I. Early
She flagged the concentration risk in the vendor portfolio eleven months before the vendor had an outage. No incident. No number. Just a pattern she’d seen twice before, at two other employers, in the sourcing data.
Nobody acted on it. Nobody could have. There was nothing yet to point to except her judgment, and judgment without an incident behind it reads as opinion, however good the judgment is.
When the vendor did go down, nine months later, someone found her memo in the archive and called it prescient. It changed nothing about how her next flag was received. She was early. The organisation has no mechanism for rewarding early. It only has one for citing it, afterward, as evidence someone should have listened.
Nobody rewards timing. They reward being right at the moment the room can still do something about it.
II. Late
He flagged the same class of risk two weeks before the renewal signed. By then there was a number: a concentration ratio, a named single point of failure, a board paper already drafted around the vendor staying.
He was heard immediately. Escalated within a day. The renewal was paused, restructured, and the concentration was gone within a quarter.
Nobody called him prescient. He wasn’t early enough for that word. He was just useful, at the only moment usefulness was still possible — and useful gets acted on, while prescient gets filed.
Nobody rewards timing. They reward being right at the moment the room can still do something about it.
Two versions of the same judgment. One arrived with nothing to act on. One arrived with a decision still open. The organisation didn’t fail either of them. It simply doesn’t have a way to tell the difference between insight and evidence until evidence is the only thing left that counts.
— Signal / unfiltered observations from the field. Fortnightly.
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