Forget move fast and break things
Move slower and heal them instead
Move fast and break things is an ethos that’s reached almost mythical status in the tech sector, chanted by aspiring entrepreneurs and— more recently— the Tech Bros at DOGE who are the public face of drastic changes in the federal government. Moving fast is a virtue. Breaking things is the price of progress. And the people who dare question this breakneck pace? They don’t understand innovation.
But here is something frequently omitted from those conversations— move fast and break things only works in lower risk environments. An app delivering frozen yogurt to your doorstep? The worst that can happen if something breaks is a customer who doesn’t get their midnight snack. An aircraft carrying hundreds of passengers? National headlines and hundreds of memorial services.
When it comes to health tech, the stakes are on the higher end of the spectrum and the regulations reflect this. Healthcare is one of the sectors where moving fast and breaking things really only works in controlled settings such as research laboratories or in emergency response where less than perfect today is better than perfect next year. Make a reckless move and patients can get injured or worse.
As AI and other emerging technologies increasingly influence diagnostics, resource allocation, benefits design, and care delivery, the cost of breaking things shoots up. These novel systems are poised to inform decisions about who gets care, when, and how much. Do we want them built by people whose priority are speed, raising the next round, and optimizing for exit?
The Myth of the Lone Genius
Big Tech and Big VC glamorize the lone technical genius who changes the world through brute force, dressed in a hoodie, seeing what others don’t, and disrupting entire industries.
While the premise for a compelling movie plot, this mythology overlooks real-world problems and the resources it takes to solve them. The health systems we depend on to deliver patient care are messy, deeply human, and full of interdependencies. The decision-makers who forget this risk harming the people they claim to serve.
In healthcare, patients don’t get better care because of lone geniuses. There are clinicians, patients, researchers, community leaders, data analysts, and policy makers, all working to ensure that treatments and services are delivered in a way that improves patient health while enforcing the guardrails that minimize harm brought onto them.
Progress, especially the innovative kind that lasts, doesn’t look like a disruptive blitz in the health tech sector. It looks like collaboration, trust, and care.
What Moving Slower and Healing Looks Like
Moving slower is not equivalent to doing nothing. It means investing the time upfront to identify what patients need and respond to, the preferences of key decision-makers, and what will actually drive impact on patient health. And rejecting the idea that disruption is always the answer.
It means redefining innovation itself, which in healthcare goes beyond shiny apps and can manifest as redesigned workflows that reduce burnout, predictive algorithms housed in transparent models that earn the trust of clinicians, and even building relationships that can lead to long-term systemic change.
Slowing down and listening to patients, regulators, clinicians, and other decision-makers is the opposite of moving fast and breaking things. Increasingly, moving slower and healing things will mean centering the people who are at the intersection of complexity and care—women, immigrants, researchers, caregivers.
For a passionate entrepreneur or innovator that can be frustrating but for a leader who is strategic and keeping their eye on the vision, empathy, patience, and discernment increase the chances for success. They may not look like your typical founder, they understand what it truly means to heal.
And in a world where AI amplifies our brilliance and our blind spots, we need more healers. Because breaking things is easy and anyone can do that. Healing, on the other hand, is the harder (and more rewarding) alternative.