THE IDEA
The invisible gap
Every system has delays built into it. You turn up the heating and the room doesn’t get warmer for twenty minutes. You hire someone and they don’t become productive for six months. You plant a tree and it takes a decade to give shade.
Delays are the gap between an action and its effect. They’re everywhere, and they’re one of the biggest reasons people make poor decisions in complex systems. Not because people are foolish, but because the feedback they need to learn from arrives too late to connect to the thing that caused it.
The trouble is that most people make decisions as if the world responds immediately. When it doesn’t, they do more of the same thing - or give up too early - because they can’t see the effect of what they’ve already done.
IN PRACTICE
Abandoned too early
A customer satisfaction problem triggers a training programme. After three months, the scores haven’t moved, so the programme gets scrapped and replaced with something else. But the training was working - it just hadn’t had time to show up in the numbers. The right approach gets abandoned and replaced with a wrong one. Three months later, the same thing happens again.
A government introduces a tax incentive to boost housing construction. New homes take years to build, but the political cycle demands results in months. The policy gets judged a failure and reversed before a single house is finished.
A parent starts a new bedtime routine with a toddler. After four nights of screaming, they conclude it isn’t working and go back to the old routine. The new one needed two weeks. The old one just got reinforced.
WORKING WITH THIS
Hold your nerve (and write down the date)
Before judging whether something is working, ask: how long should it take before we’d expect to see results? Write that number down before you start. Then hold your nerve until that date arrives.
When you’re designing a system or a process, map the delays. Where are the longest gaps between action and feedback? Those are the places where the worst decisions will get made, because everyone will be flying blind. Shorten the delays if you can. If you can’t, make them visible - on the wall, in the dashboard, in the plan.
When someone proposes a quick intervention for a slow problem, that’s a signal. The mismatch between the speed of the fix and the speed of the system is where things go wrong.
THE INSIGHT
What you’ve already forgotten
The delay between action and result is invisible, which is why it’s so dangerous. By the time you see what happened, you’ve forgotten what caused it.
RECOGNITION
Signs you’re in the gap
When an initiative gets cancelled before it’s had time to work. When the same problem keeps returning despite constant intervention. When strategies get switched every quarter. When someone says “we tried that and it didn’t work” about something that was never given enough time.