American software culture has a word for the accumulated cost of undone documentation, and it is borrowed from finance. Debt is something you take on deliberately, in order to move faster now, intending to pay it back later. Most of it is never paid back, and everyone involved knows that when they take it on.
Consultants
American corporations spend heavily on external advisers who arrive, learn the business, produce recommendations, and leave. A recurring complaint inside those companies is that the consultants are selling back knowledge the firm once had. The complaint is often accurate, and the spending continues.
Reinventing the wheel
The phrase exists in American English as a criticism, and it is used constantly — which means the thing it describes happens constantly. A culture only develops a ready reproach for a failure it commits often.
The OODA loop
John Boyd, a US Air Force colonel, built a model of decision-making out of his experience of air combat: observe, orient, decide, act, then repeat. His central claim was about speed — that cycling through the loop faster than your opponent is what wins, because it leaves them reacting to a situation that has already changed. As a Weapons School instructor he was nicknamed Forty Second Boyd, for his standing bet that starting from a position of tactical disadvantage he could defeat any student pilot within forty seconds.
The model spread from the Air Force into American business and sports coaching. It is a formal argument that acting quickly beats acting correctly.
Disciplined initiative
US Army doctrine, ADP 6-0, defines it as action in the absence of orders, when existing orders no longer fit the situation, or when unforeseen opportunities or threats arise. Mission orders are defined as directives that emphasize to subordinates the results to be attained, not how they are to achieve them.
The Army writes into doctrine a duty to act when nobody has told you to.
The shot clock
Basketball teams that were ahead used to stall, holding the ball and refusing to shoot. The NBA’s answer was a clock forcing a shot attempt within twenty-four seconds. The sport changed its own rules because not acting was ruining it to watch.
The two-minute drill
American football has a distinct mode for the closing minutes: no huddle, plays called at the line, clock managed to the second. Teams practise it as a separate discipline — a whole rehearsed system for what to do when there is no time to deliberate.
Good Samaritan laws
Every US state has legislation protecting a bystander who intervenes in an emergency from being sued for the consequences. The legal system identified hesitation as the problem and removed the reason for it.
The case method
Harvard Business School teaches almost entirely by case. Students are given an incomplete business situation, cold-called without warning, and required to state what they would do. Not what the considerations are — what they would do. And a substantial part of the grade is participation, so silence is penalised directly.
Class participation
American schools grade it, from elementary through university, and it appears on the syllabus as a percentage. A student who has understood everything and said nothing receives a lower mark than one who spoke up and was partly wrong.