Should You "Move Fast And Break Things?"

“Move fast and break things”
–Mark Zuckerberg

The inspiring former motto of the Facebook founder and CEO has a lot packed into it. Let’s break it down.

Move fast. If you want to move fast, you have to give people two things: decision-making power, and a license to make mistakes. If people are afraid to make mistakes, they’ll second guess everything, and seek approval. This causes things to move slow, not fast. Also, if you want people to move fast, you have to let them make decisions. Let them know what they’re in charge of, what the desired outcomes are, and what resources they have available to achieve that outcome. Then get out of their way. 

Break things. This is the unexpected, inspiring part of the quote. It gives people license to deviate from the status quo, to make their own rules, to do things that haven’t been done before. The thing about broken things, though, is that they often inspire more broken things. If you set your team loose on a project with no respect for the way things usually work, you can expect angry vendors, confused customers, wasted dollars. The series of security breaches, lawsuits, government hearings, and public apologies with Facebook should be a bit concerning to anyone.

I say, move fast and build things. 

When things are being built, there’s a certain amount of breakage that must be done. Buildings must be leveled to make way for better buildings. But everything is done with goal of building something new. When we tell people to break things, that’s what they’ll do. When we tell people to build things, they’ll be forced to ask: is tearing this down worth what we’re building? 

This seems more sustainable to me. 

Thanks for reading.