Standards, Tempo, Focus

17 Dec, 2025

Three things determine how an organisation performs: the standards it holds, the tempo it operates at, and where it focuses its intensity.

They interact as a system. You can’t maximise all three everywhere — the constraint forces trade-offs.

Standards

Early on, you set the standards. You’re the one saying “this isn’t good enough” and modelling what good looks like.

But standards can become organisational property. You embed them in hiring — selecting for people who already hold the bar. You embed them in systems — review processes, quality gates, feedback loops that enforce the standard without you pushing on every decision.

The goal is to shift standards from something you personally maintain to something the organisation maintains. This is what building culture actually means: encoding expectations so they persist without constant leadership pressure.

Tempo

Tempo is different. It doesn’t embed the same way.

You can’t hire your way to urgency. You can’t systematise pace the way you can systematise quality. Tempo requires ongoing pressure — someone setting the rhythm, compressing cycle times, creating discomfort with the current speed.

This remains a leadership function. The moment you stop pushing, tempo drifts. Comfort creeps in. Cycle times expand. Decisions slow down.

High tempo creates discomfort by design. That’s the point. Comfort is where tempo dies.

Focus

Focus is the release valve.

If you want high standards and high tempo, you can’t have them everywhere. You have to explicitly choose where to apply intensity — which means deliberately accepting lower standards or slower pace in the places that matter less.

This is the hard part. It requires saying out loud: “We’re not going to be excellent at this. We’re not going to move fast here.” Most leaders resist this. It feels like giving up.

But without explicit focus decisions, you get one of two failure modes. Either you try to maintain standards and tempo everywhere and burn people out. Or — more commonly — everything quietly slows down and quality drifts across the board. The organisation feels exhausted but sluggish.

The system

The three interact:

Standards can transfer to people and systems. Your job is to set them initially, then embed them so the organisation holds the bar.

Tempo stays with you. It requires ongoing attention. You are the one creating urgency.

Focus is the strategic choice. Where do you apply standards and tempo? Where do you let them slip?

Get focus wrong and you spread intensity too thin. Get tempo wrong and the organisation drifts into comfortable mediocrity. Get standards wrong and you build something that can’t hold quality without you in the room.

Get all three right and you have an organisation that maintains its own standards, moves at pace, and concentrates its energy where it matters most.

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