As the year winds down, my calendar fills with budget reviews, strategy sessions, and performance decks. Executive teams like mine are sitting around tables, locking in numbers and setting metrics for the year ahead.
In healthcare, we almost always reward speed. We applaud the quick decision, the rapid results, and the project manager who delivers a new project ahead of schedule. Speed feels productive; it feels powerful, and it looks like control.
But as October arrives and 2027 planning begins, I’m always left thinking about what gets lost when speed becomes our primary metric.
Over the years, in my conversations with clinicians and executive teams, one pattern becomes clear: so many of the hurdles we face every day exist because nobody paused long enough to ask a second question.

The hidden cost of speed

When a system prioritizes speed above everything else, the first thing to go is depth.
We see it in every part of the care journey. A doctor is forced to wrap up an appointment in ten minutes, not taking the time to connect the dots between the patient’s routine concern and their broader health. An IT team deploys a new software update in record time, not realizing that months later it adds forty minutes of charting time to every nurse's shift.
Speed keeps us moving and optimizing toward our goals - but it also makes it easy to skim over real human complexity.
When leaders treat speed as a synonym for success, it’s no wonder we keep seeing band-aids applied to complex problems. And those who raise concerns over broken processes are viewed as bottlenecks rather than valuable sensors.

Pausing is an act of care

Slowing down doesn’t mean avoiding hard choices. It means taking the opportunity to look at the actual situation, and make a thoughtful decision.
It means taking a beat when a clinical team pushes back on a new initiative to ask what challenges they’re facing, and to see what the C-suite missed when approving that initiative.
It’s having the courage to look at a project that’s been funded for years and admit that it isn't working, instead of continuing along the roadmap just to hit a target.
When care only focuses on throughput, we lose sight of the people providing and receiving that care. Real leadership requires us to slow down enough to make eye contact with the operational reality on the ground.

Looking ahead

As we build our plans for the coming year, efficiency will certainly be on the agenda. But efficiency alone can't be the finish line.
We need to ask where our teams actually need us to slow down and devote more thought. Where do clinicians need space to breathe? Which broken processes need to be paused and rebuilt from scratch?
We should never stop driving for better care, but we should also make room for the time-consuming work of listening and understanding before locking in plans for the year ahead.
Pausing at the N of 1.

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