The violent acceleration of hard decisions not taken.

Hard decisions don’t get easier with time. They get heavier.

Every leader knows the moment a difficult call presents itself. A hire who isn’t landing. A vendor who keeps missing. A product that isn’t resonating. A structure that clearly isn’t working. And yet the instinct is always the same: wait. Gather more evidence. Give it another month. Hope it resolves itself quietly.

It never does.

Hiring is the clearest example.
If someone isn’t right, the first three months are an awkward conversation. By month twelve, the team is carrying their load. By year two, the role has been reshaped to accommodate them, high performers have left, and the eventual exit becomes a full-scale organisational reset.

Vendors follow the same path.
A missed deliverable turns into a pattern. Six months later, your team has built workarounds and resentments. A year in, you’ve built dependency on a partner you knew wouldn’t scale, and unwinding it is now a project in its own right.

Products and features behave exactly the same.
A weak launch becomes “early data.” A weak quarter becomes “seasonality.” A weak year becomes “strategic patience.” It’s astonishing how many companies burn millions because no one wants to admit a bad trajectory early.

Then there’s org design.
A misaligned reporting line is manageable at first. Fast forward a year and you’ve created silos, internal politics, confused incentives, and teams who no longer know whom they answer to.