THE ART OF INTENTIONAL ACCELERATION

Speed on its own can be chaotic. Innovation on its own can be slow. But together, when harnessed with intention, they create a powerful competitive edge.

At Google, we used to say “fast beats slow.” But speed wasn’t just about being first. It was about creating momentum, compounding learning, and unlocking evolution. What made it sustainable was a deep commitment to focused innovation – resources deployed with discipline, not whim.

That’s not a dynamic exclusive to tech companies. It’s something any organization can build. But it requires looking beyond generic best practices and designing speed in a way that reflects your unique context, capabilities, and ambitions.

In my experience, that design work starts by thinking across three dimensions:

None of these are one-size-fits-all. But when they’re aligned, they compound.

SPEED OF THOUGHT: STRATEGIC CLARITY AT SCALE

When I talk about “speed of thought,” I mean an organization’s ability to rapidly process information, reach conclusions, and make strategic decisions. It encompasses how quickly an enterprise can move from identifying an opportunity or challenge to forming a clear direction forward.

Speed of thought isn’t about rushing. It’s about creating clarity, so decisions happen faster, with less friction and more alignment. At Google, clarity often came from constraints. We were shipping against aggressive timelines, with ambitious goals, in markets that moved fast. But in many enterprise environments today, the constraint isn’t urgency, it’s abundance. Too many priorities. Too much data. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

What I’ve seen work is a different kind of design: decision architectures that elevate the right signal, assign clear accountability, and reduce the noise that slows teams down.

In practice, this means building governance models that clarify
who decides what, when, and with what inputs before the decision moment arrives.

It means pre-aligning on thresholds for investment, escalation, and experimentation. It means designing meeting cadences that match the rhythm of the business, not the calendar, and building systems that allow distributed teams to make high-velocity decisions without sacrificing coordination or risk management.

In large organizations, these architectures often live at the seams between business units and functions, where ownership is ambiguous, and speed goes to die. Designing for speed means mapping those seams and stitching them into decision flows that are clear, repeatable, and fast.

We’ve seen this firsthand at Consello. One global client was facing major shifts in trade: new tariffs, geopolitical uncertainty, and fast-changing capital flows. Instead of chasing headlines, we helped them focus on the bigger picture and build a decision-making structure that let them move quickly and confidently. That meant reworking key processes, adjusting investment priorities, and fast-tracking the right partnerships. The result wasn’t just faster decisions, it was clearer alignment on what mattered most.

You don’t need to make decisions the way Google did. What you need is a decision architecture that matches your scale and complexity.
For large organizations, this often starts by aligning decision rights to strategic priorities across lines of business, rethinking approval thresholds for capital allocations, and reducing the “shadow governance” created by well-meaning risk aversion.

In my experience, the enterprises that get this right focus ruthlessly on three things: identifying their few critical decisions, designing clearer paths for those decisions to work within their governance structure, and removing unnecessary approval processes that don’t directly manage risk or add value.

Critically, they integrate these decision flows into budgeting cycles, product planning, and go-to-market processes so that speed doesn’t just live in strategy decks, but shows up in how work actually gets funded, staffed, and shipped.

SPEED OF ACTION: TURNING COMPLEXITY INTO ACCELERATION

Execution speed isn’t about heroics. It’s about systems.

What often slows down large organizations isn’t size, it’s misalignment. When your operating model isn’t built to handle the strategy you’ve chosen, friction builds. Timelines slip. Coordination breaks. People work hard, but progress stalls.

At Google, we could launch and iterate quickly because the workflows were designed to support that pace. The review processes, the engineering infrastructure, and the goal-setting rituals all worked together to move ideas from prototype to product as fast as possible.

In my work today, I encourage enterprise leaders to ask: is our complexity a weight, or an asset? Can it be transformed into speed?

The answer often depends on how well your systems for planning, execution, and measurement are designed to work together. In organizations where functional silos, legacy systems, or quarterly budget cycles dictate the tempo, speed becomes episodic – something you sprint toward, then recover from.

But when operating models are designed with coordinated acceleration in mind, linking OKRs, incentives, and inter-team workflows complexity becomes a force multiplier rather than a drag coefficient.
That’s the shift we helped drive with a complex technology company. Their go-to-market approach had become too slow and disconnected from what customers actually cared about. We helped them quickly pinpoint the friction, test a new value-based sales strategy, and rebuild around what worked. The changes led to faster decisions, clearer messaging, and stronger alignment between teams and customers and gave the organization confidence that it was moving in the right direction.

When properly engineered, scale amplifies speed. Your enterprise’s reach, resources, and relationships become accelerants rather than anchors.

SPEED OF FEEDBACK: MAKING LEARNING YOUR ADVANTAGE

If speed of thought is about deciding fast, and speed of action is about executing fast, then speed of feedback is about learning fast.

The companies that sustain competitive advantage aren’t the ones that always get it right the first time. They’re the ones that can tell, quickly and precisely, when something isn’t working and respond without delay.

In many of the enterprises I work with now, there’s no shortage of data, but the feedback loops are miscalibrated. Signals get buried in dashboards designed for reporting, not decision-making. KPIs cascade from outdated assumptions. And the accountability for acting on insights is too often diffused across teams, functions, or systems.

Designing for feedback speed means more than instrumenting a product or tracking net positivity score (NPS). It means creating pathways that make learning inevitable. That is demonstrated through instrumentation that links performance metrics to real-world outcomes, not vanity stats, cadences that bring qualitative and quantitative feedback into strategic conversations in near real-time, and clear ownership for sensing and response, so it’s not just collected, but acted on.

One financial services client came to us with a clear message from their customers: they needed to move faster on AI. We helped them act quickly, starting with the appointment of a senior leader to anchor the effort, then building out a high-caliber team around that hire. By streamlining internal decision-making and coordinating closely with government and academic partners, they were able to stand up a new R&D hub in months, not years. And it was all enabled by maintaining a tight loop between external signal and internal action.

In complex organizations, speed of feedback isn’t just a product capability. It’s an organizational discipline. It requires rethinking how teams are resourced to sense signal, how incentives are tied to responsiveness, and how quickly learnings travel from the front lines to leadership.

A FRAMEWORK FOR DISCOVERING YOUR SPEED

So how do you figure out what kind of speed your organization actually needs?

Start by asking three questions:

From there, map your answers to three dimensions of enterprise speed: Speed of thought, Speed of action and Speed of feedback.

None of these are one-size-fits-all. But when they’re aligned, they compound and give you a blueprint for where to invest in building speed.

INNOVATION AT THE SPEED OF YOUR BUSINESS

In my years working with enterprise leaders at Google and now Consello, what I’ve seen again and again is that the enterprises that win move fastest in the directions that matter most to them.

That’s what makes speed a durable advantage. When it’s designed around your specific strategy, capabilities, and market position, it becomes almost impossible to copy.

So the real question isn’t “how do we get faster?” It’s “what does speed look like for us – and how do we build it in a way no one else can?”