Sprints Beat Six-Month Studies

Remember the last time you commissioned a strategy study? Six months. £200k. A 300-page document that was outdated before the printer cooled down. Sound familiar?

Welcome to the museum of business history, where six-month strategies go to die.

The market doesn't wait for your steering committee to meet. Your competitors aren't pausing while you perfect your PowerPoints. And that burning platform? It's already ashes or someone else's opportunity.

The momentum problem

Traditional consulting follows traditional timelines. Discovery takes two months. Analysis takes another two. Recommendations take one more. Implementation? That's another project entirely.

By month six, three things have happened:

1. The market has shifted

2. Your team has lost faith

3. The problem has morphed into something unrecognizable

Meanwhile, energy dies. Momentum stalls. The urgent becomes the abandoned.

The sprint solution

Sprints flip the model. Five days. One team. Real decisions.

It sounds impossible until you realize what we're cutting: the theatre. The politics. The endless revisions that add precision but subtract truth.

In a sprint, there's no time for perfect. Only time for progress. No room for politics. Only room for solutions.

Why speed works

Speed isn't about rushing. It's about focus. When you have five days instead of five months, only the essential survives. The nice-to-haves fall away. The core emerges.

Research from Stanford's d.school shows that compressed timelines actually improve decision quality. Why? Because they force teams to trust instinct over analysis paralysis. To choose action over perfection.

Your competitors aren't winning because they're smarter. They're winning because they're faster. Because while you're perfecting the plan, they're already learning from version three.

The choice is simple: spend six months planning the perfect strategy, or spend five days building one good enough to start learning from.