Slowness as rehearsal

Flyvbjerg’s think slow, act fast is not a productivity slogan. It is the claim that planning is rehearsal — and that the projects which appear to deliver on time are the ones that did the boring, expensive work of imagining failure modes before committing capital.

The opposite — act fast, then think slow about why it failed — is the iron-law trajectory. We pay for the reflection either way. The choice is whether we pay before or after the concrete sets.

I keep thinking about The Spire in this context. The dean knew. He knew the foundations would not hold. He knew because the master mason told him, and because the cathedral itself told him every time he laid his hand on a pillar. Slowness in his case was not absent — he had been told slowly, over years. He chose not to rehearse.