The Reform Trap: When Speed Kills Substance and Why UN80 Tempo Rewards Motion Over Clarity.
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My previous piece “We’re Moving Too Fast to Think” struck a nerve. It quickly became my most-reacted LinkedIn post, which made me pay closer attention to examples that capture the dynamic I described. One came from Ronny Patz, a sharp observer of the UN80 process. His reaction to the Human Rights Council reform non-paper captured exactly what happens when urgency overwhelms deliberation. The frustration was obvious and familiar.
Unfortunately this is not an isolated misstep. It reflects a wider pattern across the UN80 process. Not because UN officials lack competence or courage - although the environment doesn’t encourage much of the latter - but because the system is moving too fast to think.
The Mechanics of Evasion
Several readers recognized the “too fast to think” problem in practice. The HRC non-paper is a textbook case. Drawing on Ronny’s post, honest reform analysis starts with three basic questions:
How should this body function if designed for its actual purpose?
What administrative improvements can be made without touching political red lines?
What structural changes require new political agreements and who needs to agree?
These are obvious foundations. Yet most UN80 documents bypass them entirely, jumping straight to incremental adjustments everyone knows won’t fix the underlying problems. Not because staff can’t see the gaps — they see them clearly — but because producing that level of analysis requires conditions the process doesn’t allow: time to think before reacting, space to align before publishing, and permission to speak plainly about trade-offs.
What Clarity Actually Costs
Producing a document that distinguishes administrative fixes from political obstacles requires several things the current tempo eliminates:
Time for honest diagnosis. You can’t separate technical and political constraints in a three-week consultation sprint. Mapping real blockages, testing political tolerance for directness, and building internal consensus takes months. UN80 does not offer that space. And yes, we could have done this before but we didn’t.
Genuine institutional coordination. Wide-ranging reforms need alignment across departments, legal review, and senior political clearance. That requires protected deliberation, not back-to-back meetings feeding parallel workstreams.
Leadership protection. Drafting teams need cover to say, “We can’t synthesize this responsibly within the current timeline.” Senior leadership needs to defend clarity over diplomatic comfort.
Relief from performance pressure. Compressed timelines with high visibility reward activity over substance. Better to circulate a thin non-paper that proves you’re “engaged” than admit you need more time to get it right.
Permission to offend strategically. Naming political blockages requires preparation, sequencing, and narrative craft. That takes time. Without it, documents stay safely vague: technically correct, substantively cautious, politically harmless.
The False Economy of Consultation
The UN80 process has been remarkably inclusive. Hundreds of inputs, dozens of consultations, constant opportunities for member states and stakeholders to weigh in. It looks participatory and feels legitimate. But it’s a pattern I’ve seen repeatedly over the last two decades: broad consultation without deliberate pacing produces lowest-common-denominator outputs. When you attempt real-time synthesis of vast, varied input, you can’t prioritize or speak uncomfortable truths. You end up acknowledging everything and resolving nothing.
This is the paradox of speed in reform: the faster you consult, the less honest you can be. The more voices you collect without time to integrate them, the more your outputs drift into generalities.
Real reform requires curated consultation: fewer, deeper engagements, with space between them to test ideas, refine arguments, and build coalitions for difficult truths. Strategic pauses to distinguish signal from noise. At the current pace, that isn’t possible. We’re crowd-sourcing reform in real time and mistaking the volume of input for the quality of thought.
What Strategic Honesty Requires
Calibrated honesty is what the HRC non-paper needed. A clear statement: “These are administrative improvements we can make immediately. These are the political decisions member states must take if they want functional human rights machinery. And these are the consequences of continuing to demand reform while blocking the necessary changes.”
The frustration Ronny voiced isn’t really about this single document. It’s about watching the UN80 process reproduce the same pattern: motion without movement, activity without impact, reform theatre instead of reform.
And it was predictable. If you try to redesign a system while operating at its dysfunctional pace, you replicate the dysfunction. The tyranny of urgency doesn’t just waste time. It makes transformation impossible.
Member states will say the secretariat didn’t go far enough. The secretariat will point to timelines and political constraints. Both will be right. And the structural issues will remain untouched because no one had the tempo to think clearly about what meaningful change requires.
This is the false economy of institutional busyness: mistaking activity for progress, consultation for clarity, and speed for seriousness.
Reclaiming the Space to Think
If UN80 is going to deliver anything beyond incremental adjustments, the conditions under which proposals are developed must change.
Mandatory pause points. Before major reform documents circulate, teams need protected time for synthesis and alignment. No new inputs; no new consultations.
Honest timelines. Some proposals require six months, not six weeks. It’s not obstruction, it’s the minimum needed for quality.
Strategic selectivity. Dozens of parallel reform tracks dilute attention and force shallow engagement. Focus on a few priorities and do them properly. And detach the current liquidity crisis from a broader reform process. The liquidity crisis is important, but don’t pretend that measures to solve this in the short term are reform.
A protected leadership voice. Senior officials need space to explain what’s blocked, why, and what requires political agreement.
These are basic conditions for responsible institutional work. They are incompatible with the current rhythm.
The Choice Ahead
UN80 can generate hundreds of documents, dozens of consultations, and a constant stream of inputs. Or it can produce a handful of clear, honest assessments that tell member states what is broken and what it would take to fix it.
It cannot do both. The tempo for broad, perpetual activity is incompatible with the tempo required for deliberation, clarity, and political truth-telling.
The question is simple: Do we want reform documents that demonstrate we consulted everyone, or reform documents that state plainly what needs to change?
The answer depends on whether we’re willing to slow down long enough to think.
What’s your experience with reform processes — in the UN or elsewhere? Have you seen examples where strategic slowness produced better outcomes? I’d welcome your thoughts
Quote that struck with me…
“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World