Coaching for Leaders: Episode 658R

How to Help Change Happen Faster, with Frances Frei
Host: Dave Stachowiak
Guest: Frances Frei
Date: December 22, 2025

Episode Overview

In this rebroadcast, Dave Stachowiak interviews Harvard Business School professor and renowned change expert Frances Frei about accelerating organizational change without sacrificing quality or trust. Drawing on her book Move Fast and Fix Things, co-authored with Anne Morriss, Frances challenges conventional wisdom that meaningful change must be slow and deliberate, instead presenting a path to urgent, sustainable, and responsible transformation.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Rethinking Speed and Change

• Distinguishing Hustle Culture from Urgency

  • Frances Frei (04:27):
    "The hustle culture, the break things part, it presented a false narrative. It essentially said because you're going fast, it's okay to break things... But on the urgency side of it, which is the move fast and fix things, collateral damage is not a byproduct."
  • Hustle culture links speed with recklessness, while true urgency pairs speed with responsibility and care for trust and people.

• The False Trade-off: Fast versus Slow

  • Frances Frei (05:59):
    "We're presenting, I guess, a third way, which is you can go just as fast as the hustlers and go righteously fast. You needn't go recklessly fast."
  • Change doesn't have to be “recklessly fast” or “righteously slow”—there's a middle path.

Empowerment and Distributed Decision-Making (07:35–11:03)

• Empowering More People

  • The fastest way to accelerate change is by empowering people at all levels to make decisions, removing bottlenecks at the top.
  • Frances Frei (07:47):
    "If decisions are being made in a distributed way, we will go 10, 100 times faster than if all decisions have to flow through me."

• Case Study: Ritz Carlton's Empowerment Model

  • Staff are empowered (with up to $2,000 per incident) to resolve guest issues on the spot, catalyzed through training and clarity of expectations.
  • Frances Frei (08:58):
    "You may spend up to $2,000 to solve [a customer issue]... In practice, nobody spends that much. But it’s the way to get people to realize, oh my gosh, you’re serious."

• Practical Entry Points

  • Start small ($5, $20, $200)—the specific number matters less than the permission and encouragement.
  • Training and narrative sharing are essential to foster discretion.

Strategic Focus: “Dare to Be Bad at Something Else” (12:10–16:39)

• Excellence requires concentrated resources, meaning leaders and organizations must intentionally perform worse in less critical areas to achieve greatness in key ones.
  • Frances Frei (12:30):
    "If you want to be much better tomorrow at something than you are today... The resources—time, attention, money—have to come from somewhere else."
• Illustrative Example: Southwest Airlines
  • Herb Kelleher’s famous refusal to change the company’s processes for the sake of efficiency, even in response to compelling, emotional requests, safeguarded Southwest’s low-cost formula.
  • Frances Frei (15:10):
    "He then shared that letter with everyone in the organization as an educational moment... I want you to understand the cost to our system of your saying yes."

Systems Thinking and Fast Tracking (17:24–23:31)

• John Little’s Law: Focus on Work-in-Process Not Just Speed

  • The total time to complete work depends on both how fast you do things (cycle time) and how many things you do at once (work-in-process).
  • Frances Frei (17:24):
    "If you remove work in process, you can have an orders of magnitude improvement. ...what we should be doing is trying to work smarter."

• Reducing Burnout and Inefficiency

  • Too much focus on cycle time (working faster and harder) leads to overwork without meaningful progress; the smarter approach is to focus and limit active projects.
  • Frances Frei (20:45):
    "Quality of life is suffering...you’re just sacrificing, sacrificing, sacrificing. And it doesn’t feel like things are getting all that much better."

• Fast-Tracking Mechanisms and Organizational Language

  • High-performing organizations develop clear language and systems (“Code Yellow”, “ambulanic projects”) to prioritize urgent needs.
  • Frances Frei (23:31):
    "It is so much better to be prepared...When we need to go very fast, what is our process for doing it?"

The Role of Healthy Conflict and Curiosity (24:18–29:14)

• Comfort with Tournament Play

  • Healthy organizations view conflict as “tournament play”—a constructive, iterative process where competing ideas are tested to make solutions and people better.
  • Frances Frei (25:08):
    "Competition makes ideas better, competition makes people better, competition makes companies better. Well, competition is tournament play."

• Building the Curiosity Muscle

  • Instead of approaching conflict with judgment, approach it with curiosity: “Why would an otherwise good person have that opposing point of view?”
  • Frances Frei (27:36):
    "Try to leave behind the judgment and replace it with curiosity...if you invite in curiosity, it repels judgment."

• Practical Exercise: Pickleball as Organizational Development

  • Engaging in team sports or competitive games outside of work can build resilience and the habits needed for constructive workplace conflict.

Notable Quotes

• On False Narratives of Speed:
  "The hustle culture...gave speed a bad name because it made us think we could either go fast or, or take care, one or the other. And what we show in this book is that that is a false trade off." — Frances Frei (04:27)

• On Sacrifice and Strategic Focus:
  "If you want the nobility of excellence, you have to articulate what are we going to be great at? And then reverse engineer, what does that necessarily mean we have to give up..." — Frances Frei (13:58)

• On Working Smarter vs. Harder:
  "Cycle time is what leads to pressing on, that is what leads to burnout in many cases. ...So you keep sacrificing and getting no better. Step back and think, how can I work smarter?" — Frances Frei (20:45)

• On Conflict as Play:
  "Competition makes ideas better...But when it comes to conflict, many of us don't want to have that competitive...our ideas don't improve in isolation, they improve in the jousting of the competitive match." — Frances Frei (25:08)

• On Curiosity and Judgment:
  "Try to leave behind the judgment and replace it with curiosity. Now fortunately, if you invite in curiosity, it repels judgment." — Frances Frei (27:36)

• On Fast Change:
  "I have always said meaningful change happens quickly... I didn't know that we were going to be able to do it in 30 minutes... Even complicated problems you can solve very, very quickly." — Frances Frei (30:41)

Important Segments & Timestamps

• False trade-off between slow/fast change: 04:27–06:23
• Empowerment and Ritz Carlton example: 07:35–11:03
• Strategic focus and Southwest illustration: 12:10–16:39
• Little’s Law, working smarter: 17:24–20:45
• Fast-tracking and organizational language (Stripe, “Code Yellow”): 23:01–23:31
• Healthy conflict as tournament play: 24:18–25:08
• Shifting to curiosity in conflict: 27:36–29:14
• Frances’s changed perspective on solving problems fast: 30:41

Tone and Style

The conversation is practical, energetic, and optimistic, challenging leaders to rethink old assumptions about change, power, and organizational culture while emphasizing care, empowerment, and curiosity.

Summary Usefulness

This summary distills major arguments, practical strategies, illustrative case studies, and actionable insights for leaders interested in moving fast responsibly. By focusing on systems, empowerment, and mindset, listeners get concrete tools for catalyzing change without organizational wreckage.

For more, see the book Move Fast and Fix Things and Frances Frei’s podcast Fixable.