Leverage Weekly #60 - Taking time to think
tl;dr - Going fast sometimes means going slow
Organizations run at different speeds. Some organizations run ahead of schedule and complete tasks quickly. Others run far behind and take forever to get anything done. In many cases, the operation of an organization depends on external parties, which can speed things up or slow things. Just considering an organization in isolation, however, there is a question about how to make it run at the right speed. Typically, the goal is to have teams and organizations run quickly and well.
One approach to making an organization move quickly is to have all of its parts move quickly. This is a natural idea: organizations are made of parts and in many cases, the attributes of a thing are derived from the attributes of its parts. To make a stream of water or a large chunk of rock move fast, all of the individual molecules of water or bits of rock need to move fast as well. This perspective leads leaders to try to pump energy, enthusiasm, and haste into their organizations indiscriminately, rousing everyone to energetic and impassioned action.
Organizations, however, are not streams or rocks. They are machines made of people. This provides two reasons to not indiscriminately pump in energy or haste. The first has to do with the nature of machines. Machines typically have parts that interlock in delicate ways; if any part moves too quickly, the machine can jam. Rather than simply cranking up the speed of any part, making a machine move quickly can sometimes involve slowing down or speeding up parts, to bring them into better synchronization.
Still, for many machines, once the parts are synchronized, every part can be made to move very, very fast. The primary barrier then becomes physical limitations. With organizations, however, one is working with people. It is then necessary to grapple with both the physical limitations of the team as well as limits imposed by how groups function psychologically. Pushing too hard can tire people out or it can distress them and make it hard for them to perform the right mental operations.
Teams need to perform a variety of functions. Some of these functions occur best in a sprint: getting through a stretch of onerous work, meeting an external deadline, testing a hypothesis that involves a clear departure from regular operations. Other functions occur best at “walking pace,” a pace of sustainable work that fits into everyday life and leaves people with enough energy at the end of the day to do other things after work.
Some activities have their own pace, taking a somewhat unpredictable amount of time. Thinking is one of these. It may seem strange to specifically try to account for thinking as part of work, but different positions and activities do, in fact, call for different amounts of thinking. More than that, different people may need to think for different periods of time in order to perform a given task or answer some particular question. As a result, it is both necessary and challenging to build the right provision for thinking time into an organization’s culture.
It is well known that thinking helps people clarify their thoughts and answer certain questions. In an organizational context, time for thought makes it easier to reflect on how the work is going and whether there are any non-obvious issues that need to be addressed. If an entire organization takes time for thought, as in the context of a full team retreat, there is the additional benefit of seeing how the machine of the organization functions at different speeds.
If full team retreats can be thought of as slowing the machine of the organization down to see how it functions, retreats also provide the opportunity for retooling the machine while it is not operating at maximum speed. Retreats thus provide an important way to manage the speed and synchronization with which organizations function, in addition to themselves providing benefits from slower operation. Together with many other factors, such as workload, meeting schedule, and deadlines, it is possible to make the parts of organizations go faster and slower, so organizations can work quickly overall.
Going fast sometimes means going slow.
The Leverage team spent most of last week in New Orleans for the Q2 2025 Leverage retreat. Over the three days of the retreat, Geoff, Melinda, and Oliver spent time discussing the institute, its programs, its partnership with the Quantum Biology Institute (QBI), and potential future partnerships. Conversation ranged over many topics, from global trends to the relation between military funding and scientific opacity to the true differences between non- and for-profits.
The most important topic of conversation was the business model. Leverage now supports itself primarily through partnerships, where the institute provides support services to revolutionary science projects it has partnered with. This raises the question of which projects Leverage should attempt to partner with and how to set expectations for partnerships in advance. The team’s solution to these problems was to develop a set of principles for revolutionary science projects and present those to the public. The associated materials will then be available to potential future partners.
Another key topic was a discussion of quantum biology. One question was how to provide knowledge and expertise to QBI as they navigate the treacherous terrain of founding a startup-like research non-profit. A further question was whether, with the social bottleneck apparently broken, the institutions in quantum biology in general should become the team’s next focus. One idea developed during the retreat was to find funders to sponsor “hypothesis-driven competitive granting,” using the field of quantum biology as an example.
Many other topics were covered as well, which will be covered in the upcoming Leverage Monthly. Apart from work, New Orleans was fantastic. The team had beignets in the French Quarter, did a ghost tour of New Orleans’ cemeteries late one evening, and enjoyed absolutely delicious food at many different restaurants. There was at least one arguable coincidence and one ambiguously spooky photograph from the tour, and so the city’s famously enchanted side may also have made an appearance!