Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck.

Speed has gotten a pretty bad rap, says Anne Morriss (MBA 2004). The Silicon Valley mantra of moving fast and breaking things has led to waves of high-profile scandals and shuttered companies. But while there's a danger of moving too fast, Morriss tells me, there's also a serious opportunity cost of moving without enough speed.

Her new book, Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader's Guide to Solving Hard Problems, co-authored with HBS professor Francis Frei, challenges the idea that companies have a binary choice. That they can either move quickly or they can build trust. In fact, you can do both, Morriss told me. You must do both.

And really, she says, most of our problems deserve a more urgent response. Morriss and Frei have spent the last decade or so helping organizations that are going through massive transformations—be it due to crises, or just the result of some really big swings. And the duo started to see some throughlines emerge about what it takes to tackle complex problems quickly and effectively.

In this episode of Skydeck, Morriss sketches out a week-long framework, with each day representing a big step the organization can take to implement real change with real speed, and offers examples of what success really looks like.

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Dan Morrell: Anne, can you briefly walk us through this Monday through Friday framework that you've developed for this book?

Anne Morriss: Yeah, of course. On Monday we want you to identify your real problem so you can think about that as diagnostics day. And then you wake up—we call it Tuesday morning confidence—you wake up the next day, you know exactly what problem you're solving, what's really holding you back. And Tuesday is the day that you solve for trust.

So you run the experiments on rebuilding trust with the stakeholder at the center of your problem. Wednesday, we ask you to do things that adults generally don't like to do, which is to make new friends. And this is where you're taking your "good enough" plan that you come up with on Tuesday and you're making it even better by bringing in perspectives that you haven't invited to the table yet. Thursday you tell a good story. And then on Friday, you go as fast as you can.

DM: For a company that's prone to moving more slowly, even identifying where to start could be paralyzing. Can you talk about a company that's gone through that part of that process and had success? What does that look like in practice?

AM: Yeah. I’ll give you an example from the height of the pandemic. This was a hospital that was really dealing with the churn of nurses at the height of this health crisis. You know, It's this big hospital system and this powerful-but-frustrated employee group, and these are conversations that are, like, prone to paralysis. One thing that kept coming up were these broken copy machines. So what was happening was there was this incredible administrative burden. It wasn't the hospital's fault. It's driven by the payers, so there's all this paperwork, and the burden of the paperwork is falling on these nurses.

And so they would go to do this most miserable part of their job, and more often than not, the copiers were broken. And what the nurses were able to articulate was it was just a daily and intraday reinforcement that their time and expertise was not being valued by this institution.

We tell this story a lot because everywhere we go that's in a state of paralysis, there is the equivalent of a broken copier somewhere in the building. Sometimes the place to start is not at these big issues, but at these smaller issues, we actually, we call it in our work, the indignities list.

I know these issues are scary and big, but start with the indignities, just the small nicks to your stakeholders' humanity. Yes, they're carrying bigger issues, but they may actually be quite solvable and allow you to begin the trust rebuilding process, but you’ve got to get in there and figure out what they are.

DM: You also talk about at the outset building a "good enough" plan, right? And I found that so interesting because you want to have a team that's working to build this culture of excellence. But at the same time, they need to be okay with building something that might fail. So culturally, mechanically, how do you build that?

AM: We talk a lot about a "good enough" plan because sometimes this pursuit of excellence is a thinly veiled pursuit of perfection, which is the enemy of progress and itself can be paralyzing.

And so we really, and this is the work of Tuesday in our plan, we give you a job to do, Monday through Friday. But on Tuesday, we really want you to get into the organizational sandbox and give yourself permission to play. We want you to learn. We want you to try things on. We want you to experiment. We want that learning loop to be very tight and fast and allow that flywheel to keep going and I think when we give ourselves permission to solve for good enough, that can be liberating and really free up the creativity and optimism that are really important and infectious emotions in any change process.

DM: You also talk about how fundamentally you need to have trust. You need to build trust within the organization for any of this stuff to work. And I could ask you about what it looks like when that succeeds. But I think the more interesting way to ask that is, what does that look like when it fails?

AM: Yeah. We walk into a lot of situations where it has failed. I'll give you a very simple one. We did some work with Uber at the height of its leadership crisis. One of the very common organizational behaviors at the time is that people would often email each other about each other in the middle of meetings.

DM: Wow.

AM: Which is a very efficient way to destroy trust in a room. And so we ran experiments, and one of the experiments was let's just have conversations without any technology, like technology off and away, conversations where we're looking at each other in the eye here, and it was a very new behavior for this organization in this moment and it was an immediate way to restore empathy and compassion and connection in the room which is one of the core pillars of trust.

DM: The ideas of empathy and trust are also core to this book. And it seems like increasingly those ideas are table stakes—are becoming table stakes. Yeah. It seems like such a positive movement, right? But I think as a layperson, I wonder why did these conversations take so long to come to the fore, right? Why did it take so long for us to realize the inherent value of those?

AM: I think the presence or absence of trust, of course, has been around since the beginning of human relationships. I mean, our core trust model, which we call the trust triangle—it rests on the idea of empathy, logic, and authenticity—it goes all the way back to Aristotle's logos, pathos, ethos. So I think these ideas have been around for a long time. I think we are experiencing a crisis of trust in many organizations and institutions right now, which I think has heightened our sensitivity to it.

I also think this is a really interesting moment in the history of leadership and management and organizations and our species, frankly. I think the intersection of the shared experience of this pandemic, the fact that every single human on the planet had to deal with these existential questions at the same time.

I think we've all kind of picked our heads up and come back to the project of work. We all survived a pandemic and kept the economy going. And we're now taking that experience and investing in this shared project with quite profoundly different perspectives than we had, and I think our awareness of trust is one of the silver linings from that time.

