There are a couple of good posts over on the Acronym blog about making “fast” decisions versus making the “right” ones. It started with some comments Jim Collins made in an interview with Scott Briscoe. I had written about that when it came out over on the Association Renewal Blog.

In short, Ben Martin argues that “fast is the new right”—that we don’t have the luxury of moving slowly these days.

I agree with him on that—the pace has definitely increased lately and taking too long to figure out what you do may result in several windows of opportunity closing.

But I’m also preparing for a presentation about conflict resolution today, and one of my points under “facilitating conflict conversations” is to slow the conversation down. The people I am facilitating usually hate it when I do this, but it’s usually the best way to successfully work through the conflict. They want to rush through the conflict so they can get to resolution faster. If you can do it quickly, then more power to you, but usually when you rush it you end up with mediocre resolutions.

I still agree with Ben. I think we need to be able to move through to decisions quicker. And that requires we REALLY improve on our communication and conflict skills, because that’s the only way we can speed up that process. And even then, sometimes you have to work through difficult conflicts in order to be clear on your decision (and it takes time). You can’t skip that step, so you’d better build it (and some time to do it) into your overall decision-making process.