People often use the phrase “take small steps, move quickly.” But if the steps are small, how does the walking become fast? And if speed is the goal, why not simply take bigger strides?
Look around at people on the street, and you will rarely see anyone truly walking fast in tiny steps. Apart from women with bound feet in old films and television dramas, or Japanese women in kimono who are not dressed for long strides, the only people likely to move that way are those caught in extreme anxiety or hesitation. Their path is often not a path at all, but a back-and-forth consumption of energy. If an ordinary person walked down a busy street in quick little steps, others would probably wonder whether something was wrong with him.
So why do people “hurry in small steps”? There are probably two reasons. First, the direction is unclear, and a large step in the wrong direction may take one too far off course. Second, motion itself becomes necessary: it lets others think you are still alive, or lets you convince yourself of the same. Put together, it means having no clear destination while still needing to keep moving—and preferably to make others feel that you are moving very fast.
A natural question follows: if the direction is unclear, why not stop, think carefully, decide where to go, and then move?
The difficulty is that the correctness of the direction is often judged by someone else, while diligence is displayed through one’s own two legs. When no clear instruction has arrived, the safest posture becomes small steps at high frequency. As long as you keep moving, you can create the impression that you are more active than most people. And because the steps are small and often circular, you can adjust direction quickly once the real instruction finally comes.
In that sense, “small steps, quick pace” is not really a behavior. It is a state of mind.
This state of mind appears everywhere in life.
In a company, middle managers need to demonstrate leadership, but they often do not get to decide the overall direction. Before the main direction becomes clear, they assign large numbers of tasks to frontline employees. Those tasks may change from morning to evening; they may also have little relation to one another. In any case, before the larger direction is settled, the lowest-level employees are the ones most likely to be tossed around. They look busy, they move constantly, yet they produce no meaningful result. The persistently high management cost in many companies may well be a consequence of this kind of small-step haste.
What happens in a company of several hundred people can also happen in a small group of a few dozen.
Imagine a neighborhood organizing a cultural performance. The older residents are enthusiastic, and the most enthusiastic among them is chosen to be the person in charge, responsible for daily coordination. Before an upcoming holiday, the activity room where they usually rehearse is fully booked, so they have to wait for notice about whether and when it can be used.
At eight in the morning, the auntie in charge posts a message in the group chat:
“The activity room is very tight today. Everyone please stay ready and wait for notice to come rehearse. After receiving this message, please reply in sequence in the group to confirm.”
So everyone replies in sequence.
At nine, she sends another message:
“The specific time has not been confirmed yet. Please do not go out casually. Reply in sequence after receiving this.”
So everyone replies again.
At ten, another message arrives:
“Confirming whether everyone is still available. No leave is allowed today. Reply in sequence after receiving this.”
The whole day is spent replying to the group chat. At five in the afternoon, the auntie in charge finally sends one more message:
“Sorry, we could not get a daytime slot today. The neighborhood committee leaders were in meetings all day and forgot to notify me. It is now confirmed that we can use the activity room tomorrow morning from 8 to 9. No one should be absent. Reply in sequence after receiving this.”
It would have been enough to notify everyone after the exact time was confirmed. They could also have moved the rehearsal somewhere else. Instead, under this form of management, a whole group of people spent the day performing the ritual of confirmation.
The same pattern appears not only in small groups but also in individuals. Some people are busy all day, every day, yet their busyness is aimless. At the end of the year, they cannot say clearly what they have done. If someone asks why they are always so busy, the answer is usually: “I just can’t stay idle.”
As social beings, we may participate in companies of hundreds of people, community activities of dozens of people, and also have our own family and personal lives. If everything operates through quick little steps, then much of one’s life is wasted. Some of that waste is forced upon us, some comes from blind compliance, and some is self-created.
How can this be avoided? One answer is to give managers real decision-making authority.
For an individual, the suggested solution might be learning time management, or reading another inspirational piece about the habits of highly effective people. For a non-profit or informal group, it may mean finding someone who is good at making decisions to coordinate everyone. For a company, it may mean adopting a divisional structure and delegating authority downward.
But as organizations grow larger, even decentralization does not fully solve the problem. Different “business divisions” may develop tangled webs of interest among themselves. Communication between those divisions and top leadership may also become poor because there is no effective connecting mechanism. Then the familiar pattern reappears: when instructions cannot be received in time, people hurry in small steps; when affirmation is needed, they hurry in small steps.
Society is diverse, and people differ from one another. Giving managers decision-making power cannot completely eliminate this problem. If the head of a business division makes a wrong decision, he may lose his position. If the leader of a neighborhood seniors’ activity team decides incorrectly, she may be blamed by the others. Even in the smallest social organization—the family—a failed decision can easily lead to an argument.
Decision-making power is efficient only when the decision-maker can guarantee that every decision is correct. If his accuracy is 99 percent, he may still encounter the one failed decision on his very first attempt, and that may be enough to remove him from the position.
So how can decision-making authority be fully used once it is granted?
Two conditions are needed. One is that the system must be designed from the beginning with some tolerance for failed decisions. The other is that the manager must have the resolve to take responsibility when a decision fails.
Reality usually runs in the opposite direction. Institutional design often lacks tolerance because fairness is treated as the first priority. Decision-makers, meanwhile, rarely have strong incentives to take on the risk of failure. When a decision succeeds, the benefit belongs to the group rather than to the individual; when it fails, the individual bears the blame. The risk and reward are asymmetrical.
Under such conditions, the decision-maker will most likely choose the safer, second-best option. First ensure that, in all probability, no obvious mistake will be made; then consider whether the decision can be carried out.
And so the problem returns to where it began. In daily life, people keep saying: take small steps, move quickly.