Hopefully this is a useful analogy you can use if you’re struggling with a boss or manager who thinks the way to go faster is to push the team harder or cram in more work.

A few months ago, I took up running. At first, I improved steadily – each 5km a little quicker than the last. I assumed the way to keep getting faster was simple: run harder, push more.

But then recently, I hit a wall. My pace stopped improving. I finished every run exhausted. And no matter how much I tried to “dig deep”, I wasn’t getting anywhere.

So I did some research. It turns out running hard all the time doesn’t make you faster – it often slows you down. Improvement comes from running slower most of the time, staying in your “aerobic zone”, building endurance, recovering well, and only pushing occasionally.

Here’s the key point: it’s completely counterintuitive.

The analogy with running breaks down a bit here, but this counterintuitiveness is exactly why so many software teams – despite best intentions – end up underperforming.

The intuitive belief is that the path to delivering faster is to do more: write more code, skip meetings, avoid “distractions”, and stay heads-down. But just like me trying to sprint every run, it has the opposite effect.

Some common examples

• Not spending enough time on discovery or analysis to “get going” faster – but ending up building the wrong thing and wasting time on re-work.
• Skipping retrospectives or post-mortems – missing key opportunities to learn and improve, so mistakes get repeated.
• Worrying that developers spend too much time collaborating – and believing solo work is more efficient, but ending up with bottlenecks, siloed knowledge, and poor decisions.

These instincts feel productive, but they’re often the root cause of slow, ineffective delivery.

Improvement doesn’t come from pushing harder. It comes from pacing well, working sustainably, and continuously improving the system you’re running in.

It’s often counterintuitive. But it’s true. Agile software development best practices have been around for decades, and the principles they were founded on even longer. Yet they’re still not common – because they go against intuition.

Sometimes, the way to go faster… is (quite literally in the case of running) to slow down.