Are We Moving, or Are We Getting Somewhere?

There’s a question I’ve been asked many times, usually by someone senior who has just sat through a project update and is now visibly concerned: “Are we moving quickly enough?” It sounds reasonable, the kind of thing leaders are supposed to ask, but is it the right question?

When I worked as a product manager, I encountered the concept of velocity for the first time. In agile frameworks, velocity describes the amount of work a team can complete within a given sprint, measured consistently over time so that patterns, fluctuations, and changes in capacity all become visible. The crucial thing about velocity, though, is not the number itself; it’s the direction that accompanies it, because speed tells you how fast something is moving, whilst velocity tells you how fast something is moving and where it is going.

When we ask “are we moving quickly enough?”, we collapse a complex question into a single, essentially unanswerable dimension; fast compared to what, compared to last month, compared to a competitor, compared to some idealised version of the project that existed in a presentation six months ago and has since been quietly revised beyond recognition? Speed without direction is, in the most practical sense, just agitation; it is motion that may or may not be carrying you anywhere useful, and the inability to tell the difference is where a great deal of organisational effort disappears.

Velocity thinking requires you to hold two questions simultaneously: how much are we accomplishing, and is what we’re accomplishing moving us towards the right outcome? This is considerably harder than asking about pace alone, because it requires you to have defined the outcome clearly enough to measure progress against it, which many projects, in my experience, have not done with anything like the rigour they imagine they have. Where the destination is vague or contested, velocity becomes impossible to assess meaningfully; you can only report activity, and activity, however impressive it looks on a dashboard, is not the same thing as progress.

In L&D, I find this distinction particularly pointed, because we are extraordinarily good at producing activity; at running sessions, completing modules, hitting completion rates, and filling calendars with the kind of visible busyness that tends to satisfy stakeholders in the short term. What we are less consistently good at is asking whether any of that activity is moving us in a direction that can be justified, and whether the rate of movement is sustainable enough to reach something that matters. Borrowing velocity from the software world doesn’t require adopting sprints, stand-ups, or any other piece of agile apparatus; it simply requires a shift in the quality of the question, from “are we doing enough?” to “are we moving in a direction we can defend, and is our rate of progress in that direction one we can maintain?” Those are harder questions, but they’re the ones that will tell you something worth knowing.