Move fast and break things.
This was Facebook’s internal motto up until May, 2014 and a maxim that persists today across many spheres within tech, design, business, entrepreneurship, innovation, and beyond.
Sooner or later, one of the critical things that commonly breaks when following this formula is trust, which typically isn’t quick, cheap, or easy to restore. We’re seeing examples of this broken trust today, from the backlash against Big Tech, to the loss of public trust in many governments, corporations, media, and leadership. The reckoning for trust breaches eventually comes.
The thing is, the key to really moving fast is to build trust (Stephen M.R. Covey expands on this in his book The Speed of Trust). It’s trust that accelerates results, ones that we would likely all feel much better about too.
So let’s embrace a different maxim:
Build trust to move fast.
