The warning usually arrives in time. The loss happens in the weeks between agreeing and acting.
I have been right and still lost, and it cost more than being wrong would have. Years ago, one of our engineers told us that a component in one of our products was going end of life. He was right, and within a week, everyone in the room agreed. The concern went into the minutes, and the organization carried on at its usual pace. By the time we had qualified a replacement, the last buy window had closed, and the line stopped.
Nobody had disagreed with him. We were on a schedule the world didn't care about. That cost never shows up on a spreadsheet. It equals the cost of being wrong, plus the cost of having known better.
John Boyd, a U.S. Air Force pilot and theorist, understood this better than anyone. Most of us know his ideas through Robert Coram’s biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. His central discovery started with a puzzle from the Korean War. The Soviet MiG-15 climbed faster, turned tighter, and flew higher than the American F-86, yet the American pilots won far more often than the specifications said they should.
Boyd found that air combat goes to the pilot who cycles through his maneuvers faster. He described the cycle as a loop of observe, orient, decide, and act, then observe again, because the situation has already changed. The F-86 had a bubble canopy that let the pilot see more and hydraulic controls that let him switch maneuvers more quickly. He completed his loop first, and by the time the MiG pilot acted on what he saw, the world he reacted to no longer existed.
The right maneuver, executed too late, is the wrong maneuver. Organizations go astray on the same part of the loop, and I include the ones I have run. We fall in love with the decide step and keep adding reviews and sign-offs to get it right. Every addition makes the loop longer. Meanwhile, the supplier’s window closes and the competitor ships, indifferent to how thorough our committee was.
In regulated manufacturing, the loop runs on a calendar. When a component goes end of life, you get a fixed window set by the last time buy date, the qualification timeline for an alternative, and the shelf life of what you stocked. The signal almost always arrives in time. What fails is the transit from signal to qualified alternative, the months lost to a validation nobody started with urgency because everyone agreed on the answer and mistook agreement for action.
Same signal, same correct decision. Different tempo, opposite outcome.
So I have changed the first question I ask a team under pressure. I used to ask whether we were making the right call, but every team is trying to, so the answer tells me little. Now I ask how long our loop is, from the moment we knew to the moment it changed anything.
Being right only counts when it arrives in time. The pilots in Korea flew the better airplane and had every correct maneuver available to them. They kept losing to men who got there first.
Kauko Väinämö, CEO, Ginolis.