I’ve sat through this meeting more than once. Results are flat, the competitive landscape is shifting, and somewhere between slide 12 and slide 15, a leader says it: “We need a stronger sense of urgency.”
Everyone nods. Nobody asks the obvious question: urgency about what, exactly?
That question matters more than it seems. Because in my experience, the injunction to urgency is rarely the beginning of a strategy. It’s what leaders reach for when they don’t have one.
Kotter saw the problem. He didn’t go far enough.
To be fair to the “sense of urgency” tradition: John Kotter, who built the concept, was more careful than the executives who quote him. He distinguished complacency (“everything is fine, why change?”) from false urgency — frantic activity, packed calendars, meetings about meetings — and reserved the term “true urgency” for a focused determination to act on what actually matters. He was explicit that manufactured urgency gets detected and destroys credibility.
But Kotter’s framing still contains a trap. His model treats urgency as step one — something a leader creates first, so that strategy and change can follow. Generate the emotion, then figure out the plan.
I think Richard Rumelt would say — and I agree — that this sequence is exactly backwards.
The elimination test: urgency forbids nothing
If you’ve read my earlier piece on Rumelt, you know his core claim: a real strategy is a kernel — a diagnosis of the challenge, a guiding policy for dealing with it, and a set of coherent actions. And you know his catalogue of bad-strategy symptoms: fluff, blue-sky goals, ambition mistaken for a plan.
There’s a simple test I use, derived from Rumelt’s insistence on saying no: a real strategic choice eliminates options. If you can do anything and everything while “respecting” it, it isn’t a strategy. It’s decoration.
Now run “we need more urgency” through that test.
What does it forbid? Nothing. What does it deprioritize? Nothing. Which battles does it decline? None. Every team can keep doing exactly what it was doing — just faster, with more anxiety. That’s why the urgency injunction is so popular: it demands effort from everyone while requiring no hard choice from the leader who issues it.
That’s not a strategy. That’s the absence of a strategy, wearing a determined face.
And it explains something Kotter’s model treats as an accident: why “false urgency” is so common. False urgency isn’t a failed attempt at true urgency. It’s the natural, predictable result of injecting pressure into an organization that has no diagnosis. When people don’t know which obstacle matters, the only way to display urgency is theatrically — more meetings, more emails, more visible motion. The frenzy is the compliance.
”Speed is strategy” — the same error, promoted to a slogan
The corporate cousin of the urgency injunction is the phrase “speed is strategy.” I understand its appeal, especially now, when every board is asking how fast the company is moving on AI. But it fails the same test, for the same reason.
Speed is an attribute, or an outcome. It is not a strategy, because it answers none of the questions a strategy exists to answer: fast at what? Fast instead of what? Fast because we believe what about the market? A company that is “fast” at twelve uncoordinated initiatives is not executing a strategy. It’s distributing its incoherence more quickly.
Here’s the irony: the company most often cited by the speed-is-strategy crowd doesn’t actually support the slogan. Amazon’s famous decision mechanisms — the 70% rule (decide when you have roughly 70% of the information you wish you had), the distinction between Type 1 decisions (irreversible, deliberate slowly) and Type 2 decisions (reversible, decide fast and correct) — are not a cult of velocity. They are designed mechanisms, derived from a diagnosis: that in Amazon’s environment, the cost of slow reversible decisions exceeds the cost of occasional wrong ones, while a small class of one-way doors deserves the opposite treatment.
Notice what that framework does that “speed is strategy” doesn’t: it discriminates. It tells you when not to be fast. It eliminates something. That’s the tell of real strategic thinking.
Where legitimate urgency actually comes from
So if urgency can’t be injected, where does it come from?
It’s derived. Specifically, it’s derived from the part of strategy work that exhortation is designed to skip: identifying the crux — the point in your challenge that is both critical (solving it unlocks the most progress) and addressable (you can actually act on it now).
Something happens in a team when the crux is named precisely. I’ve watched it. The energy that no all-hands speech could generate appears on its own, because people can finally see the difference between motion and progress. Rumelt’s “proximate objectives” work the same way: an objective close enough to be feasible creates more traction than a distant ambition amplified by pressure. Urgency, it turns out, is mostly a byproduct of clarity.
There’s a second, less comfortable reason leaders reach for urgency, and Rumelt names it better than the change-management literature does: every real strategy creates losers inside the organization. Concentrating resources on one crux means taking them away from someone’s project, someone’s territory. Unless collective ruin is imminent, those interests will resist. A genuine, externally grounded sense of threat can make that concentration politically possible. That’s the legitimate use of urgency — not as a motivational input, but as the honest communication of a diagnosis that justifies saying no.
The difference is detectable. Urgency derived from a diagnosis always comes with a name attached: this obstacle, this window, this competitor’s move. Urgency injected as a substitute comes with adjectives: faster, hungrier, more agile.
The honest counterargument
Let me argue against myself, because there’s a real objection here: sometimes speed genuinely is the source of advantage. Market windows close. Learning curves compound. In winner-take-most dynamics, the second-fastest company gets a consolation prize. Rumelt himself, in his chapter on exploiting dynamics, treats riding a wave of change at the right moment as one of the great sources of strategic power.
All true. But look at the structure of those cases: speed is the advantage given a diagnosis — a specific belief about which wave is breaking, which window is closing, and why you are positioned to move through it. Speed is the conclusion of an argument, never its replacement. “We must ship the reusable-rocket landing before the launch market consolidates” is a strategy that implies speed. “Speed is our strategy” is a wish that implies nothing.
Which is why, if I had to compress this whole piece into one line: the problem is never that tempo doesn’t matter. It’s that tempo is downstream of clarity, and slogans try to make it upstream.
A test you can run Monday morning
The next time you hear — or catch yourself saying — “we need more urgency,” ask one question: urgency about what, specifically?
If the answer names a precise obstacle and what you’ll stop doing to attack it, good news: you have a strategy, and the urgency will largely take care of itself.
If the answer is a restatement of ambition — faster, more, now — then you don’t have an urgency problem. You have a diagnosis problem. And that one is solvable: it takes a few honest hours with your leadership team and the willingness to say no to something. That’s harder than giving a speech about urgency.
It’s also the only version that works.
This is a conversation I keep having with leadership teams that mistake motion for progress. If it resonates, I’d be glad to think it through with you. Find me on LinkedIn.