The Pace Problem: A Process Nobody Redesigned

I’ve been in process improvement reviews where the team identified the same problem three years running.

Not because no one cared. Not because the analysis was wrong. But because the redesign stopped at the policy layer, and the habits underneath it stayed exactly as they were.

Pace is one of the clearest examples. Most organisations have, at some point, decided to slow down decision-making. Fewer sign-offs, shorter approval chains, more trust at the team level. The new process gets documented. Sometimes it even gets trained.

And then, six months later, the same people are in the same rooms, waiting for the same approvals, at the same pace as before.

This isn’t a compliance failure. It’s a design gap, between what the process says and what the surrounding system rewards. If the incentive structure still rewards moving fast individually rather than moving well collectively, the pace problem doesn’t get solved. It gets managed around.

Three questions worth sitting with before the next redesign:
1. Where did the redesign stop: in the policy, or the habits underneath it?
2. Does what gets rewarded match what the new process claims to value?
3. Who in the system has the most to lose if the pace actually changes, and, have they been part of designing it?

This is the kind of process review HAANA Business School brings to teams. Not a verdict on what’s missing, but a shared look at where a good redesign got interrupted, and what finishing it would take.

What’s one pace-related change your team already made that actually stuck?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

– The HAANA founding team: Alejandro Villazon Pineda, Jürgen Mohr, Liane Grassi, Maria Marshall-Clarke –