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Hello everyone, this is Ricardo Vargas, and this is the Five Minutes Podcast. And today I want to talk about something I see all the time in projects: the rush to start. A problem appears, and immediately someone asks, what are we going to do? We have an idea, and someone says, let's start. We receive a request, and the first concern is, who is going to execute this? Everything needs to become action immediately, because action creates a feeling of progress. Thinking, strangely enough, is often perceived as a waste of time. And this is the paradox I want to discuss today. Five minutes of thinking can look like a delay. Five weeks fixing a bad decision looks like work. In many projects, we have created a culture where being busy has become almost synonym of production and productivity. But they are completely different things. You can have a team working 10 hours a day and still be moving very quickly in the wrong direction. Look, I love speed, okay? People who know me know that. And I'm not defending slow projects, bureaucracy, or endless planning processes. It's quite the opposite. What I'm questioning is speed without clarity. There is a huge difference between acting quickly and simply acting before thinking. Imagine someone identifies a problem in the project. Immediately, we organize a meeting. In the meeting, we define an action. Someone starts executing. And later we discover that the problem was different from what we initially thought. So we have another meeting. We change the action, we redo part of the work, we update the schedule, and we move forward. Everyone worked very hard. But how much value did we actually produce? Sometimes I have the impression that we are afraid to stop, because stopping for a few minutes to think can create the impression that we don't know what to do. And leaders feel enormous pressure to have answers. But one thing experience has taught me is that a good question can be far more valuable than a quick answer. Questions like, what problem we are actually trying to solve? What happens if we do nothing right now? What information are we still missing? Can this decision be easily reversed? Who will be affected by it? What needs to be clear before we start? Did you see? These are simple questions, but they can prevent weeks of unnecessary work. And of course, there are situations where we need to act immediately. A real crisis will not wait for a three-week analysis. An opportunity can just disappear. emergency requires action. But even in these situations, speed does not mean the absence of thinking. In fact, the greater the pressure, the more important it becomes to distinguish speed from impulse. And there is something else that I find interesting. We normally measure how much time we spend planning, but we rarely measure how much time we spend correcting what we did because we did not plan enough. Maybe that is why planning looks expensive, while rework looks normal. One happens before the work begins; the other stays hidden inside the work. So the next time someone says, " We don't have time to think about it right now, maybe it's worth asking, do we have time to do it twice? Because maybe your project does not need to work faster. Maybe it needs to stop for a few minutes. Before it continues running. And very often, those few minutes are exactly what allow the project to reach its destination much faster. Think about that. I hope you enjoy this podcast. I'll see you next week with another 5 Minutes Podcast.
