When you’re moving fast, you make mistakes. It can be hard to stop everything and reassess as risks creep up on you. But when the stakes are high, that’s when you have to do it the most. No matter how hard it is to pause and pull back, try to reassess the risks of your decision-making in hindsight. What would you tell yourself in the future about how you were making decisions right now?
That’s right. You’d tell yourself to stop and take a minute. I am, of course, speaking from experience. I’ve always been in a rush. It’s my nature. But I’ve learned the value of slowing down.
As a young news editor at an alternative weekly in Portland, Oregon, I moved fast. There was a weekly print edition with up to six stories to file and edit, and I blogged two or three times daily. I was filing thousands of words of copy each week. When I wasn’t biking down to city hall or to police headquarters I was meeting sources in coffee shops and cafes. We had a good, competitive rivalry with another local weekly paper and it drove me to get more scoops. A strong sense of injustice drove me on. I wanted to break stories that disrupted established narratives about the city. The fast pace worked. I found, for example, that the downtown police were keeping a secret list of serial offenders. They wouldn’t share it, which breached public records law. Despite the bureau’s best intentions. My reporting impressed my future bosses in New Orleans. So I moved to a new city with a reputation for corrupt decision-making, and brought my learning with me.
When you’re moving at that kind of pace, it’s easy to get caught up in the maelstrom. Sometimes I’d make mistakes in Portland because of the pace. We would issue the occasional correction. It was inevitable, but I learned to think fast and check facts as I did so. I was lucky to also have the support of expert fact-checkers in the editing process for the print edition. When I moved to New Orleans I worked on long-form investigative pieces that took months. We could move slower. My editors were very experienced. And when we finally issued a piece of reporting, it often moved the needle on a serious issue. It did so in part because people trusted the rigor of its production and the reputation of the outlet. You earn such things every day. I learned to rely on my colleagues’ insights and instincts and to trust them to make my work better. I became less egotistical. It was amazing to be part of such an experienced team.
Meanwhile, public relations and communications offices strive to move with deliberate speed. Being a professional in the field means learning how to build enough time into processes. We stop. We check. We re-check. We redraft. But sometimes, with a launch date approaching, these processes can become automatic. And automation is always a risk in a business where news changes fast.
Let’s say you’re planning an event with a news hook, several weeks ahead. You might time it to coincide with another major news hook, like, for example, the election. But if the results surprise everyone, then you may need to hit pause and pivot around your event. Are the speakers still well-positioned to influence public policy? Are the talking points and questions you planned to raise still pertinent? It’s never fun to make big changes at short notice. But sometimes the short term pain can reposition you, strategically, for bigger wins. More importantly you can avoid harming your reputation.
Whether you’re moving fast or slow, don’t be afraid to stop. Look around. Take the temperature, and listen to your intuition and the data about how best to move forward. Things change, and that’s alright. But only if you’re also prepared to change with them. Making such calls is rarely easy but that’s why people rely on a communications professional. We earn our reputation for being most valuable when it matters.
