Last week's “strategy session” was a kid’s workbook and a dull pencil.
I was teaching my 4½-year-old how to solve more complex mazes. Not the simple “follow the one obvious path” ones, but the kind where you actually have to think—multiple branches, dead ends, and loops that bring you right back to where you started.
So I walked her through a basic problem-solving approach:
Pick a path.
If it’s a dead end, mark it.
Trace back to the last decision point.
Try the next branch.
Classic depth-first search. In crayon.
It’s a great way to solve mazes logically. But it does require something that’s usually in short supply in the late afternoon: patience.
We worked through the first one. Then we tried a second maze—same logic, but this time with a twist: an ambulance racing through the maze to get to a hospital.
Halfway through the second attempt, she put the pencil down and said:
“We don’t have time.”
I asked her why.
“Because the person in the ambulance needs to get there fast.”
And just like that, we were out of “abstract maze land” and deep into something very real: even the best strategic approach can get completely hijacked by perceived tactical urgency.
When Urgency Overwrites Reason
In her mind, the story changed the rules.
The first maze was a puzzle. The second maze was a mission. And missions, in her world, don’t have time for slow, deliberate backtracking. You just go. Fast. Now.
It’s funny on the surface, but it’s exactly what happens in companies every single day. You can have a solid strategy. A clear sequencing of what to do when. A thoughtful way to explore options and eliminate dead ends.
But the moment someone says:
“We’re going to miss the quarter.”
“The client is getting impatient.”
“A competitor just launched something similar.”
…all that deliberate thinking gets shoved aside for: We don’t have time. Just ship it. In her case, the “ambulance urgency” was imaginary.
In ours, it often feels very real.
The Conversation I Had to Have (With a 4½-Year-Old)
So I tried to meet her where she was. I didn’t say, “It’s just a maze, relax.”
Instead I said something like:
“If the ambulance driver rushes without thinking, they might hit a wall and have to go all the way back. That actually takes longer. If they go carefully, choosing the right turns, they get there faster—even if it feels slower.”
She looked back at the page. We tried again. This time she followed the “mark the dead end, go back, try another path” approach a little more deliberately.
On the third try, she did something interesting: she paused, scanned the maze more broadly, and then found a completely different route to the hospital—faster than either of us had found earlier.
Same maze. Same urgency in the story. Different outcome.
Once she trusted the method, her brain freed up enough to see a better path altogether.
The Founder Parallel
This is the tension I see in a lot of founders (and honestly, in myself):
You know the value of deliberate, strategic moves.
You also feel the heat of very real urgency.
Revenue targets. Runway. Investor expectations. Team morale. Customer timelines. The ambulance is always on the way to the hospital.
So you’re constantly walking a tightrope between:
Strategic patience – exploring branches properly, marking dead ends, accepting that some paths are learning, not waste.
Tactical urgency – shipping, responding, moving, reassuring, reacting when the market punches you in the face.
Too much strategy, and you over-analyse yourself into stagnation. Too much urgency, and you sprint into walls, burning trust, cash, and energy you don’t get back.
The trick—if there is one—is noticing which voice is driving the decision in front of you:
Are you saying “we don’t have time” because the stakes are truly existential?
Or because it feels uncomfortable to slow down long enough to think?
When “Slow” Is Actually Fast
The maze moment with my daughter reminded me of something I keep re-learning: Sometimes the slow, deliberate approach is the fastest way through.
Taking an extra week to test a pricing assumption before rolling it out to your entire base.
Saying “no” to a rushed enterprise deal that would distort your roadmap for a year.
Spending an extra hour clarifying the real problem before building the “urgent” feature.
From the outside, it can look like wasted time.
From the inside, it’s often the difference between a clean line to the hospital and a frantic scribble that never gets there.
And just like in that maze, once you’ve internalized the method, you start seeing paths others miss—shortcuts that still respect the structure, but come from actually understanding the system instead of reacting to it.
The Balance We’re All Trying to Hit
I don’t have a neat framework to wrap this up.
What I do have is a picture in my head: my daughter, pencil in hand, torn between wanting to help the person in the ambulance right now and having to trust a slower, more deliberate way of getting them there.
That’s most of us, most of the time.
Walking the line between:
“We don’t have time.”
And “If we think properly now, we’ll get there faster—and in one piece.”
In her case, after three tries, she found her own path using the same logic I’d shown her.
In ours, the best we can do is notice when urgency is shouting loudest, pause for just long enough to check whether we’re still in a maze or actually on a highway—and choose our next move from there.
Because not every “we don’t have time” is a real ambulance.
But some are.
And learning to tell the difference—that’s the real balancing act.