I’m not sure where I first heard it. One of the high-performance team trainers I worked with back in my implementation days around 2013 must have taught it to me. The saying goes: when you’re delivering something, you can have it fast, cheap, or high-quality. The catch is you only get to pick two. That statement still rings true over 10 years later. I bring it up in conversations all the time, and no one has managed to prove it wrong yet.
The real challenge is that everyone always wants all three. Life is about trade-offs, and this rule makes the trade-offs unavoidable. The hardest part is that people don’t usually want to accept it right away. They only come around once reality sets in.
Maybe someday, maybe even someday soon, AI will make this saying obsolete. But so far, it hasn’t.