There’s an old adage, “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.”
This expression was around before the rise of generative AI, when LLMs hadn’t yet become an everyday workplace tool. When the pandemic had not yet upended the workplace, and remote work was a niche perk, not a default working model.
This saying has always rung true, of course. But it carries a different weight and urgency today.
The rate of change rose a dramatic 183% in the past few years (2019 to 2023), and 72% of C-suites anticipate more change throughout 2025 compared to 2024.
We need to ask ourselves: Are we equipped to adapt at the same rate?
As our team at Lucid reflected on this question, it became clear that businesses today need new strategies, workflows, and technology to navigate an era of work that’s marked by relentless change. So we got serious about looking at exactly what challenges slow teams down the most and what solutions could propel them forward faster.
From this analysis, we’ve uncovered the necessity for a new core capability: work acceleration.
What is work acceleration?
Work acceleration is the process of bringing teams together to transform the business through efficient collaboration, continuous alignment, and increased adaptability.
A work acceleration platform, then, is where teams come together to problem-solve, brainstorm, plan, you name it. In other words, it’s where the work itself gets done. And it gets done quickly, with purpose-built capabilities to facilitate alignment, automate workflows, and enable decision-making.
At the very core of work acceleration is visual collaboration. I know that many organizations have already experienced the power of visual collaboration—that is, collaborative activities such as ideating, planning, and diagramming that take place on a visual, infinite canvas—in fueling innovation and productivity.
Work acceleration can be considered the next evolution of visual collaboration. It goes a step further by applying the powerful capabilities of visual collaboration to large-scale transformation initiatives such as Agile transformation, cloud transformation, process transformation, or new product development.
Lucid, for example, has evolved from a visual collaboration platform to a work acceleration platform by deepening its capabilities with the acquisition of airfocus and two powerful accelerators: purpose-built solutions for scaling and standardizing key workstreams, and, ultimately, accelerating business transformation.
Why is a work acceleration platform necessary?
A work acceleration platform helps teams work faster by directly addressing the hurdles that slow down progress. We recently surveyed knowledge workers worldwide to uncover the most pressing roadblocks.
I’ll break each of those challenges down here:
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Scattered information: More than a third (38%) of respondents don’t know where to go to get all project resources. And 48% spend one to two hours a day just searching for information. That’s five to ten hours per week—essentially a full work day!
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Ineffective collaboration: 42% of workers say frequent meetings and interruptions make it difficult to work efficiently. What’s worse is that these meetings not only interrupt work, but they aren’t often effective: Over 60% of people frequently leave meetings without clear next steps.
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Misalignment: The percentage of respondents citing team misalignment as a project workflow challenge rose from 32% in 2024 to 44% in 2025, which just so happens to coincide with the increasing pace of change I talked about earlier.
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Lack of visibility: 35% say projects always or often miss deadlines or fall short of company objectives. To help projects meet deadlines, workers say they’d need more visibility into these five areas: project development timelines and product roadmaps, proven strategies from other teams, project goals, operational processes, and cross-departmental dependencies.
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Prolonged decision-making: Another major roadblock to working efficiently is slow or long decision-making processes, cited by 40% of respondents. The time it takes for teams to build consensus has also increased compared to just six months ago.
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Inconsistency and repeated work: Nearly a third of knowledge workers say they’re recreating processes multiple times a week. What would help? Respondents list easily accessible documentation, access to real-time data, and templates for frequent projects. In fact, one in five knowledge workers estimates that access to standardized process documentation would save them three or more hours a day.
No matter what your business goals are, I can’t overstate the importance of addressing these challenges now, before it’s too late and too hard to catch up to those that have proactively managed them.
Work acceleration is specifically designed to address these challenges, helping you not only respond to change and innovate but also save the business time and money with an overall more efficient operating model.
