Founder's Blog: Depth with velocity

Have you felt the world has become less responsive lately? Everyone looks so busy. Emails that should take five minutes are taking weeks. Proposals enter processing limbos that are counted in months. Research papers’ reviews may protract for years (even first decisions—which used to take days in many cases—now require months). It not only feels as if the response itself has become optional without prior agreement, but also that delay is not considered impolite anymore.

Is it that we are too busy? But busy with what? Are we too deep in conversation with our favorite AI chatbots? Is it that our plate has stretched too big, with more tools, more conversation channels, and less of what it takes to “close the loop”? Or is it—and I hope this is not the case—that people have quietly stopped caring, and the silence is the actual answer?

The average professional now receives more than a hundred emails every single day. Microsoft's own research found that knowledge workers are interrupted every two minutes during the core work hours—that’s 275 times a day!—by meetings, emails, or chats. This is what an oversized, overloaded plate looks like, with people drowning in demand with no capacity left to come back to any of it well. However, organizations are networks themselves but also nodes in a global fabric of many others, and communicating with those others—be it colleagues, customers, suppliers, job applications, or general inquiries—is an essential part of human work as we know it. And responsiveness, for those who don’t remember, used to signal that the matter, whatever big or small, is important for you and that you care about the matter at hand. And even if you don’t, communicating that helps in itself: the inquirer moves on with their lives, and so does the world.

At Kano, responsiveness is not considered an act of courtesy. We now think responsiveness has become a differentiator. To achieve this, we employ a rather simple trick: we don't take on more than we can answer. We acknowledge that capacity is always finite, and that the moment a firm overcommits, every client pays the price. So, we engage carefully to avoid becoming the very thing we are describing. When we feel we are “overloaded”, that’s a sign that our capacity is reaching the danger zone. Most decisions our clients need to make are time-sensitive: if you're too slow, they might simply miss out on great investments or acquisitions. We are aware that every minute we spend deliberating is a minute a client's competitor has for taking the market.

Speed, to be clear, is not the absence of depth. A slow reply is rarely slow because someone was thinking really hard. Too often, slow replies are still unforgivably shallow. Fast and shallow would be a problem. We aim for the hard combo: depth with velocity.

Cover photo credit: Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash