Velocity Bias: When Moving Fast Becomes the Goal Instead of Moving Right

Your internal newsletter has gone out every Thursday for two years. It started because the old all-hands had grown stale and people wanted a steadier drumbeat of updates. Now there’s a small machine around it. Two people draft it, a designer lays it out, you review the final cut on Wednesday, and the open rate gets reported in the monthly numbers. It runs, and nobody questions whether it should.

But the thing it was built to fix is gone. The company reorganised into smaller pods six months ago, each with its own channel and standup, and the cross-company updates people actually act on now travel through those. The newsletter still goes out, still gets opened by some, still costs four people a slice of every week. The reason it existed expired, and the machine kept running because running is what machines do. Nobody decided to keep it. They just never decided to stop, and stopping would mean being the person who killed the thing everyone’s used to seeing on a Thursday.

The evidence

Start with where the good feeling comes from. The strongest day-to-day driver of motivation at work is the sense of making progress on something that matters. Track people’s moods across thousands of working days and the best single predictor of a good day is the feeling that the work moved forward, even by a little. This is the progress principle, one of the more reliably reproduced findings in research on work motivation.

Here’s the part that turns it into a trap. The reward attaches to the sense of progress, not to progress toward the original goal. Your mind pays out the good feeling when tasks get done and the board moves, and it doesn’t audit whether those finished tasks still point at the target that justified them. So a programme can drift off its purpose and keep generating the exact reward it generated when it was on purpose. The newsletter still ships, the open rate still posts, and the weekly hit of “we did the thing” arrives on schedule whether or not the thing is worth doing anymore.

Now layer in why nobody around the work calls it. Teams rewarded for steady output become structurally unable to slow down, even when slowing down would help, and this is the speed trap. The mechanism is social. Output is visible, visible output earns approval, and approval makes more output the easy path. The person who says “should we even still be doing this” forfeits that approval and absorbs a cost on top, because they’re the one slowing things down. So the question the work most needs is the one no one has any reason to raise.

And the longer it has run, the harder it is to touch. The more anyone has put into a course of action, the more they resist abandoning it, and the investment that locks you in isn’t only money. People have built routines and a bit of identity around the newsletter. Killing it means explaining not just why it should stop now but why it kept going this long, which feels like admitting two years of partly wasted effort. So the run itself starts to feel like the reason to keep running.

How it works

Put it together and the pull to keep a thing rolling is predictable, and it runs on feel rather than fact. The reward you get from steady output is genuine, and it pays out the same whether or not the output still points anywhere useful. On top of that, the social cost of pausing falls on whoever raises the question, and the longer the run has gone, the more there is to justify in stopping it. None of those forces says a word about whether the work is still worth doing, yet they all push the same way.

That’s why a programme that should stop is invisible from inside. A team executing the wrong thing flawlessly looks identical to a team executing the right thing flawlessly, with the same steady output and the same green dashboard. The only difference is whether the destination is still one you’d choose, and the in-the-moment experience gives you no signal either way. You can run a smooth, well-loved, on-time operation for a year past the point where it stopped earning its keep, and feel good every week you do it.

The feeling of progress is indifferent to where the work is headed, so you can run a programme well for a year past the point it stopped being worth running and feel good the whole time.

How to use it

The thing to check is direction, and you can’t get it from the meetings you already run. A standup, a sprint review, a status update all ask the execution question: are we on track, are we shipping, are we hitting the dates. The answer is reliably yes, which is exactly why those checks never catch the drift. The direction question is different. Is the thing we’re running still the thing we should be running. Give that its own slot, its own cadence, and someone with the standing to actually call a stop. For the newsletter that’s one half-hour a quarter where the only item is “does this still beat the alternatives, and what happens if we kill it.”

When you sit down to ask it, judge the work against the reason it was created rather than against how well it runs now. Re-read the original brief. The newsletter was meant to carry cross-company updates people act on. Ask, honestly, whether the pod channels now do that job better, because each small step away from the original purpose felt reasonable on its own and the full distance only shows when you hold today’s work next to the day-one intent. How well the newsletter is made tells you nothing about whether it’s still needed, and it’s the second question that decides whether to keep it.

There’s one more signal, and it’s the most useful because it’s already inside you. Watch how it feels to even consider stopping. If the thought of pulling the plug brings a flash of “but we’ve kept this going for two years” or “people would miss it,” treat that flash as information rather than as the answer. It tells you your commitment has detached from the purpose and attached to the run itself. A programme you’re confident in can be paused and examined without that flinch.

And sometimes the check tells you to carry on. The newsletter still does a job the channels don’t, the cost is fair, so you keep it. When that’s the answer, say so out loud: “we looked at killing this and chose to keep it because X.” That’s a different footing from never having asked. You can stand behind a decision you actually made, and you can’t stand behind something that only kept going because nobody stopped it.

Why it matters

Step back and the costliest things you keep doing are rarely the ones that fail loudly. They’re the ones that keep working just well enough to never trip an alarm. The report you still compile every month that two people read. The recurring meeting that solved a problem that’s since gone away. The integration you maintain for a client who left last spring. None of them break, and none of them force a moment where someone has to look at the cost on the table. They just keep drawing down your time in the background, long after the reason for them dried up.

Professional life is built to reward the visible kind of work and to punish the person who questions it. The team that ships fast gets admired, and the one who asks whether the shipping still matters looks like a brake. That tilt is why the failure that costs you most rarely looks like a stalled project. It looks like a capable team running a well-oiled programme, on time and on budget, toward an outcome that stopped being worth reaching a while ago. Catching that early has nothing to do with slowing down. It means checking the compass often enough that you notice when the road you’re making good time on no longer goes anywhere you want to be.