Ask any leadership team to honestly rate their speed -- speed of decision making, speed of execution, speed of delivery -- and most will tell you the same thing. "Yeah, we are not that fast." Not in a self-critical way. Just an honest statement.
This matters because speed has stopped being a nice-to-have operational trait and has become a primary competitive weapon. The companies pulling ahead in 2026 are not necessarily smarter, better funded, or more talented than their competitors. They are faster. And speed, when it compounds across an organization, creates a gap that slower competitors simply cannot close by working harder.
The question is: what does "speed" actually mean when you break it apart?
Two Dimensions of Speed
Decision Speed
How fast does your organization move from "we have a problem" to "here is what we are going to do about it"?
Execution Speed
How fast does your organization move from "here is the decision" to "it is done and in the market"?
These two dimensions are independent. You can be fast at deciding and slow at executing, or vice versa.
The Decision Speed Problem
Decision speed is almost always a leadership and alignment issue, not a data issue.
The pattern I see repeatedly: a leadership team has all the information it needs to make a call. The data is there. The market signal is clear. But the decision stalls because the organization lacks a codified mission, a shared vocabulary for priorities, or a clear framework for who gets to make which calls.
Without those structural elements, every meaningful decision triggers a negotiation cycle. People need to re-litigate the "why" before they can agree on the "what." Meetings multiply. Alignment conversations loop. And by the time the organization commits to a direction, the window has narrowed or closed entirely.
Stop any five people in your organization at random. Ask them two questions:
If you get five different answers, your decision speed problem is not a process problem. It is a clarity problem. And no amount of project management tooling will fix it.
The organizations with the fastest decision velocity are the ones where anyone in the company -- from the C-suite to the newest hire -- can articulate the same direction in the same language. That alignment acts as a decision-making accelerant across every level of the organization.
The Execution Speed Problem
Execution speed is an architecture and tooling issue, and this is where AI has fundamentally changed the game.
For decades, execution speed was constrained by headcount. Need to move faster? Hire more people. Need to produce more? Add shifts. The throughput of the organization was directly proportional to the number of humans doing the work.
That equation has broken.
Not because anyone is working harder, but because the work that consumed 60-70% of everyone's time is now handled by machines that do not sleep, do not context-switch, and do not lose momentum.
The key word is "disciplined." The execution speed gains do not come from giving everyone a chatbot and hoping for the best. They come from architecturally embedding automation into the delivery workflow -- identifying the commodity labor (data pulling, basic reporting, initial drafts, template formatting) and routing it to agents so that human talent is freed to focus on the strategic work that actually requires human judgment.
Where the Two Dimensions Compound
The organizations that are truly pulling away from their competitors are fast on both dimensions simultaneously. And the compounding effect is dramatic.
This creates a learning velocity advantage that is even more valuable than the speed itself. The fast organization is accumulating market intelligence, customer feedback, and operational insight at a rate that makes their next decision even better and faster. The gap does not stay the same. It widens.
This is not a talent gap. It is a speed gap. And it is the single most undervalued competitive lever in most industries right now.
The "Directing vs. Doing" Paradigm Shift
Speed transformation requires a fundamental mindset change that most leadership teams have not yet made.
The organizations that resist this shift -- that keep their best people buried in execution because "that is how we have always done it" -- will feel increasingly sluggish relative to competitors who have made the transition. Not because their people are less capable, but because their people's capability is being consumed by work that machines can now handle at higher speed and lower cost.
The Speed Audit
If you are a leadership team reading this and recognizing the pattern, here is a starting framework for diagnosing where your speed problems actually live:
Decision Speed Diagnostic
- • How many meetings does it take to move from "identified opportunity" to "committed direction"?
- • Is your mission codified clearly enough that mid-level managers can make strategic calls without escalating?
- • When was the last time you made a meaningful strategic decision in under a week?
Execution Speed Diagnostic
- • What percentage of your team's time is spent on commodity work (reporting, formatting, data aggregation, first drafts)?
- • How many of your delivery workflows have AI automation embedded at the structural level (not just ad hoc usage)?
- • If you removed all the manual bottlenecks from your highest-value delivery process, how much faster would it move?
Compounding Diagnostic
- • How many full "decide, execute, measure, learn" cycles does your organization complete per quarter on a given initiative?
- • How does that compare to the fastest competitor in your space?
Speed Is Not Recklessness
One important distinction: speed is not the same as rushing. Rushing means cutting corners, skipping diligence, and hoping things work out. Speed means removing the friction, waste, and structural drag that slow down good work.
The goal is not to make bad decisions faster. It is to make good decisions faster and execute on them with a velocity that the market cannot ignore.
The organizations that figure this out in 2026 will set a pace that defines their competitive position for the next decade. The ones that do not will spend the same decade trying to figure out why they keep arriving late to opportunities they spotted early.
Speed is the strategy. Everything else is a tactic within it.
Michael Murray is the founder of abeba co, where he advises leadership teams on AI-enabled business transformation, strategic positioning, GTM, and operational acceleration.