ryandrake]

Businesses fake urgency all the time. I guess I have never worked in any of these 'high stakes' companies. My whole career, everything was reportedly urgent, but when you missed the deadline, nobody dies, nobody got fired, you just slipped a little and leadership pretended even more urgency. And if you slipped a lot, people got burned out and quit and leadership would institute 'war rooms' and 'crunch time'. And if you slipped a hell of a lot, the project would probably get canceled and the rest of the team was absorbed into various other projects. Nothing matters, the company's stock goes up and down randomly--having nothing to do with your project's failure or success, yet the message from above is always "FAST FAST RUSH URGENT!!!"

[Verdex]

It has to be done by next week.

Here it is. It is done.

Great, now we put it on a shelf and ignore it for 6 months.

From my perspective, every time.

Edit: the last time this happened to me, they later revealed that it was going to be shelved for a year.