An operations chief at an industrial machinery and plant engineering group told us, in one sentence, about a commitment that was kept, and kept too late.
"Financing was agreed on but was paid after certain deadlines and therefore the deal was cancelled"
Read that twice. The financing was agreed. The money was paid. It arrived after the date the deal depended on, and the deal went away.
This one got done, just late. A tracker that only asks whether the work is finished would have marked it complete.
What failed is the date the work depended on. Somewhere between agreeing to the financing and paying it, the deadline stopped being anyone's to watch.
Decision decay usually looks like a call that loses its owner. This one kept its owner and lost its date. It happened in the execution gap, after the decision, where most companies have nothing watching the calendar.
–Clint
The slips nobody sees coming
We asked executives one open question, with no menu to pick from: describe a commitment or decision that slipped. Then we sorted the answers by what actually went wrong.
Most are the story you would expect. Someone owed a piece of work and it got dropped. A call got made and nobody drove it. A priority got pushed aside by the next one. Everybody already has a fix for those: chase it, set a reminder, put it on somebody's list.
A smaller set doesn't fit that fix and stands out as a result. A quotation, decided and written up and never sent, which the customer noticed first. A team did the work, drifted from what was decided, and ran months late before anyone above it found out. And the payment above: agreed and made, after the date the deal needed.
In none of these is the problem a missing owner. The work had one. What it lacked was anyone watching the date from both sides. The owner saw a task in progress. The person waiting heard nothing and took nothing to mean on track, right up to the deadline.
It is a handful of answers, so treat it as a shape worth watching. It is also the one shape discipline cannot fix, because nobody in it knew there was anything to follow up on.
Product progress
An agent you set up in Brief can run on a schedule, before or after a meeting, when a message arrives, or when you start it manually.
Here are some things you can set up.
- Before a customer call. 15 minutes before each meeting with someone outside your company, get what you owe them and what they owe you.
- Before a big meeting. An hour before each meeting with your largest customer, get recent news about their company.
- When a customer writes. When an email arrives from anyone at their company, get a short summary on your phone.
- When your team needs you. When someone mentions you in a Slack channel you pick, find out if you need to decide something.
- When you are ready. On Friday, start an agent that lists what you promised this week and have not done.
A meeting agent runs a number of minutes that you set before a meeting starts or after it ends. You can limit it to meetings with someone outside your company, or with people you name. A message agent watches Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat. You can limit it to messages from people or domains you name.
To make one, tell Brief in chat what you want, in a sentence like the examples above.
–Zac
A payment that arrives after its deadline is the execution gap, the second of the two stages Larry lays out in the second Executive Intelligence Paper, The Decision-to-Done Gap. It is free and ungated.
Somewhere in every operating company is the person who notices a date slipping before anyone else does, usually without a title that says so. Who is it in yours?