Nice write-up. Not really related but it seems Americans currently prefer Cowboys.
…or maybe I’m just paraphrasing what the article said, I’m not really sure.
That's not necessarily the case, actually. You will be slow so you may make outdated decisions and you will try to "cover everything" in advance, which means you may well cover the wrong things. "No plan survives contact with the enemy".
A business case-in-point is Nokia vs Apple. Nokia was caught completely off-guard by the iPhone and they then spent years planning their response (down to the usual comprehensive technical design specs covering every details) while Apple was churning one new version of the iPhone almost every year.
Perhaps a similar scenario is playing out with SpaceX vs Arianespace (Ariane 6 design started in ~2012 with first flight in 2024, "only" 12 years later).
The slow approach might look like it's trying to "cover everything", but sometimes it's just trying to account for the things that could break, so that 1) they don't end up dumped on other people's heads as externalities, and 2) the total ROI is actually positive.
Which model is more appropriate and to what degree, really depends on the context. Technology is often a good case for the "fast" model, but since this subthread is making this an US vs. Europe thing, it's only fair to point out that the "slow" model works better when the general public is on the receiving end of the business or political activities.
The situation is Europe is not really demonstrating that the "European/slow model" works "better"... At the moment what we're seeing is legacy systems and companies slowly falling behind and decaying everywhere with a glacial pace of change.
Process is not free. The bad decision may well be to invest in the process rather than invest in cleaning up after the cowboys.
It takes time, labor and money to run whatever process structure you're using. There are many, many cases where various processes grow in scope of things they cover that it reaches a point of absurdity and the cost is greater than the cost of just cleaning up after the cowboys when they screw up. But because the costs are diffuse, hard to quantify and efforts to quantify them are rife with places that less than honest people can inject subjective judgement processes are often allowed to grow in scope or cost until they are so massively huge that the absurdity is undeniable.
The current disrupters don’t care about improving the administration or delivering something. They’re civil servants like the Vikings were looking to improve monastic efficiency.