The quote from Queen Elizabeth II—"It’s worth remembering that it is often the small steps, not the giant leaps, that bring about the most lasting change"—is the most dangerous piece of comfort food ever fed to the middle class.
It feels good. It sounds wise. It’s also a blueprint for stagnation.
In the world of high-stakes business and personal transformation, the "small steps" philosophy is a sedative. It’s a way to avoid the terrifying, necessary work of the giant leap. When we praise incrementalism, we are usually praising a lack of courage. We are validating the choice to stay within the lines while the house burns down.
History isn't written by the people who took 1% better steps every day. History is forged by the ruptures, the pivots, and the massive, uncomfortable gambles that change the trajectory of an entire industry overnight.
The Myth of the Compound Effect
The "lazy consensus" suggests that if you just improve by a tiny fraction every day, you’ll end up a titan of industry. This is a mathematical fantasy that ignores the reality of friction and competition.
If you improve a horse-drawn carriage by 1% every year, you eventually get a slightly faster carriage. You never get the internal combustion engine.
Real change is non-linear. The "small steps" approach assumes that the path is a straight line and that the environment is static. It isn’t. While you’re taking your polite, measured steps, the market is shifting under your feet. A competitor isn't trying to be 1% better; they are trying to render your entire existence irrelevant.
In biology, this is called punctuated equilibrium. Long periods of stability are shattered by rapid, massive evolutionary changes. If you aren't preparing for the leap, you are just waiting for the extinction event.
Why Small Steps Lead to Institutional Rot
I’ve seen billion-dollar companies die because they fell in love with "process improvement" over "product revolution." They spend five years optimizing a declining revenue stream because it feels safe. It feels like "progress."
- The Sunk Cost Trap: Small steps make it harder to quit. When you’ve invested thousands of tiny increments into a failing strategy, you feel a psychological obligation to keep going.
- The Illusion of Activity: Busywork is the shadow of incrementalism. It allows teams to report "wins" to the board without actually moving the needle.
- Lack of Momentum: Small steps don't inspire. Nobody ever quit a cushy job to join a startup because the founder promised to make 0.5% improvements to a legacy database. People move for the giant leap.
The most lasting change doesn’t come from polishing the status quo. It comes from the audacity to break it.
The Physics of the Giant Leap
Let’s look at the actual data of disruption. Consider the transition from physical media to streaming. Did Netflix win by making the DVD-by-mail process 10% more efficient? No. They made a giant leap into a technology that was, at the time, barely functional for most of their customer base. They cannibalized their own profitable business model to jump into the future.
If they had followed the Queen’s advice, they would still be the world’s best shipping company for plastic discs.
When we talk about change, we have to distinguish between optimization and transformation.
- Optimization is for the maintenance phase of a business.
- Transformation requires a clean break.
The math of a giant leap looks like this:
$$\Delta V = \int_{t_0}^{t_f} a(t) , dt$$
To get a significant change in velocity ($\Delta V$), you need sustained, high-intensity acceleration ($a$). You cannot get there by tapping the gas pedal once a week and calling it "consistency."
The Psychological Price of Safety
The reason the "small steps" mantra is so popular is that it eliminates the risk of public failure. If you take a tiny step and trip, nobody notices. If you try to leap across a chasm and fall, everyone sees it.
We have pathologized the giant leap because it requires us to admit that we might be wrong. It requires us to put our reputation on the line.
But here is the brutal truth: The risk of a giant leap is acute, but the risk of small steps is terminal. I’ve worked with founders who spent three years "A/B testing" their way to a product-market fit that never arrived. They were so afraid of the big pivot—the giant leap into a new category—that they optimized their way into bankruptcy. They took small steps right off a cliff.
When Small Steps Actually Work (The Exception)
There is one area where the "small steps" philosophy holds weight: Technical Debt. In software engineering or personal health, you cannot leap over the consequences of a decade of bad decisions. You cannot "leap" your way out of a $100$ million technical debt or a chronic illness. In these scenarios, the incremental approach is the only way to rebuild the foundation.
However, rebuilding a foundation is not the same as building a future. Once the foundation is stable, the small steps must stop. You cannot build a skyscraper by laying one brick a month and hoping for the best.
The Strategy of the Violent Pivot
If you want to disrupt a market or your own life, you need to ignore the siren song of "gradual change." You need a violent pivot.
Imagine a scenario where a legacy retail brand decides to go 100% digital. The "small steps" approach says to launch a small pilot program and slowly migrate inventory over ten years. The "giant leap" approach says to close 50% of the physical stores and pour every cent of that overhead into a proprietary distribution network.
One of these companies survives the decade. The other ends up as a case study in a business textbook under the chapter "Slow Deaths."
The Cost of the "Lasting Change" Fallacy
The competitor’s article argues that small steps bring about the most lasting change. This is a misunderstanding of how the world works.
Lasting change is usually the result of a massive shift in the environment that forces everyone to adapt or die. The Internet wasn't a series of small steps. It was a giant leap in how information is decentralized. AI is not a series of small steps. It is a giant leap in how we define cognitive labor.
If you are waiting for a series of small, comfortable moments to change your life, you are going to be waiting until the end of it.
How to Execute the Leap
- Identify the Chasm: Stop looking for the next logical step. Look for the gap between where you are and where the future is going.
- Burn the Ships: Incrementalism thrives on the ability to retreat. A giant leap requires you to remove the "back to normal" option.
- Accept the Turbulence: A giant leap is messy. There will be a period where things look worse than they did before you started. This is the "valley of despair" that small-steppers never have the stomach to cross.
- Ignore the "Wise" Counsel: You will be surrounded by people quoting monarchs and "growth mindset" influencers telling you to slow down. Recognize this for what it is: their own fear projected onto your ambition.
The most lasting change doesn't come from the person who refined the candle. It comes from the person who realized the candle was a dead end and flipped the switch on the lightbulb.
Stop taking steps. Start jumping.
