The Timing Problem

Why the window for change is smaller than you think

Adaptability has a timing problem that rarely gets discussed.

Move too early and you look reactive, unstable, lacking conviction. People lose confidence in your direction because it keeps shifting before anyone can settle into it.

Move too late and you look stubborn, out of touch, married to approaches the world has already moved past. By the time you adjust, the window has closed.

The space between too early and too late is narrower than most planning assumes. And it almost never announces itself clearly. You’re operating on partial information, reading signals that might be noise, making calls that won’t reveal themselves as right or wrong for months.

The operators I respect most don’t wait for certainty. They’ve accepted it isn’t coming. Instead, they build systems with enough flexibility to absorb being wrong, then focus on correcting faster than competitors can recover from their own mistakes.

Speed of correction beats accuracy of prediction.

This reframes the whole adaptation question. It’s not about being right the first time. It’s about building capacity to be wrong, learn, and move before the cost of the error compounds.

The window is small. The information is incomplete. The only real advantage is how quickly you can update once reality clarifies what the data couldn’t.