On Rushing

The other day I caught a funny clip — a commercial pilot reading out his dream announcement: “Dear passengers, thank you for flying with us! The moment we touch down, unbuckle immediately — the last two of you will find your seatbelts jammed. Anyone who doesn’t grab their bags off the overhead bins, those bins lock the second deboarding begins. As soon as the door opens — out you go, the last few suckers stay behind to clean the plane. And whoever doesn’t claim a spot right up against the belt, their luggage flies back to where it came from.”

I fly a lot, and I’ve seen it all: grown men, desperate to get out first, bowling over women with children in the aisle; people taking a heavy suitcase to the shins of a stranger just to grab or stow it a half-second faster. Plenty of other madness, too.

Almost always, with rare exceptions, those very same people in a hurry would then be standing in the airport, glancing around anxiously, with no idea where to run next.

The reasons behind this are clear enough: the fear of “not making it in time” is stitched into our DNA going back to the shortages of the Soviet era. And under outside pressure — the stress of a flight, a sense of not being safe, loss of control, the uncertainty of having no experience — all of it pulls us into regressive states, where the basic, almost animal models of behaviour switch on.

The mere fact of a queue reads as a signal: there might not be enough left for the last in line. One person starts to hurry — infects a few; those few infect the rest. And there it is, a mass frenzy, where people are ready for conflict, for violence, without even understanding what exactly they’re competing over, or whether there’s any shortage at all. At times a person doesn’t even know why he needs it — but if there’s a scramble, well, better grab a piece!

I see something similar on the road. Those “chess players,” weaving from lane to lane, into oncoming traffic, riding the edge. And in the end, if you know the route — or simply have the experience to know which lane to take, where to speed up, when it’s safe to pass — you come out far ahead, with no risk to yourself or anyone else.
The ones in the biggest hurry are the ones with no plan and no experience.

I see the same thing in business all the time. I’m not talking about the cases where speed is a competitive advantage. There it’s obvious: honed processes, metrics, efficiency. But far more often you get the other thing — chaotic motion. Companies “running” somewhere, with no agreed direction, no clear sense of where exactly, or why.

At the Skolkovo business school they teach this: to get a task done well, about eighty percent of the effort should go into planning and only twenty into execution. With the rise of AI, where carrying out many tasks becomes nearly instant, that ratio only grows stronger.

Here’s to all of us not rushing, planning our moves carefully, and ending up out front — calmly, without the fuss! 😎