DM: I want to talk about a figure in this book who you discussed, Kathleen Hogan, chief people officer at Microsoft, and you note that she was someone who used inclusion to lead that company's dramatic turnaround. What do you think we can learn from her example?

AM: Yeah, and it was really her partnership with her CEO, Satya Nadella, the two of them together. And there were other people on that team, but they both stood out in how they revealed their commitment to inclusion, led this incredible turnaround story, arguably the turnaround story of the decade at Microsoft.

And I think one of the really powerful parts of that story is on the short list of pillars that they built this turnaround strategy on, one of them was inclusion. And really the idea of inclusion, which is creating an environment where every single complex human who walks into the room to contribute to the mission of Microsoft is excited to, willing to contribute what they can uniquely contribute.

If you look at the research on inclusion, what's really extraordinary is that when we get this right as organizations—and very few organizations actually do—but when we get this right, there is incredible, incredible performance payoff.

And there's so much angst and churn and heat around this inclusion discussion right now that this part of the story is sometimes getting lost and what I love about Microsoft is they're so dominant right now and that this is just a beautiful part of their trajectory and ability to rocket to the top of the tech sector.

DM: You noted that there's some angst and churn going around these ideas of inclusion. Where do you think it stands culturally?

AM: I think it has been politicized the way a lot of issues have been politicized but what I will tell you from the front is that the most competitive organizations are not confused about it. There's increased awareness around how do you tell the story of inclusion at the company, not to jump ahead to Thursday, but the way we have to tell the story about any organizational commitment but the commitment itself, the conviction that this is the right, you know, moral, ethical, competitive path for the company to me remains high and rising among the organizations that are truly committed to winning.

DM: So what do you think a leader needs to think about when they are shaping their story?

AM: First, it's how important having a story is. So this is the step in the day of the week that leaders who are in a hurry often rush through or sometimes skip over. So we really want you to pause and think about this one because it is the thing that allows us to make sense of change as human beings to really find our place in the script of it.

Like the framework itself, we've been able to observe a pretty stable architecture for effective change stories. So they honor the past, both the good stuff and the bad. They include that quite intentionally in the story. They provide a clear and compelling change mandate. A very clear "why" for what's the reason I'm going to follow you down the path and jump off the cliff into this uncertain future, and they describe a rigorous and optimistic way forward. And the most effective change leaders, not only do they follow this formula, but they repeat it over and over again.

And then I think this final principle that I just want to underscore is this idea of deeply, simply communication. So really understanding what you want to say really deeply so that you can describe it simply and really make it accessible to the people around you. You're trying to solve for: Are other people willing to be guided by you?

That's the fundamental question of leadership. It's a yes or no answer. Your probability of getting to yes is significantly higher if you give us a compelling change story.

DM: Anne, who do you think does this well?

AM: The person that just came to mind is the young CEO of the Momofuku restaurant group. Her name is Marguerite Seybar Mariscal. What I love about her as a storyteller is she's not afraid to use all kinds of different media. So yeah, she's telling the story verbally, one-on-one, in a group setting. She also made these beautiful books that really capture the history of the organization that everyone who shows up on the team gets. What we do see—and, I'm a woman of a certain age, so I can talk about “younger”, the younger generation—younger CEOs we find are particularly good at telling stories across different media.

So using the short-form video. Yes, get out there in the traditional spaces, but also use the video camera in everybody's pocket to reinforce the message that you're trying to send.

DM: The book culminates in a chapter that focuses on forward movement using all these foundations that you've built, and in that chapter, you share the story of Southwest Airlines cofounder and CEO Herb Kelleher, and it's amazingly inspiring, given the fact that he's essentially telling a dear old grandmother that he's not going to help her in any way, shape or form. Can you talk about that anecdote and tell us why it's a useful example for leaders?

AM: Yeah, we have a lot of fun on Friday in the book. Because by the time you get to Friday, you've earned the right to move fast because you're far less likely to break things at this point in the week.

So we are just giving you all of our favorite tactics for ways to move fast. So this is in a section that I think we titled it "Dare to Be Bad". But it's really about having so much clarity about what you are going to do that you have deep conviction about what you're not going to do.

That's the hard part. In products, we can just not do things. We can just leave features off the laptop. But in services. We have to not do some things well, and that can be even, that can be emotionally more challenging. In this airline, the, you know, iconic founder, Herb Kelleher, he gets this email from this very persuasive grandmother complaining about the fact that she cannot transfer her bag, that the company will not transfer her bags, and all she wants to do is go see her grandkids, and she can't move very fast at this advanced age and he responds very clearly. And he says, I would really like to help you out, but then the whole model of this company falls apart and the strategy is built on speed and the ability to quickly turn planes around at the gate.

The powerful part of that story from our perspective is that he responds to this grandmother and then he CCs the entire company. And so everybody sees with deep clarity what it means to make strategic trade-offs. Not just the cost, but what would you get in return? And that's what we really want you to wrestle with as part of your work on Friday. If you're going to compete on speed—because there's a difference between competing with speed and on speed—if you're going to compete on speed, then it means you're not going to be good at some other things.

You have to get in touch with that clarity and make it really clear to everyone else around you what the tradeoffs are going to be.

Skydeck is the Harvard Business School alumni podcast, featuring interviews and insights from across the world of business. It’s produced by the External Relations Department at HBS. Our audio engineer is Craig McDonald.

It is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And If you could take a moment to rate and review us, we’d be grateful.

For more information, or to find archived episodes, visit alumni-dot-hbs-dot-edu-slash-skydeck.

Featured Alumni

Anne Morriss

MBA 2004

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